Black Kids Doing Better than ever

I just read this article from the Chicago Defender at http://www.chicagodefender.com. It is nice to see that there is some good news in the war for equatibility. I should point out that we still still have a long way to go, but progress is taking place. Anyway, I just discovered the Defender today, it has a lot of great articles surrounding the Black community as well as national and local news for the city of Chicago, where it is out of . What we need as a White community is a good source of info for the issues that are important to the black community. Obviously you can ask a member of the Black community, but remember the myth that White people have that a Black person represents their whole community. Don't assume that one person opinion, no matter how well informed he ar she is, can represent a whole race of people.

OK, enough of my own opinions heres the article. Enjoy.

New Report: Black children doing better than ever
but still trail white children in quality of life

Black children are doing better than ever, but still have a long way to go before closing the racialethnic gap in quality of life, according to a report released last month by the Foundation for Child Development. The report was the first ever to analyze and compare trends in the well-being of Black, white, and Hispanic children over a span of nearly two decades.
According to the report, all children experienced overall improvements in quality of life between 1985 and 2004. However, because improvements were greater for Black and Hispanic children during this time span - particularly after 1993 - the gap between them and whites is narrowing. But even if trends continue at their current pace, it will take at least an entire generation to fully eliminate these gaps.
“Even if we manage to continue to make progress towards closing the racial-ethnic gaps in children’s well-being at the same rate we have been, it would take another 18 years before Black children essentially caught up with white children,” Ruby Takanishi, president and CEO of FCD, said. “As a leading world superpower, America can do and should do better than this,” Takanishi continued. The report is entitled “Racial- Ethnic Inequality in Child Well- Being from 1985-2004: Gaps Narrowing but Persist.”
The researchers pulled data from several years of the FCD Child Well-Being Index-an annual analysis of the quality of life for all American children. It found that the gap in the overall quality of life separating Black children from white children narrowed by 26 percent- a change driven largely by promising improvements in safety, economic security and health for children of color.
A few other key findings of the report include:
- Education is stagnant: While Black children have made progress in many areas, substantial gaps in education between white and Black children have shown little improvement. The Black disadvantage in preschool enrollment has been eliminated, but the gaps in reading and math indicators have barely changed, and the same is true of the Black-white gap in completing a bachelor’s degree.
- Black children have seen the biggest improvement in their likelihood to commit a violent crime. While all children were much less likely to commit a violent crime in 2004 than they were in 1985, the likelihood of Black children committing a violent crime has decreased so significantly that it is now nearly on par with whites. Hispanic youths are less likely than whites to commit crimes or be victims.
- While the likelihood of all youth voting is up, Black youth are now more likely to vote than ever before, and the likelihood of Black youth voting is improving faster than it is for white children.
- The poverty gap between white children and Black children is closing. While rates of poverty are decreasing for all racial/ethnic groups, they are decreasing more rapidly for Black children than they are for white children.
- Black and Hispanic children also benefited from advances in the safetybehavioral domains including reduced cigarette smoking, drinking alcohol, and use of illicit drugs.
- Gaps in family economic well-being narrowed for both Black and Hispanic children as parental employment and health insurance coverage increased.
- Obesity rates rose less for Black and Hispanic children, although they remain higher than for whites.
- Both Black children and Hispanic children were advantaged compared to White children in the emotional/ spiritual domain.
- Even if Black and Hispanic children reached parity with the current level of well-being among white children, the overall well-being of all three groups would be substantially below the best that the U.S. has ever achieved on these measures, and levels of well-being currently experienced by international peers of the U.S.
“With the possibility of an economic recession, policies should aim to protect the economic security of American families, as well as key programs in health and education that support the largest number of children, especially those whose families earn below the median family income,” said Don Hernandez, researcher and author of the report.
“A number of the positive changes outlined in this report can be attributed to smart policies and an active community. If we want to continue to improve our children’s lives, we must continue push for this kind of smart policy.” Margaret Simms, senior fellow at the Urban Institute, which studies social policy, said that regardless of the progress reflected in the FCD report, “we shouldn’t become complacent.”
The Foundation for Child Development is a national, private philanthropy dedicated to the principle that all families should have the social and material resources to raise their children to be healthy, educated and productive members of their communities.
We believe that families, schools, nonprofit organizations, businesses and government at all levels share complementary responsibilities in the critical task of raising new generations.

