Community Checkup

Neuman is a good friend of mine. We agree on social and political issues about 50-60% of the time. But even when I disagree with him I always appreciate his persuasive, thoughtful, and provocative arguments. His comments on my last post about Sean Taylor are a great example. I decided [...]

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Whoa! Jason Whitlock has always been provocative but he came especially hard in his article for Fox Sports in responding to the murder of Redskins’ Sean Taylor. And even before Whitlock wrote this, some bloggers responded similarly–saying what many were thinking but afraid to say. On Tuesday, The Field Negro had this to [...]

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Dawn Turner Trice wrote a piece in the Chicago Tribune that echoed some of my reservations about the recent Pew Research Center survey with respect to the types of questions asked. Her particular issue had to do with the question about whether blacks can be considered a single race.
Say you were contacted for a [...]

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I didn’t live in Chicago during the time he was mayor, but since I am now a resident, it is only right for me to give props to Harold Washington, one of the first black mayors of a major U.S. city (Chicago’s very first). Sunday was the 20th anniversary of his death, but his [...]

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The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) released its report on minority-serving institutions (MSI). They describe MSIs as, “colleges and universities serving a large percentage of minority students” and identify 6 different subgroups of such schools.
Here are some of their findings:

In 2004, the 1,254 MSIs accounted for just under one-third of all degree-granting Title [...]

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The first installment of NBC’s five-part series was almost as much about the underachievement of black men as it was about the success of black women (check their website for videos). It pointed out a few gender gaps such as 64% of black college students consisting of black women–no newsflash here. Haywood Strickland, [...]

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I learned about this on The Black Informant’s blog.    
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) — A teenage girl was locked up on theft charges in an Amazon jail for weeks with 21 men who she said would only let her eat in return for sex, according to authorities, setting off a national scandal over the treatment of [...]

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Check it out. The five-part series, African American Women: Where They Stand, starts tonight on NBC. I’m sure there will be some interesting discussion across the blogosphere following the broadcast (hopefully this site included).
For years, Black women have told their daughters they may have to take care of themselves without a husband [...]

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Shelby Steele, an essayist on race from Stanford’s Hoover Institute, has a new book on Obama called A Bound Man. I haven’t read it yet but an article in Sunday’s Washington Post summarized Steele’s thesis:
In “A Bound Man,” Steele makes the case that Obama has adopted “a mask” familiar to many African Americans, designed to [...]

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I’m a little late on this due to the holiday but thought I’d post anyway. From Friday’s Chicago Tribune:
So,” the woman asked, “how do we beat the bitch?” And Sen. John McCain laughed.
It was, he said, an “excellent” question. Yes, he went on to express respect for Hillary Rodham Clinton, to whom the woman referred. [...]

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