EthnicMajority

(Huffington Post) The blog 8asians recently posted an article stating that Asian men have the highest salary. This statement is both correct and misleading at the same time. It is correct that Asian American men have the highest median wage. But to the extent that it suggests that Asian Americans are economically advantaged relative to whites, it is incorrect.

As I pointed out in my examination of Asian American unemployment over the recession, Asian Americans experience hidden disadvantages in the U.S. labor market. To see this disadvantage, one must disaggregate the data by education level. The Asian American unemployment disadvantage appears upon examining those with a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education. In 2009, the annual unemployment rate for Asian Americans with a bachelor’s degree was 6.7 percent. For whites with a bachelor’s degree is was 2.1 percentage points lower at 4.6 percent.

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(NY Daily News) Veterans who dreamed of joining the FDNY vented frustration yesterday with a judge’s decision to cancel a class of firefighters because he said the test they took was biased.

“The people who are supposed to be getting helped [by this ruling] could be the one getting hurt,” said Nafis Sabir, a 33-year-old African-American man who spent eight years in the Marine Reserves.

“I feel pretty frustrated,” said Sabir, one of 50 military veterans among the 312 candidates set to enter the department. “I didn’t see where the racial bias [was] coming from.

“If I never got to become a firefighter, I would have a pretty bitter taste in my mouth,” added Sabir, who was deployed to Kuwait in 2003.

Military veterans got extra points on the 2007 FDNY test that Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis threw out on Wednesday, saying it was discriminatory.

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(Houston Chronicle) Omar Thornton sat calmly in a meeting with union representative and his supervisors as they showed a video of him stealing beer from the distributor where he worked.

Busted, he didn’t put up a fight, company officials said. He quietly signed a letter of resignation and was headed for the door when he pulled out a gun and started firing — “cold as ice,” as one survivor described it.

In the end, Thornton killed eight people, wounded two, then turned the gun on himself in a rampage Tuesday at Hartford Distributors that union and company officials said they would not have anticipated from someone with no history of complaints or disciplinary problems.

Yet relatives say Thornton, 34, finally cracked after suffering racial harassment in a company where he said he was singled out for being black in a predominantly white work force.

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(Daily Press) Former U.S. Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod said Thursday that a lack of diversity in the Obama administration might have led to her hasty dismissal after a doctored video of one of her speeches made her a target of conservative bloggers.

Sherrod said no African-Americans were involved in the direct discussions prior to her being forced to drive to the side of a Georgia highway and submit her resignation.

“There was no black person in his inner circle who could even talk about this, to say, ‘hey, you ought to look into this.’”

She said that the lack of the diversity ran from her bosses at U.S.D.A. all the way to the White House and that no person of color was among the dozen people who discussed her fate.

Instead, Sherrod said her dismissal came after a series of phone calls from U.S.D.A. deputy Under Secretary for Rural Development, Cheryl Cook, who eventually told her that the White House wanted her resignation.

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(LA Times) Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to name 3rd District Court of Appeal Justice Tani Gorre Cantil-Sakauye as the next chief justice, making her the first Asian American to lead the state’s judiciary and giving the California Supreme Court a female majority for the first time in its history.

Cantil-Sakauye, 50, a Sacramento native who rose through the trial courts, served as deputy legislative secretary and deputy legal affairs secretary under former Gov. George Deukmejian. He plucked her from the Sacramento district attorney’s office and later appointed her to the Sacramento Municipal Court.

Former Gov. Pete Wilson elevated Cantil-Sakauye to the Sacramento County Superior Court, and Schwarzenegger named her to the Court of Appeal in Sacramento.

A graduate of the UC Davis School of Law, Cantil-Sakauye was a surprise nominee who is relatively unknown outside judicial circles. She has served two years on the state Judicial Council, the policy-making arm of the courts, and if approved by voters in November, will be responsible for the state’s entire court system.

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(Washington Post) The Washington-based National Association of Public Hospitals plans to announce Monday (July 19) the appointment of a George Washington University health policy professor as its chief executive. The association said it will name Bruce Siegel to the position, making him the first African American to head a hospital group. Siegel, who starts in October, is expected to deal extensively with the health-care overhaul law. He will replace Christine Capito Burch, who held the executive director position and is retiring.

(Diverse Education) Diversity isn’t recession proof, and higher education and corporate officials agreed that institutions of all types must be proactive to prevent the faltering economy from overly impacting one or more underrepresented groups.

That was a theme of discussion during the American Association for Affirmative Action (AAAA) annual meeting in Raleigh, N.C., on Wednesday. The main question: how can organizations maintain diversity when the bottom line forces downsizing?

“You have to pay attention to what’s happening and what decisions are made because downsizing is an opportunity for inequity,” said Dr. Benjamin D. Reese, Jr., vice president of the Office for Institutional Equity at both Duke University and Duke University Health System. “It’s difficult to develop a strategy around diversity. We all want to create an inclusive environment, but in practice, it’s very, very challenging.”

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(Helium) The importance of diversity skills and personal and interpersonal enrichment is valuable in today’s world. Diversity was once a means of separation, but it is now a common ground. Learning diversity skills can lead to personal and interpersonal enrichment.

Diversity skills are like empathy but on more levels than just emotion. When you have empathy you can understand or relate to someone’s feelings or situation. Diversity skills allow you to understand where someone else is coming from even if you are not from or in the same situation. Diversity skills also allow you to see where multiple different perspectives come from. They allow you to listen with an open mind and background knowledge of other people’s circumstances.

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(NPR) In the U.S. Army, Asian-Americans have typically volunteered at the lowest rate of any ethnic group. They make up 4 percent of the population, and only 1 percent of military recruits.

But that seems to be changing. Something is suddenly drawing Asian-Americans in California into the Army at a remarkable rate. And there have been similar increases in other Asian-American population centers, like Seattle and New York.

In Los Angeles County last year, 22 percent of Army recruits were Asian-Americans — almost twice their proportion in the population. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the sign-up rate is also spiking. The proportion of newly enlisted soldiers who are Asian-Americans this year is nearly double that of last year.

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(Guardian) A Nebraska town, angry over a surge in the number of Hispanic residents, is voting today in a referendum on a new law that would require foreign nationals to get a licence to live in the town.

The referendum in Fremont has been prompted by a sharp rise in Hispanic people drawn by work at local meatpacking plants combined with fears over job losses and demand placed on the town’s social services because of the economic downturn.

If approved, tenants who are not US-citizens would be required to get an “occupancy licence” from the city council. Even residents of nursing homes would be required to obtain such a licence.

Federal law requires employers to verify the immigration status of workers but the proposed Fremont law would also open violators to local sanctions. Supporters insist it is not racist and is essential to protect jobs, healthcare and education for local people because the town’s Hispanic population has surged from 165 to more than 2,000 in the past 20 years.

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