Tag Archives: race

If President Obama kicked teams out of the NCAA tournament for low graduation rates

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The discussion over the graduation rates of men’s basketball players on NCAA tournament teams has grown in recent years. One columnist wondered what President Obama might say if he addressed the issue:

“While nine of every 10 white players graduate on the top-32-seeded men’s teams, only five of every 10 black players graduate. As an African American, I am personally outraged that 21 of the 68 men’s teams have black player graduation rates ranging from 44 percent down to zero.

“Thus, beginning today, I will do my bracket with this new stipulation: I will not write in your team if either your team or black player graduation rate is under 50 percent.

“This decision is not an easy one to make for a basketball purist. It leaves out nearly a third of the teams, including prestigious programs that account for 10 of the last 21 titles. It is with regret that I will leave blank spots for Syracuse, Indiana State, Missouri, Southern Cal, Michigan State, Tennessee, Florida, Nevada-Las Vegas, UC-Santa Barbara, Michigan, Morehead State, Kentucky, Georgia, Temple, Connecticut, Alabama-Birmingham, Texas, Washington, Arizona, Kansas State, and Akron…”

If Education Secretary Arne Duncan already made a similar suggestion, why not the President, who is an avid basketball fan and fills out men’s and women’s brackets on TV?

This is a complex issue that the NCAA doesn’t seem to want to talk about. Instead, they would rather run commercials (one example here) saying that “most [college athletes] go pro in something other than sports.” This may be true in many sports but there are racial gaps in a number of schools in both men’s basketball and football (read about troubles at Auburn here), the major revenue-generating sports.

Number of multiracial Americans grows in 2010 Census

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In the 2000 Census, respondents were able to indicate for the first time that they are multiracial. The latest figures from the 2010 Census suggest that the multiracial population is growing at higher than expected rates:

In the first comprehensive accounting of multiracial Americans since statistics were first collected about them in 2000, reporting from the 2010 census, made public in recent days, shows that the nation’s mixed-race population is growing far more quickly than many demographers had estimated, particularly in the South and parts of the Midwest. That conclusion is based on the bureau’s analysis of 42 states; the data from the remaining eight states will be released this week.

In North Carolina, the mixed-race population doubled. In Georgia, it expanded by more than 80 percent, and by nearly as much in Kentucky and Tennessee. In Indiana, Iowa and South Dakota, the multiracial population increased by about 70 percent.

“Anything over 50 percent is impressive,” said William H. Frey, a sociologist and demographer at the Brookings Institution…

Census officials were expecting a national multiracial growth rate of about 35 percent since 2000, when seven million people — 2.4 percent of the population — chose more than one race. Officials have not yet announced a national growth rate, but it seems sure to be closer to 50 percent.

This is interesting data, particularly since these figures exceed expectations. There are several issues to note with the data. First, some of the largest growth is taking places in states like Mississippi where there is a large percentage increase because there were so few interracial people in the 2000 Census. A second question we could ask about this data is whether this is primarily an increase in multiracial relationships or is it simply a reflection of changing measurements from the US Census? One sociologist suggests the second option could be plausible:

“The reality is that there has been a long history of black and white relationships — they just weren’t public,” said Prof. Matthew Snipp, a demographer in the sociology department at Stanford University. Speaking about the mixed-race offspring of some of those relationships, he added: “People have had an entire decade to think about this since it was first a choice in 2000. Some of these figures are not so much changes as corrections. In a sense, they’re rendering a more accurate portrait of their racial heritage that in the past would have been suppressed.”

So then perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by these large increases in percentages; rather, we have better instruments by which to collect this data.

This Census data does seems to line up with changing attitudes about interracial relationships. In a recent story from Pew Research about what 90% of Americans can agree about, Pew showed how the approval of interracial relationships has grown a lot in the last several decades:

It is remarkable how this has jumped from 48% in 1987 to 83% approval in 2009. But if there is more approval for interracial relationships, then there is likely to be more relationships, marriages, and eventually children who identify as multiracial.

Grant Hill, Jalen Rose, and race and class

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ESPN recently aired the documentary The Fab Five which earned the network its highest ratings for a documentary (though its unclear how this stacks up against their typical Sunday night programming). One part of the documentary that has drawn attention are the comments Jalen Rose made regarding Grant Hill, Duke, and race. Here is what Rose said in a short segment:

I hated Duke and I hated everything Duke stood for. Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms … I was jealous of Grant Hill. He came from a great black family. Congratulations, your mom went to college and was roommates with Hillary Clinton. And your dad played in the NFL — a very well-spoken and successful man. I was upset and bitter my mom had to bust her hump for 20-plus years. I was bitter that I had a professional athlete that was my father that I didn’t know. I resented that more than I resented him. I looked at it as they are who the world accepts and we are who the world hates.

