EthnicMajority

(CTpost.com) The student stabbed Ryan in the back with a mechanical pencil and walked away. There was no explanation, no words exchanged at all. But Ryan knew why it happened. Scared to tell the teacher, all Ryan could do was to go to the bathroom to wash off the blood.

It was all because of the color of his skin, his mom, Gail Rodriguez said. He was often the only light-skinned student in his classes, which were predominantly black. Ryan, who is half white and half Puerto Rican, was called names like "stupid white cracker."

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(ABC News) A senator is calling on the Defense Department to conduct a system-wide review of alleged hazing incidents in the military, after eight soldiers in Afghanistan were charged in connection with the death of Army Pvt. Danny Chen, who apparently committed suicide in October.

Chen had told family and friends that he was the target of persistent racial taunts and abusive treatment by his comrades in arms.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, requested the investigation due to concern that Chen's death is a reflection of a larger problem of military hazing.

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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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(FoxNews) At least a dozen female basketball players at a western New York high school were serving suspension for chanting a racial slur as part of their warmup routine, the Buffalo News reported.

The team at Kenmore East High School, near Buffalo, apparently had chanted "One, two, three [N-word]!" for years, to the ignorance of their coaches and school administrators.

The officials only learned of the practice after the current team's sole African-American, sophomore Tyra Batts, was caught brawling with a teammate over the use of the slurs.

While both girls were suspended for fighting, school district officials were called in to deal with the allegations of racism.

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(Care2) The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics report was released on November 14, and the numbers show a dramatic spike in crimes against Latinos.

The number was up 11% since last year to 66.6 percent of victims of ethnically motivated hate crimes in 2010. In California, they went up 50%.

These figures for those targeted because of anti-Latino bias are the highest percentage in almost a decade.

The Southern Poverty Law Center said of a previous spike in 2007:

There’s no doubt that the tone of the raging national debate over immigration is growing uglier by the day. Once limited to hard-core white supremacists and a handful of border-state extremists, vicious public denunciations of undocumented brown-skinned immigrants are increasingly common among supposedly mainstream anti-immigration activists, radio hosts and politicians. While their dehumanizing rhetoric typically stops short of openly sanctioning bloodshed, much of it implicitly encourages or even endorses violence by characterizing immigrants from Mexico and Central America as “invaders,” “criminal aliens” and “cockroaches.”

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(NY Daily News) Hate crimes targeting Hispanics accounted for 66.6% of all ethnically motivated bias incidents in 2010, according to the FBI's annual Hate Crime Statistics report released Monday. The remaining 33.4% consists of all incidents targeting other ethnic and national groups combined.

That's an eleven percentage point spike from the 2009 report that showed Hispanics accounting for nearly 45% of hate crimes based on ethnicity or national origin.

The statistic reflects the highest percentage of victims "targeted because of an anti-Hispanic bias" in nearly a decade, whereas ethnically motivated hate crimes have generally fallen since 2007 and remained the nearly the same since 2009, the report indicates.

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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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(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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(Globe and Mail) If the people who expressed all that outrage in the social and mainstream media over the banana-tossing in London, Ont., really believe it was an isolated act by a lone racist moron and not indicative of a greater problem in hockey then they are greatly mistaken.

Granted, unlike the ugliness of someone throwing a banana at a black player such as Wayne Simmonds of the Philadelphia Flyers, there is almost no direct racism in the National Hockey League these days. But racism in the NHL is far more subtle, just as it is in a wider society like Canada.

In more than 25 years of covering the NHL, I have seen plenty of evidence it exists with precious little of it in the open. The worst examples were a popular, likeable head coach who routinely used the n-word in bar conversations, and an elderly Hall of Famer who occasionally wrote me letters complaining about the state of today’s game. His diatribes contained more than a few anti-Semitic references to the current NHL leadership.

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(Los Angeles Times) More than 500 people, including clergymen, elected officials and mothers pushing strollers, gathered here Sunday to denounce the killing of an African American auto plant employee in what authorities say was a racially motivated hate crime.

The slaying of James C. Anderson initially attracted little notice outside the immediate area, but since a security camera recording of the June 26 incident was broadcast nationally last week, the case has drawn coast-to-coast attention.

Anderson, 49, was beaten and run over in the parking lot of a motel. Prosecutors say the 5 a.m. attack was committed by a group of white teenagers from nearby Brandon, Miss. Two 18-year-olds have been charged in the case. Deryl Dedmon, the alleged driver of the green pickup that ran over Anderson, is charged with murder and remains jailed; bond was set at $800,000. John A. Rice, originally charged with murder, now faces a charge of simple assault. He was freed on $5,000 bail.

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