EthnicMajority

(Sojourners, Lisa Sharon Harper) During a roundtable chat with a group of emerging young evangelical leaders recently, someone posed the question: “Has America become a post racial society?”

Well, we haven’t had a race riot in a while — does that mean race isn’t relevant anymore?

A black president just gave the State of the Union Address. How about that? Does that mean America’s OK with the race thing?

Our nation is a more ethnically diverse nation than it’s ever been. Does that count for anything?

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(Daily Markets) PepsiCo Inc. (NYSE:PEP) will now have to shell out $3.13 million as a price for alleged racial discrimination. Pepsi Beverages Company – the manufacturing, sales and distribution operating unit of Pepsi in United States, Canada and Mexico – allegedly carried irrelevant criminal background checks on several African American applicants, and thereafter denied them jobs in the organization.

The racial discrimination charge was filed in the Minneapolis Area Office of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and upon investigation it “found reasonable cause to believe” that Pepsi’s criminal background check discriminated the ‘black people’ and affected more than 300 ‘black applicants’. Pepsi has agreed to pay the aforementioned amount and will also provide job offers and training to the applicants, or the victims of the former criminal background check policy, who still want jobs at Pepsi and are qualified for the jobs for which they apply.

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(io9) Ashley Michelle Williams has a fascinating article over at theGrio about a recent study that offers evidence that the harsh conditions of slavery subjected the African American population to strong evolutionary pressures. This could help explain what appear to be recent mutations in the genomes of African Americans. Williams writes:

Researchers found that of the African-American genomes in their sample, only 22 percent of the DNA analyzed came from Europeans. The remaining DNA was found to come from purely African ancestors, a finding in alignment with previous discoveries.

The main result of the study was that certain disease-causing variant genes were found to have become more common in African-Americans after their ancestors reached American shores — possibly because they presented greater benefits, according to an article published by the team in Genome Research.

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(Kansas City Star) The Army filed charges Wednesday against eight Alaska-based soldiers in the death of a 19-year-old Army private, in a sign that the military is investigating whether racial harassment could have led him to commit suicide.

Pvt. Danny Chen's body was found in a guard tower in Afghanistan's Kandahar province in October, two months into his deployment. The New York native died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, but Chen's family and the Chinese-American community pressed the military to explain what led Chen to kill himself. The New York Times later reported that investigators had told Chen's family that superiors had abused him and taunted him with ethnic slurs.

"There was some serious misconduct in this situation," said Jacinta Ma, the deputy director of the Asian American Justice Center, who was part of a group of Asian-American organizations that met with Pentagon officials this month on behalf of Chen's family to discuss their concerns that Chen's case is not an isolated incident.

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(Voice of America) The Occupy Wall Street movement is gaining allies. Our reporter tells us who they are and what they plan to do.

Protesters of the Occupy movement are spreading their wings – joining forces with veterans of the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, and African-American churches.

In Washington, civil rights icon Benjamin Chavis announced the formation of Occupy The Dream.

David Degraw is with Occupy Wall Street in New York.

“This is a very diverse movement as it stands right now," said Degraw. "But obviously we need to do more work to get into the African-American communities and to get into all different ethnic backgrounds, the Latino community as well.”

The African American leaders were drawn in by the issue of income inequality.  More than 15 percent of black Americans are unemployed, compared with an overall jobless rate of 8.6 percent.

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(AlterNet) Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske held a media briefing Wednesday to discuss the disproportionate impact our nation's "drug problem" has on African-American communities.

It is simply Orwellian for the drug czar to focus on the disproportionate impact of our nation's drug problem on African-American communities without acknowledging the disproportionate racial impact of drug law enforcement. According to the federal government's own yearly research surveys, African Americans use and sell drugs at similar rates at whites — yet African Americans are arrested for drugs at 13 times the rate of whites.

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(Atlanta Journal Constitution) The U.S. Justice Department launched a civil rights investigation Thursday into whether Miami police officers engaged in a pattern of excessive use of deadly force in the fatal shootings of seven African-American suspects over an eight-month span.

Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, and Miami U.S. Attorney Wifredo Ferrer said the probe will focus not on the individual officers but on whether the Miami Police Department's policies and practices on use of force led to violations of constitutional rights. The investigation is not criminal in nature.

"We're looking at systems. We're not looking at individual culpability," Perez told reporters. "We will follow the facts where the facts lead us. We will peel the onion to its core."

The shootings in inner-city Miami, from July 2010 to February 2011 and including two others that were not fatal, sparked outrage in the African-American community and led to protests at City Hall. The NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union, among others, demanded a federal investigation.

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(Google AFP) Asian Americans endure far more bullying at US schools than members of other ethnic groups, with teenagers of the community three times as likely to face taunts on the Internet, new data shows.

Policymakers see a range of reasons for the harassment, including language barriers faced by some Asian American students and a spike in racial abuse following the September 11, 2001 attacks against children perceived as Muslim.

"This data is absolutely unacceptable and it must change. Our children have to be able to go to school free of fear," US Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Friday during a forum at the Center for American Progress think-tank.

The research, to be released on Saturday, found that 54 percent of Asian American teenagers said they were bullied in the classroom, sharply above the 31.3 percent of whites who reported being picked on.

The figure was 38.4 percent for African Americans and 34.3 percent for Hispanics, a government researcher involved in the data analysis told AFP. He requested anonymity because the data has not been made public.

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(The Guardian) Black people are being systematically and intentionally excluded from jury service in parts of Alabama almost 140 years after the practice was outlawed in the US, a lawsuit lodged with the federal courts alleges.

The class action has been launched on behalf of thousands of black people in Alabama who were allegedly prevented from sitting as jurors in serious criminal cases, many of which carried the death penalty, in a blatant move by prosecutors to achieve all-white or largely white juries. The complaint claims that the practice has been going on for decades.

It relates specifically to the actions of one prosecutor, Douglas Valeska, who is district attorney in the Alabama counties of Houston and Henry. The lawsuit alleges that he, together with his unnamed associate prosecutors, effectively relegated black people in their areas to "second class citizenship".

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(CBS News) It was just another schoolyard basketball game until a group of Hispanic seventh-graders defeated a group of boys from Alabama.

The reaction was immediate, according to the Mexican mother of one of the winners, and rooted in the state's new law on illegal immigration.

"They told them, `You shouldn't be winning. You should go back to Mexico,"' said the woman, who spoke through a translator last week and didn't want her name used. She and her son are in the country illegally.

Spanish-speaking parents say their children are facing more bullying and taunts at school since Alabama's tough crackdown on illegal immigration took effect last month. Many blame the name-calling on fallout from the law, which has been widely covered in the news, discussed in some classrooms and debated around dinner tables.

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