EthnicMajority

(Washington Post) President Barack Obama acknowledged on Wednesday that black Americans have faced “enormous challenges” with unemployment under his watch, and appealed for their support in pursuing solutions that he can implement without help from Congress.

Appearing at a daylong White House summit of black business, community and political leaders, Obama said the current 15.1 percent unemployment rate among blacks is “way too high,” and that various other problems that plagued black communities before he took office, such as housing and education, have worsened.

“We know tough times,” the president said. “And what we also know, though, is that if we are persistent, if we are unified, and we remain hopeful, then we’ll get through these tough times and better days lie ahead.”

Full story…

(Washington Post) President Barack Obama acknowledged on Wednesday that black Americans have faced “enormous challenges” with unemployment under his watch, and appealed for their support in pursuing solutions that he can implement without help from Congress.

Appearing at a daylong White House summit of black business, community and political leaders, Obama said the current 15.1 percent unemployment rate among blacks is “way too high,” and that various other problems that plagued black communities before he took office, such as housing and education, have worsened.

“We know tough times,” the president said. “And what we also know, though, is that if we are persistent, if we are unified, and we remain hopeful, then we’ll get through these tough times and better days lie ahead.”

Full story…

(Washington Post) President Barack Obama acknowledged on Wednesday that black Americans have faced “enormous challenges” with unemployment under his watch, and appealed for their support in pursuing solutions that he can implement without help from Congress.

Appearing at a daylong White House summit of black business, community and political leaders, Obama said the current 15.1 percent unemployment rate among blacks is “way too high,” and that various other problems that plagued black communities before he took office, such as housing and education, have worsened.

“We know tough times,” the president said. “And what we also know, though, is that if we are persistent, if we are unified, and we remain hopeful, then we’ll get through these tough times and better days lie ahead.”

Full story…

(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 Root) A recent study out of UCLA says that minority students as young as second grade are aware of stigmas against their ethnic groups and have increased academic anxiety as a result. But in a compelling twist, researchers also found that minority kids are more motivated about school than their white classmates.

Cari Gillen-O'Neel, a UCLA graduate student and one of the study's authors, said that the higher motivation levels among minority students is an encouraging "ray of hope."

"That really does suggest the idea of a kind of resilience in the face of adversity," she said. "Despite the fact that minority students might be aware that their group might not be as respected, they like school; they felt more interested in school."

Researchers conducted three 40-minute interviews with 451 second- and fourth-graders from New York City schools. The students were African American, Chinese, Dominican or Russian and ranged from 7 to 11 years old. European-American students were also interviewed but weren't counted as ethnic minorities. A female researcher from each child's ethnic group asked questions to determine their stigma awareness, academic anxiety, intrinsic motivation, sense of school belonging and ethnic identity.

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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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(Boston Globe) With black unemployment reaching historic levels, banks laying off tens of thousands and law school graduates waiting tables, why aren't more African-Americans looking toward science, technology, engineering and math — the still-hiring careers known as STEM?

The answer turns out to be a complex equation of self-doubt, stereotypes, discouragement and economics — and sometimes just wrong perceptions of what math and science are all about.

(Think Progress) Pat Buchanan is, among other things, an MSNBC contributor with a new book out, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? As his “last political will and testament,” the book’s thesis is centered on “cultural collapse” of the nation and “the slow death of the people who created and ruled the nation” — namely, white people. In an op-ed for CNS News yesterday, Buchanan outlines the three major consequences America will face without enough white people to save it.

First, the Republican party, which “routinely gets 90 percent of its presidential votes from white America,” will come to an end, especially since crucial GOP states like Texas are “hispanicizing.” Second, the “millions of immigrants, legal and illegal” who “do not bring the academic or professional skills of European-Americans” will replace actual “taxpayers” and suck the government dry. Finally, test-scores will nose-dive because “more and more children taking those tests will be African-American and Hispanic”:

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(Huffington Post) If Latinos don't understand the roots of their culture, how can they preserve it? Although the explanation might sound a bit more academic at times, that concern is driving scholars at the Dominican Studies Institute of the City College of New York to develop new digital technology for studying Spanish writings from the Americas' colonial era.

Their prototype is called the Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool.

"It is a tool that will revolutionize the history and contribute to the strengthening of Hispanic cultural identity in the United States," said Ramona Hernandez, director of the institute. She said the online program will facilitate the study of four centuries of written Spanish, beginning with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World and continuing through the formation of Hispanic society and "the founding of the countries we know as the Americas."

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(FoxNews Latino) The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California is suing a school district and law enforcement authorities for allegedly racially profiling 55 Hispanic students.

The ACLU says Glendale Unified School District illegally detained and searched the students, who were rounded up and help for an hour in September 2010. The Los Angeles police departments and Los Angeles County Probation Department were also named in the lawsuit.

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