Hill responded to Rose’s comment on the New York Times website. Here are a few relevant points:

In his garbled but sweeping comment that Duke recruits only “black players that were ‘Uncle Toms,’ ” Jalen seems to change the usual meaning of those very vitriolic words into his own meaning, i.e., blacks from two-parent, middle-class families. He leaves us all guessing exactly what he believes today…

This is part of our great tradition as black Americans. We aspire for the best or better for our children and work hard to make that happen for them. Jalen’s mother is part of our great black tradition and made the same sacrifices for him…

To hint that those who grew up in a household with a mother and father are somehow less black than those who did not is beyond ridiculous. All of us are extremely proud of the current Duke team, especially Nolan Smith. He was raised by his mother, plays in memory of his late father and carries himself with the pride and confidence that they instilled in him…

I caution my fabulous five friends to avoid stereotyping me and others they do not know in much the same way so many people stereotyped them back then for their appearance and swagger. I wish for you the restoration of the bond that made you friends, brothers and icons.

While this appears to be a conversation about race, I wonder how much of this might be about social class. While Rose used terms that invoked race (particularly the reference to “Uncle Toms”), what also might have been describing differences in social class: Grant Hill grew up in more of an upper-class family where his dad was a known athlete and his mom had connections. Rose did not have the same opportunities that Hill’s family provided and felt bitter about Duke, a private school known for its wealth (according to the National Association of of College and University Business Officers, Duke is #15 in its 2010 endowment with over $4.8 billion).

In the long run, both men have done well for themselves: Hill is still playing in the NBA while Rose is an analyst for ESPN and also played 13 years in the NBA. But these discussions about opportunities and race and class are ongoing in sociology: is it race that is the primary issue or is it social class? A sociologist like William Julius Wilson has written about this, most recently here, invoking a lot of discussion over the last few decades. How this particular discussion ends up between  Rose and Hill remains to be seen but there will be plenty of ongoing talk about these larger issues.

Considering whether whites are the new minority

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A CNN article takes a look at the question of whether  “whites [are] racially oppressed.” A sociologist in the story summarizes why whites may be feeling like a minority group and acting accordingly:

For many decades, white people saw themselves as individuals, not as members of a race, says Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University in Pennsylvania, who writes books about white studies.

“We are often offended if someone calls attention to our race as shaping how we view the world,” says Wray, author of “Not Quite White.” “We don’t like to be pigeon-holed that way. Non-white Americans are seldom afforded this luxury of seeing themselves as individuals, disconnected from any race.”

This threatened-status argument seems to be gathering steam as more sociologists (and others) look for explanations for the persistence and/or growth of right-wing movements. With the changing demographics in America (whether in kindergarten or the suburbs), this is not something that will go away.

What might happen in the long run? Another sociologist offers a prediction:

Gallagher points out that the United States has accommodated massive change before. Women were once thought too emotional to vote, interracial couples were outlawed, blacks enslaved.

He says his children won’t see race the same way that he or other generations did. They won’t see diversity as a weakness.

It’ll just be a way of life.

I would love to hear more about this: how exactly will the view of and effects of race change in the coming generations? A number of sociologists have written about the changes in the past 100 years as America moved from more overt forms of discrimination to move covert forms. I haven’t seen too many predictions about this.

More minorities in the Chicago suburbs leads to new issues

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The Chicago Tribune discusses some of the growth in minority population in the Chicago suburbs as well as the challenges this poses to these communities:

“Immigration is coming right to the suburbs because of jobs and because there are networks that have been established in the suburbs,” said Chicago-based demographer Rob Paral.

The greatest number of new suburbanites were Hispanics. More than 62,000 Latino residents settled in Will County, many in Aurora, Joliet and Bolingbrook.

Bolingbrook also saw its Asian population more than double, with a surge of Indian, Pakistani, Filipino and Chinese residents, village officials said. In Naperville, the black, Hispanic and Asian populations were each up by 70 percent or more, while the still much larger non-Hispanic white population dipped slightly…

“When you talk about the challenges of integration, part of the problem is that some of these communities were not built to sustain or increase by 150 percent, let alone by people whose language is from a different country,” said Sylvia Zaldivar-Sykes, executive director of the Lake County Community Foundation.

This will pose some interesting challenges to many suburban communities. Having new residents in the community might lead to reconsidering the characters of these suburbs: how will residents and other communities view themselves and other suburbs? New programs or services will require more money, something in short supply in our current era of suburban budget shortfalls. And in the long run, what will the white residents in these communities do – move to other suburbs, as many whites have done in the past, or stay within their changing communities?

