EthnicMajority

(TV Guide) To paraphrase NBC’s marketing slogan, has prime time become “less colorful”? Looking at the casting of this fall’s new TV series, the groups that monitor TV diversity think so.

Unlike last year, when at least nine new shows boasted leading roles for black, Latino and Asian-American actors (including NBC’s now canceled Undercovers and Outlaw and The CW’s returning Nikita), next year most minority characters are supporting roles. The networks are also airing more comedies next fall — and in recent years, half-hour sitcoms have been less diverse than dramas.

That’s why there’s concern that the strides made by network diversity efforts are being erased. The trend is to “sprinkle in some African-Americans or Latinos as the second or third character,” says Vic Bulluck, who heads the NAACP’s Hollywood branch. That’s despite 2010 census data, which show that the U.S. Hispanic/Latino population now makes up 16.3 percent of the country, while Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders constitute 5 percent and African-Americans 12.6 percent.

Execs say they take diversity seriously but could do better. “Network TV has come a long way…but there is always a need for and a desire to improve,” says Nicole Bernard, Fox’s senior VP of audience strategy.

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(Examiner.com) On his popular talk show on Monday, Taliaferro, who is African-American blasted those in the African-American community who are antigay.

“It is inhumane to do what black people do when they approach the issue of homosexuality,” Taliaferro said.

“Why is it that black people, my people, feel they got to get up in the pulpit and they have to to condemn a very active segment of the population of our society who happen to be gay, who happen to be homosexual?”

Taliaferro is a former San Francisco NAACP president and has been a choir director for years at several churches in San Francisco.

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(Atlanta Journal Constitution) Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said today he is reconsidering his department’s decision to fire a Georgia official in wake of new details about her controversial speech to the NAACP.

Vilsack said in a statement early Wednesday morning that he will “conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts” about his decision to ask Shirley Sherrod to resign. Washington’s apparent reversal came hours after a video of Sherrod’s full speech was released, and the director of rural development in Georgia was defended by the white couple at the center of the controversy.

The full, uncut video of a federal agricultural official’s NAACP speech purporting racial scheming, told a different story than the barely-three-minute snippet that cost Sherrod her job.

Despite admitting in the edited version of the taping that she once withheld help to the couple on the basis of race, Sherrod was defended Tuesday by the wife of a white Georgia farmer.

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(Kansas City Star) Calling education “the civil rights issue of our generation,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Wednesday issued a national challenge for whole communities to get involved in improving public education.

“The only way to achieve equality in society is to achieve it in the classroom,” Duncan told NAACP delegates meeting in Kansas City for the group’s annual convention.

“This is not just a moral obligation; it is our economic imperative,” he said. “Everyone has a responsibility. Everyone can step up. Education is our national mission. Education is our best hope.”

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(CNN) The NAACP has passed a resolution that condemns what it feels is rampant racism in the Tea Party movement. Members passed the measure on Tuesday at the organization’s 101st annual convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

Tea Party activists have swiftly denounced the action as unfounded and unfair.

The resolution pits the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, with its storied history of wins on behalf of racial justice, against a grassroots conservative movement that has won some recent political races and is flexing its muscle in Republican circles.

“We take no issue with the Tea Party. We believe in freedom of assembly and people raising their voices in a democracy,” Ben Jealous, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said in a statement.

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(Voice of America) In an address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), First Lady Michelle Obama has spoken about the campaign she launched earlier this year against childhood obesity.

Mrs. Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, which she launched this past February, aims to shine a constant spotlight on childhood obesity in the United States, and the millions of young people at risk of developing related serious health conditions.

According to government statistics, one in three children in the United States is overweight or obese, with black and Hispanic children facing the greatest risk of developing heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses related to obesity.

Addressing the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization at its 101st annual convention in Kansas City, in the central U.S. state of Missouri, Mrs. Obama said the African-American community in particular is suffering negative effects.

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