EthnicMajority

(Game Politics) First Lady Michelle Obama recently gave a commencement address at Bowie State University encouraging more young African Americans to continue their education. She does so by throwing culture like videogames, television, and music under the bus.

"Be an example of excellence to the next generation," she said Friday at commencement ceremonies held at the nearby University of Maryland. "Today, more than 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, more than 50 years after the end of 'separate but equal,' when it comes to getting an education, too many of our young people just can’t be bothered."

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(Huffington Post) In an area known as one of the safest communities in the country, a hit list of African American students who would be "the first to die" was spray-painted in a high school bathroom.

The racist graffiti was at Agoura High School in Agoura Hills, Calif., a predominantly white community about 35 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The hit list is believed to have been painted during school hours Wednesday, KTLA reports in the video above.

Before that, graffiti reading "Go back 2 Africa" was found and removed off of the school walls on Sunday.

The hate crime made some parents wonder if it was safe for students to go to school, even though extra patrols will be there all week. “Does (my son) have to watch his back when he’s coming to school?” a parent asked CBS.

“(The suspects) win if our kids don’t come to school … they think they’re scared, they’re afraid," another parent said to the station.

In the video above, KTLA interviews parents whose children were on the hit list — many of whom went to campus immediately after hearing about the graffiti on Wednesday.

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(Los Angeles Times) The Los Angeles Police Department opened an internal investigation into its response at an off-campus house party near USC amid complaints from some students that the department showed racial bias and used heavy-handed tactics.

The incident occurred early Saturday morning during an end-of-semester party at a house a few blocks from campus. A neighbor called police complaining about the noise. Police arrived, and the situation escalated with the arrival of dozens of more officers donning riot gear. Six people were arrested and one officer was injured. Two of those arrested were “treated for minor abrasions,” police said.

The clash roiled the USC campus Monday, prompting a student sit-in at the center of campus.

“They were acting like they were going to war with us,” said senior Jason Sneed, 23, a political science major. Sneed, who described the scene as chaotic and hostile, said he was handcuffed and thrown inside the back of a police car.

This incident comes after two violent events that shook the USC community and were followed by tighter security measures in the area. In April 2012, two graduate students were shot to death in a botched robbery less than a mile from campus. Last October, four people were shot, one of them injured critically, outside an on-campus Halloween party.

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(Guardian) An Asian American fraternity has revived allegations of racism at the University of California, Irvine, by making a parody music video in blackface and posting it on YouTube.

Four members of the Lambda Theta Delta fraternity recorded a homemade skit in which one wore black makeup to impersonate Jay-Z, prompting recriminations and apologies. The students said the parody of the Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake song Suit and Tie was intended as harmless fun but student organisations and university authorities condemned it as insensitive and racist.

"We'd like to point out that this blackface video isn't the first, nor is it the last, example of racism that's been shown on this campus," Ainaria Johnson, co-chairwoman of UCI's Black Student Union, told the Daily Pilot. Johnson noted that a second video on the fraternity's YouTube page featured a blackface.

In 2011, a chef at the university caused a spat by serving fried chicken and waffles, an African American culinary stereotype, to mark Martin Luther King day.

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(Hispanic Business) African-American and Hispanic students are less likely than Whites to work part-time in high school, according to a University of Michigan study. But those who do hold jobs tend to work longer hours, and are less likely to suffer negative consequences. 

Those are among the findings of a new analysis of data on nearly 600,000 10th- and 12th-grade students, collected between 1991 and 2010 as part of the Monitoring the Future Study conducted by the U-M Institute for Social Research. The analysis was published online in Developmental Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association. Monitoring the Future is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health. 

"Working more than 15 hours a week is associated with problems for most students," said ISR researcher Jerald Bachman, the study's lead author. "These include lower grades and higher use of cigarettes, alcohol, and illicit drugs. But this pattern does not hold true among some minority students, especially those from less advantaged backgrounds." 

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(Syracuse.com) Letrice Titus, a parent of a Cicero-North Syracuse senior, asked the North Syracuse board of education in February a question that sparked a controversy over race and casting in the high school's performance of "The Wiz."

"Are there no talented African-American's at C-NS?" Titus asked the school board.

Titus was angry that there were no African-American students in leading roles in the school's performance of "The Wiz," a play that historically features African-American actors. Titus' concern sparked a debate across Central New York and made news around the country.

"There is a lot of talent here," Titus said.

In an effort to showcase that talent, Titus teamed up with The Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company to present "Cabaret & Conversation." The benefit performance will feature C-NS and high school students from the Syracuse City School District. The show will also feature an open dialogue about colorblind casting.

Titus said five African-American students from C-NS who wanted to be part of "The Wiz" will perform in the show.

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(Huffington Post) For years, education advocates have highlighted the dire importance of closing the achievement gap of academic performance between students of different ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Now, another group of advocates is drawing attention to the discipline gap of unequal punishments to different groups of students.

The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles Civil Rights Project, released two reports on Monday that show the increasing gap between suspension rates of black and white students. One million – or one in nine — middle school and high school students were suspended in 2009-2010, including 24 percent of black students and 7.1 percent of white students.

Most of the suspensions came not in response to violent behavior, but for minor infractions such as dress code violations or lateness. The research also found that suspensions increase the likelihood kids will drop out of school and commit crimes.

School districts that suspend students are hurting themselves, said Damon Hewitt, the director of education practice for the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. "You can't close achievement gaps if you have a discipline gap at the same time," he said.

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(Daily Mail) Two members of the White Student Union at Towson University in Maryland are refusing to apologize after advocating for racial segregation and defending slavery during the school’s Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday.

The two student group members, Scott Terry and Matthew Heimbach, took their incendiary stances while Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans was delivering a presentation at the university event about how Republicans could reach minorities more effectively. 

In the midst of Smith’s presentation, Terry began challenging him about the inclusion of blacks in the Republican Party.

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(Gawker.com) Life is tough for white people in America. A few hundred years of presumed superiority have left many of them psychologically unable to deal with failure, trapped in a cycle of victimhood where their own shortcomings can only be understood as evidence of persecution against them. So we have Abigail Fisher, 23 years old, and the plaintiff in Fisher v. University of Texas, which is currently being weighed by the Supreme Court.

Fisher, who is white, is suing the university because—well, because the full-time crusaders against affirmative action asked her to. But her ostensible complaint is that she applied to go to the University of Texas at Austin but didn't get in, while some students who are not white did get in, under the university's system of weighing "personal circumstances," including poverty and race, in some of its admissions. Ergo, under the logic of anti-reverse racism, some undeserving minority student took her spot.

But this week, Pro Publica published a look into the actual circumstances surrounding University of Texas admissions when Fisher applied. And that the reason Fisher didn't get in was that she wasn't qualified.

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(ABC News) A black student at a Texas junior high school was the victim of routine racial taunts and bullying, including his receiving a fake invitation to a KKK birthday party to be held in his honor, his mother says.

Justin Howard, a seventh-grader at Tomball Junior High School in Tomball, Texas, has been harassed by a group of white students who bullied him because he is black, according to his mother, Tahiyyah Howard.

"I'm just, really, you know, sick of it," Howard told ABC News affiliate KTRK-TV. "A girl wrote on the board 'Black Justin' and my son was really upset."

The most egregious example, the boy's mother said, came when Justin received a fake birthday party invitation from two classmates with a Ku Klux Klan theme. It is unclear about how the boy became aware of the note.

"[They] put it on his desk and said that he was invited to a KKK birthday party with lots of fun and games," said Howard, who has not sought action outside the school.

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