Time to get off the high horse

In 2007, my very own congressman, David Wu, made the statement that there were Klingons in the White House. Funny as that Star Trek reference was I think he got it wrong. Most of the representative administration is white, and if white people as a whole are anything in the Star Trek Universe they are the Ferengi. The capitalistic, technology stealing, Ferengi.

We as white people love to blow our own horn as to all of the great things we have accomplished. Well, let's set the record straight. We haven't accomplished all that much to be proud of. We invented the car and steam power, but those were really just advances on existing technology. The light bulb? Yeah, Thomas Edison invented it, but he would have been hard pressed to make it work without the filament made by Lewis Howard Latimer, a black man.

In fact Black people are responsible for almost all of the civilization changing inventions. Fire (or discovering how to use it), the wheel, writing, math, philosophy (I know I thought it was the Greeks too. Turns out I was wrong.), using stone to build. The list goes on. Then when all of Europe went into the Dark Ages, and went a little bat shit crazy with the whole religious thing, it was the Middle East that kept all of the knowledge of the world from disappearing. That's right those crazy terrorist we are all so afraid of kept the light of knowledge burning while all of us White folk were burning each other at the stake in the name of God.

Again, as a White person, I am not trying to spread white guilt, or make anyone feel bad. My mission is to knock all of us White people off of the high horse we ride around on as if we deserved to be their by perdition. It's OK to be White, I'm proud of being White. What it's not OK to be is vain due to ignorance. Instead realize that our history that we have learned is mostly a lie based on the need for White people to maintain a sense of superiority and control. Later.

Tolerance and why I don't care for the phrase.

I cringe every time I hear someone use the word tolerant in reference to race relations in this country. It's not that I don't think that there is anything wrong with the word; it is the context in which it is used. "We need to be more tolerant of others," I hear it all the time. Well do me a favor please don't be tolerant of me, I don't need you to tolerate me, and I certainly don't think that when it comes to race relation we need to tolerate anyone. Either accept them or don't and move on.

You see, tolerance to me says that their is something fundamentally wrong or offensive with that which you are tolerating. Like some pungent cheese you don't like, but you tolerate so as not to offend your host who serves it. People aren't stinky cheeses. Gay people, as a for instance, don't need to have their lives tolerated, if you don't like them then just don't like them. Move your ignorant ass somewhere else, but please don't don't be so condescending as to tolerate them. Tolerating also says that you are somehow above that which you are tolerating. How arrogant to assume that the way you were born is somehow better than a fellow human being, and so therefore you "tolerate" them.

Allow me to say that I don't tolerate the people who believe that they are somehow doing us all a favor by tolerating all of the other races in our country. In fact, I don't like you. I'm not going to tolerate or not tolerate you, I am just not going to deal with your nonsense anymore. You will either become accepting or in the near future you may find yourself the one that people won't tolerate anymore. Later.

Reverse Racism

Let me state emphatically that I do not believe in Reverse Racism. Racism is a white problem in this country not a Black, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, etc... problem. Let me try and explain myself. The reason for this belief is how you define racism. The best definition I have ever heard is simply Racism= Prejudice+Power. So when you add power to the equation their can be no reverse racism.

I am not saying that there are no prejudice people who are non white, for certainly there are. However, Black people, for instance, do not have the power necessary in this country to institute policies and procedures that affect White people on an institutional level. They simply don't have access to the resources or the representation in the areas of power that would allow them to implement those changes.

So I say again that there is no such thing as reverse racism. Racism is a White problem exclusively in this country. White people are the only ones with the power added to their prejudice that can allow them to implement far reaching policies that negatively affect people from another race.

