Community Checkup

A mini “TechCheck”…
A frequent commenter on this site, JJ, recently wrote me asking if there was any data to show how much blacks agree with some of the frequently mentioned views of Reverend Wright. I thought it was a pretty interesting question given the back-and-forth in the press and blogosphere lately about how how [...]

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Yet another racial gap…
A recent study in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) points out a gap in the prescription of pain killers during emergency room visits. The study looked at national data on the prescription of opioid pain meds (e. g. morphine & oxycodone) for whites, blacks, Asians, and Latinos [...]

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Yesterday, The Washington Post, for a second time, accused Obama of being wrong, or lying about his statement that there are more black men in jail than in college.
Obama’s exact words on November 29th were, “I don’t want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men [...]

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This one’s strictly for the nerds [my hand raised].
I promise to only hit you with these more technical “checkups” (what I’ll be labeling as tech checks from here on) every couple of months or so. Sometimes, I just can’t help myself. Plus, just maybe, some of you (okay, maybe one or two) [...]

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There has been a lot of hoopla about Latino immigrants and whether they make real efforts to participate in and assimilate to so-called American culture. Some say they do while others say they choose to self-segregate and make little effort to learn the English language. The recent Pew Research Center Report got [...]

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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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“Skip” Gates Jr. of Harvard, hit on some important points in his NY Times op-ed related to my previous posts on the Pew Center findings, economic vs. social programs and black leadership. Regarding economics:
The telltale fact is that the biggest gap in black prosperity isn’t in income, but in wealth. According to a study [...]

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I’ll probably do a couple of posts on this one. Here’s a start…
Yesterday, the Pew Research Center released their report on racial attitudes and concludes that optimism regarding black progress is declining and that there is a growing values gap between poor and middle class blacks. The study involves a phone survey administered to [...]

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Think the educational system for low-income ethnic minority children is hopeless? Then check out some of the research on 90-90-90 schools. This work shows that schools successfully educating such students do exist and the data points to some of the contributing factors. 90-90-90 schools are schools identified with the following characteristics:
• [...]

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Recently, the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) published its report Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Minorities. There is some good news and bad news here. Some good news: Blacks and Latinos are increasing in terms of numbers going to college and numbers taking AP classes is increasing. [...]

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