The role of residential segregation in lawsuit over Elgin school district

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The Chicago suburb of Elgin has long been a satellite city with more diversity and manufacturing than the average suburb. The city’s school district, U-46, is the second-largest district in the state and is the plaintiff in a long-running civil suit that is continuing in federal court this week:

The two sides in a long, bitter fight over boundary lines in an Elgin-area school district met in federal District Court in Chicago on Monday, six years after a class-action suit sought to improve learning conditions for minority students.

The students and the families who were part of the original case filed in 2005 have long since left School District U-46, a racially and culturally diverse district of 40,000 students in the northwest suburbs. But the conditions that sparked that initial outrage — overcrowding and poor classroom conditions — continue to persist and are putting minority students at a disadvantage, attorney Stewart Weltman told the judge in his opening remarks.

“U-46 served the needs of white students first, and the needs of minority students second,” Weltman told U.S. District Judge Robert W. Gettleman. “The district knew it had thousands of empty seats in white schools, and yet it forced more and more minority students into overcrowded schools and portable classrooms without running water.”

Attorneys for the school district say race never played a role in the redrawing of attendance boundaries for the district’s 55 elementary, middle and high schools. Instead, they say, the changes were part of a reorganization plan by the district in 2004 to allow more students to attend schools closer to home.

I don’t know the particulars of the case. What the district did sounds like what a lot of American parents might desire: let my children go to schools close to home rather than busing or driving them to schools across the city. Closeness is one issue but the idea of local control or rule of nearby schools is important, even in a large school district.

But as I read this, I am struck by an idea: with the district letting students “attend schools closer to home,” U-46 was letting the wealthier kids go to the nearby nicer schools and the minority kids go to nearby worse-off schools. And if you look at the map of the U-46 boundaries, there is quite an economic range, from Elgin (median household income in 2009: $57,009) to wealthier Bartlett (median household income in 2009: $91,863) and Wayne (less than 2,000 people in the village but a 2009 median household income of $142,321). Therefore, it may appear that the district is not spreading the wealth (in money or children) around the district in a way that benefits everyone. The residential segregation patterns in suburbia, where the wealthier tend to live with the wealthier and the poorer live with the poorer, then get reinforced.

It will be interesting to see how the case turns out. On one hand, I’m sure the district has an interest in keeping wealthier families and areas within the district, something that may have been aided by this 2004 decision. On the other hand, the larger school district is supposed to be providing the same opportunities for all students.

 

Chicago’s population loss, neighborhood by neighborhood

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After the recent news that Chicago lost about 200,000 residents between 2000 and 2010, the Chicago Tribune takes a look at how the population changed in each of Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods. Here are some of the trends:

Sixty of Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods lost population, according to the 2010 Census. The focus of the population growth was in the Loop, the Near South Side and the Near West Side, areas that experienced a boom in new residential high-rises and loft developments.

The city lost more than 200,000 people during the decade, many from predominantly black neighborhoods hard hit by crime and foreclosures. More than 27,000 non-Hispanic white residents, meanwhile, poured into the city’s downtown and surrounding areas.

On the Southwest Side, the number of Hispanics and Asians grew in historically white ethnic neighborhoods such as Bridgeport, Archer Heights, West Lawn, West Elsdon and Ashburn. White populations in those communities dipped.

So the population growth took place in two places: around the downtown where wealthier whites moved in and on the southwest side where Latinos and Asians moved in. Throughout the rest of the city, the population declined.

As the City of Chicago thinks about how to respond to these figures, should they focus resources on the areas that were growing (particularly the area around the Loop which is likely to get more attention) or figure out some way to boost the prospects of the 60 other neighborhoods that experienced population loss?

Exactly how many American homes are vacant?

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Two bloggers have a disagreement about how many vacant homes there are in the United States. Check out the debate and the comments below.

The moral of the story: one still needs to interpret statistics and what exactly they are measuring. The different between 11% and 2% is quite a lot: the first figure suggests 1 out of 10 housing units are vacant while the second figure suggests it is 1 out of 50. If you look at Table 1 of this Census Bureau release regarding housing figures from Quarter 4, it looks like the vacancy rate is 2.7%. But there may be confusion based on Table 3 which suggests the vacancy for all housing units is roughly 11% for year-round units. And later in the release, page 11 of the document, gives the formula for the vacancy calculation and an explanation: “The homeowner vacancy rate is the proportion of the homeowner inventory that is vacant for sale.”

There are some other figures of note in this document. Table 4 shows that the homeownership rate is at 66.5%, down from a peak of 69.2% in the fourth quarter of 2004. (It is interesting to note that this rate peaked a couple of years before the housing market is popularly thought to have gone downhill. What happened between Q4 2004 and the start of the larger economic crisis? Table 7 has homeownership rates by race: the white rate has dropped 1.1% since 1Q 2007 while Blacks and Latinos have seen bigger drops (3.2% and 3.3%).

