EthnicMajority

(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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(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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(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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(Huffington Post) Bullying victims often cite lasting psychological damage as a consequence, but a new study shows that those who are bullied also suffer academically, especially high-achieving black and Latino students.

The study shows that students who reported being bullied in the 10th grade saw a slight decrease in GPA by 12th grade — but the change is sharper for black and Latino students who tend to earn high grades.

While the overall decrease in GPA for bullied students over the studied period was 0.049 points (on a GPA scale with 0 being the lowest and 4 being the highest), black students saw a 0.3-point decrease in 12th grade GPA from a 3.5 GPA in 9th grade — before they were bullied. Worse, high achieving Latinos who were bullied experienced a 0.5-point drop in GPA from a 3.5 their freshman year. Carrying the same control variables, bullied white students only saw a 0.03-point drop in GPA.

"Stereotypes about black and Latino youth suggest that they perform poorly in school," study co-author Lisa M. Williams said in a statement. "High achieving black and Latinos who do not conform to these stereotypes may be especially vulnerable to the effect bullying has on grades."

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