EthnicMajority

(Los Angeles Times) LMFAO’s head-pounding “Party Rock Anthem” pulsated through North Hollywood’s El Portal Theatre as a multiracial group of young performers stormed the stage, promising in song to provide a lively evening of laughs. They then launched into a rapid-fire parade of sketches filled with gleeful raunch and pokes at racial stereotypes.

The performance had the usual trappings of a night out at any comedy club around town. But little about this invitation-only night was typical. The actors, writers and directors were all amateur, and they were mostly people of color — young blacks, Latinos, Asians, Indians — performing original material they had helped to develop before a crowd of managers, agents and creative executives from major networks and studios.

The event marked the culmination of this year’s CBS Diversity Sketch Comedy Showcase, an annual talent forum that also functions as a three-month boot camp designed to boost the chances of minorities hoping to land roles on TV comedies and dramas.

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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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(CNN) Weeks ahead of the premiere of a CNN documentary focusing on diversity in the tech industry, the charged issue is already generating sparks. A heated debate broke out on Twitter Wednesday night after a preview screening of Black in America 4.

Blogger-turned-investor Michael Arrington ignited a controversy with his comments about the visibility of minority-led companies. In the documentary, which airs November 13, Arrington talked about his difficulties finding African-American entrepreneurs to launch their ventures at his TechCrunch Disrupt conference — and suggested he would accept almost any black entrepreneur, regardless of merit.

"There's a guy, actually, his last company just launched at our event, and he's African-American. When he asked to launch — actually, I think it was the other way around. I think I begged him," Arrington told CNN's Soledad O'Brien.

"His startup's really cool. But he could've launched a clown show on stage, and I would've put him up there, absolutely," Arrington said. "I think it's the first time we've had an African-American [be] the sole founder."

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(AP) Now that the National Football League has a record number of head coaches who are black and Hispanic, can Fortune 500 companies borrow from the league's diversity playbook and see similar results among corporate executives?

Robert L. Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television, thinks so. He is urging corporate America to adopt a version of the NFL's Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate when filling head coach and general manager positions.

Currently, seven NFL coaches are black and one is Hispanic. Five general managers are minorities. In 2003, when the rule was implemented, there were three African American NFL head coaches.

Unlike the NFL rule, which is mandatory for teams, Johnson is asking companies to voluntarily adopt a version of the rule.

In Johnson's version, which he calls the RLJ Rule, companies would include at least two African Americans among interviewees for positions of vice president and above and interview at least two black firms when searching for vendor and supplier services contractors.

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(Washington Post) A group of researchers has found that minority students in community colleges tend to perform better when they’re taught by minority instructors — particularly those of similar race or ethnicity. In a new working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, three economists explain how the minority performance gap narrows: According to their research at California’s De Anza College, one of the biggest community colleges in the United States, black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American students are 2.9 percent more likely to pass courses with instructors of a similar racial or ethnic background. They elaborate:

We find that the performance gap in terms of class dropout and pass rates between white and minority students falls by roughly half when taught by a minority instructor. In models that allow for a full set of ethnic and racial interactions between students and instructors, we find African-American students perform particularly better when taught by African-American instructors. . . . The class dropout rate relative to Whites is 6 percentage points lower for Black students when taught by a Black instructor. Conditional on completing the course, the relative fraction attaining a B-average or greater is 13 percentage points higher.

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(PRNewswire) Racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to develop cancer and die from it than the general U.S. population. However, as the next generation of cancer medicines are being evaluated, only 17 percent of clinical trial participants are, in fact, minorities.(1)

Today, Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) announced findings from a prospectively designed observational study that resulted in new ways to increase minority participation in clinical trials. The study, released at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual "Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved" meeting in Washington, D.C., assessed the impact of ethnicity on the second-line treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

As part of Lilly's goal to improve health outcomes for all patients, the company is working to increase enrollment of diverse populations in clinical trials, and making trials more accessible in minority communities.

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(Washington Post) Hispanics and non-Hispanic blacks have over the past decade been underrepresented in U.S. jobs in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in large part because of a lack of equality in educational opportunity, according to a new report being released today.

The Obama administration has made increasing and improving STEM education a priority, asserting that the country’s economic future depends on a strong workforce in these fields.

The report, issued by the Commerce Department’s Economics and Statistics Administration, says that regardless of race and Hispanic origin, higher college graduation rates are associated with higher shares of workers with STEM jobs.

But, it says, non-Hispanic whites and Asians are much more likely than other minority groups to have earned a bachelor’s degree, and, in part for this reason, have a larger share of STEM jobs.

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(Freakonomics) When it comes to achievement, does it matter if a student and a teacher are the same race? And if so, how much? That’s the essential question posed by a trio of economists in a new working paper, the first to test whether minority instructors have a positive effect on the academic achievement of minority students at the college level.

Their results indicate an emphatic yes, and may hold a partial solution (although a tricky one to enact) to one of the most persistent and vexing problems facing the U.S. education system: the achievement gap between non-minority and minority students. Less than than one-fifth of African-Americans, and less than one-eighth of Latinos between 25 and 29 years-old have a college degree. According to the U.S. Department of Education, only 9.6% of full-time instructional faculty at U.S. colleges are black, Latino or Native American. And yet, these groups make up a third of the college-age population.

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(Chicago Sun Times) Black and Latino drivers pulled over in Illinois traffic stops last year were more likely to end up with a ticket and have their vehicle searched than their white counterparts, according to a new Transportation Department study.

Minority drivers also were involved in traffic stops at a higher rate than their share of the state population would suggest, even though illegal contraband was more likely to be found in vehicles being driven by whites.

The average length of a traffic stop was the same for all races: 10 minutes.

The American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday that the study supports its request for a federal civil rights investigation of the way Illinois State Police handles driver searches. It also called on state leaders to address the issue in all police departments.

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(Orlando Sentinel) Law schools in Florida have struggled for years to draw more minorities into legal fields long dominated by white men.

Yet despite recruitment drives and other efforts to boost their enrollment, the numbers at some colleges have remained stagnant or have fallen off.

That troubles scholars and college administrators as Florida becomes more and more diverse.

Soaring tuition, tougher admission requirements and other factors have discouraged many minorities from seeking law degrees.

At the University of Florida, black enrollment at the state’s largest public law school dropped 10 percent from fall 2006 to fall 2010, the national Law School Admission Council reported last week. The overall number of full-time minority students studying law dipped as well.

Meanwhile, Hispanic enrollment fell by more than one-third at Florida A&M University’s law school in Orlando from 2008 to 2010. And even though black student enrollment remained about the same at Florida A&M, which has served mostly black students for decades, a smaller percentage of the law school’s student body is now black.

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