MLK in Chicago

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While many of the tributes to Martin Luther King, Jr. talk about the important marches and speeches in the early 1960s regarding civil rights (and the subsequent legislation), the last three years of King’s life are less well-known. Having grown up in the Chicago area, I was not aware that King spent a significant amount of time in Chicago in 1966 until I was doing some research in recent years. The Encyclopedia of Chicago has a brief summary:

But in the summer of 1965, the nature of King’s connection to Chicago changed. Responding to requests from local civil rights forces, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined the fight against school superintendent Benjamin Willis and Chicago’s segregated public schools. By the fall, SCLC had allied with the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations to launch a campaign to end slums in the city, which would become known as the Chicago Freedom Movement.

King relied on his lieutenant James Bevel to energize the first phases of the campaign, but in January 1966 he captured national headlines when he moved his family into a dingy apartment in the West Side ghetto. It was not until June that King and his advisors, under pressure to produce results, settled on a focus for the Chicago movement. King himself participated in two dramatic marches into all-white neighborhoods during a two-month open-housing campaign during the summer of 1966. These fair-housing protests brought real estate, political, business, and religious leaders to the conference table for “summit” negotiations.

In late August, King and Mayor Richard J. Daley announced that an agreement had been reached: the marches would stop, while city leaders promised to promote fair housing. King hoped that the “summit” accord would be an important step toward making Chicago an open city, but black militants denounced the settlement and the Daley administration never fulfilled its promises.

Several things are notable about this effort:

1. This was a large-scale movement in the North. Most depictions of the Civil Rights Movement imply that all the action or the problems that needed to be solved were in the South. This was not the case then or now. Indeed, measures of housing segregation show that the most segregated cities in terms of race are still in the North.

2. Even with the passing of Civil Rights legislation, this issue of housing discrimination and segregation is one that has plagued America. While the housing discrimination of today is less overt than that of the past (exclusionary zoning, differential treatment, and high prices today vs. redlining, blockbusting, and restrictive covenants in the past), King’s efforts are notable. Of his efforts in Chicago, King said something like “if we can solve the issue of housing in Chicago, we can solve it anywhere.” Chicago was notorious then for its segregation and this is still the case today.

3. Perhaps we don’t hear about these issues from King’s later years, such as housing or his thoughts about Vietnam or his efforts on behalf of labor, because they don’t seem to have clear solutions. Civil rights is an issue that seemed to have been solved with the Civil Rights Acts (though this isn’t quite the case). But housing is a long-standing concern in many cities and metropolitan areas. Viewpoints on Vietnam are still mixed and get brought up again in discussions of current wars.

4. This part of Chicago’s history is not one that is widely talked about. King and his followers led numerous marches in 1966 that were met with much resistance, particularly when marching in white neighborhoods. Chicago and the region has a longer history of negative incidents: one, in particular, in Cicero in the 1950s is often cited as a black family who moved into an apartment was met by an angry mob (including many housewives) who firebombed the apartment building. As the Encyclopedia entry suggested, the older Mayor Daley did meet with King but didn’t follow through on his promises. These sorts of moments are often scrubbed or ignored in history as they don’t reflect too favorably on communities. At the same time, we need to know about these to help understand the present reality.

Museum exhibit on the social construct of race

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There is no question that the idea of race has had a profound impact on Western history, particularly the American experience. A museum exhibit in Boston helps attendees see that race is a social construct:

Developed by the American Anthropological Association, the exhibition draws on science and culture, history and politics. It surveys race as concept and the almost always unfortunate consequences that concept has had and continues to have.

Race is a relatively recent term, dating from the Age of Discovery, with its many European encounters with non-European others. (Of course, go back far enough, and we’re all non-Europeans, humankind having originated in Africa.) The first legal use of the word “white’’ in America wasn’t until 1691, when the increasing importance of slavery added a whole new dimension of complexity to the concept of race.

A better word than “concept’’ would be “construct.’’ That’s what race is. Black and white and yellow and red aren’t biological categories as, say, male and female are. Race is more of a social, or even psychological, category, as class is; and, like class, it owes far more to culture and society than it does to genetics.

Sociologists would say the same thing about race: it is a construct based on skin color, not inherent biological characteristics.

I would be interested to know if a museum exhibit like this changes people’s minds about race. There would be an easy way to find out: give a pre-test including questions about race to all those who enter the museum. When the visitors leave the museum, give the same test and also ask which visitors went through the race exhibit. Compare results and see if the group that went through the race exhibit have different views.