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(Los Angeles Times) Young black and Latino men lag behind their contemporaries in nearly every measure of educational attainment, with many failing to attend college or earn degrees and large numbers facing the prospect of unemployment or incarceration.

The findings are included in two reports released at a briefing Monday by the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center. It was hosted by Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research in Cambridge, Mass.

The reports cull census data, academic research and in-depth interviews to paint a bleak picture of the educational experiences of young men across four racial and ethnic groups: African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinos and Native Americans.

Among the findings:

• 28% of African American men and 16% of Latino men aged 25 to 34 had obtained an associate’s degree or higher, compared with 70% of Asian American men and 44% of white men.

• Large proportions of minority men aged 15 to 24 with high school diplomas were unemployed — 34% of black men, 47% of Latinos, 39% of Native Americans and 30% of Asian Americans.

• Incarceration rates are increasing — 10% of black men aged 15-24 were incarcerated, as were 5% of Latinos and 3% of Asian Americans and Native Americans.

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(Law.com) What is it like to be arrested in your own home and taken to jail — and to feel that it is because you are black?

At a benefit for The Southern Center for Human Rights on Monday evening, Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree talked about his experience representing his colleague Henry Louis Gates last July in just such an incident.

Gates, a University Professor at Harvard and nationally known scholar on race, was on his porch when he was arrested for disorderly conduct by a Cambridge police officer who had responded to a call from a neighbor saying that someone had forced his way into the front door of Gates’ house.

The ensuing national brouhaha about racial profiling prompted Ogletree to write a book about the incident, “The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class, and Crime in America,” which was just published on June 18.

Ogletree, who has been the chairman of the Southern Center’s board since 1982, said that America has a long way to go to become a post-racial society, citing the disproportionate number of black men in prison.

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(Boston Globe) When Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent Harvard professor of African-American studies, was arrested for disorderly conduct by a white Cambridge police officer last summer, President Obama led a chorus of critics denouncing the local Police Department.

Gates, who is African-American, described his arrest as a “teaching moment’’ about race relations in America.

His case drew national attention to the relationship between policing and race. Obama wound up hosting Gates and the officer who arrested him for a so-called beer summit at the White House. And the arrest, for some, raised the question of whether officers disproportionately arrest blacks for disorderly conduct, considered one of the most discretionary and most abused charges in the nation’s criminal justice system.

But a review of the Cambridge department’s handling of disorderly conduct cases from 2004 to 2009 finds no evidence of racial profiling. Instead, the analysis by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting finds that the most common factor linking people who are arrested in Cambridge for disorderly conduct is that they were allegedly screaming or cursing in front of police.

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