Next time someone gets up on their high horse about reverse racism be sure to tell them that they have their definitions confused. They probably won't care much, white people who aren't willing to examine their own actions in affecting others probably aren't willing to listen to you explain to them why they are wrong. A lot of White people cling to the prejudice that they experience on a limited basis as their evidence that they aren't the only racist people in our country. When in fact they really are. Later.

Isn't racism mainly a southern thing?

Ahh the South. They always get the lions share of blame for racism don't they. Well I am not going to say that the south is a great island of racial understanding, but you can't put all of the blame on them. In fact during the Nadir period of racism and even through today the south has far less "Sundown" towns and counties by a huge number than the rest of the nation. Of course part of the reason for that is that the south wasn't about to keep their cheap source of domestic labor out of the areas where they worked, but still...

The rest of the nation has just as bad of a history of racism as the south. It is just easy for those of us whites not living in the south to say that the problem is just there. For instance I live in Portland OR, and this town is one of the most segregated communities in the United States. My university is fairly diverse, but the actual town and the suburbs are really segregated. Even in a hotbed of liberalism like Portland we have the same problems that are subscribed to the rest of the country. If you live in the right area than your kids get a good education, and you don't have to be rich, just live in the right area. I live in a suburb called Beaverton, which is admittedly mostly white with small pockets of Latinos and Koreans in the area. Our schools are great, but if you go just across the river and north a bit you will encounter schools that can't afford PE, Music, Art, etc...

So no it isn't just the south, it's everywhere. Look around wherever it is you are and you will see it. Trust me. Later

New Jersey to Apologize for Slavery

Well as a way to ring in the New Year the state of New Jersey is working on an actual atonement for slavery. Well it's only been 147 years or so, so why not. Good lord this is so pathetic. 147 years and all the black people in this country get from New Jersey is an official apology. How about some repartition for all the gains that those same politicians got from slavery. How about a real working justice system that doesn't profile African Americans. How about becoming a state where 8 out of 10 motorists stopped and searched weren't minorities (Source:Interim Report of the State Police Team Regarding Allegations of Racial Profiling, 1999).

No, the fine African Americans in New Jersey are going to get an apology. Not better living conditions, better education, a more equitable system to function in, but an apology. This thing is gonna be so hollow you will be able to hear an echo in it for years to come.

I am not saying that all of us as White people shouldn't apologize for slavery, we absolutely should have done it long before this. There is just so much more that we have to do, this is a bandaid for a bullet wound. I can just hear my White brothers and sisters now, "What the hell do you want, we apologized for the whole slavery thing."

I hope that all of you who heard about this apology had a good laugh. Not because it was funny, but because it was so absurd that you just had to. Later

One More Privilege of Being White

If I go to the hospital in pain, I am more likely to be give meds for my pain. So says this article I just read.





CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Emergency room doctors are prescribing strong narcotics more often to patients who complain of pain, but minorities are less likely to get them than whites, a new study finds.

Even for severe pain, narcotics such as oxycodone were prescribed less frequently for minorities.

Even for the severe pain of kidney stones, minorities were prescribed narcotics such as oxycodone and morphine less frequently than whites.
The analysis of more than 150,000 emergency room visits over 13 years found differences in prescribing by race in both urban and rural hospitals, in all U.S. regions and for every type of pain.
"The gaps between whites and nonwhites have not appeared to close at all," said study co-author Dr. Mark Pletcher of the University of California, San Francisco.
The study appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association. Prescribing narcotics for pain in emergency rooms rose during the study, from 23 percent of those complaining of pain in 1993 to 37 percent in 2005.
The increase coincided with changing attitudes among doctors who now regard pain management as a key to healing. Doctors in accredited hospitals must ask patients about pain, just as they monitor vital signs such as temperature and pulse.
Even with the increase, the racial gap endured. Linda Simoni-Wastila of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Pharmacy said the race gap finding may reveal some doctors' suspicions that minority patients could be drug abusers lying about pain to get narcotics.

The irony, she said, is that blacks are the least likely group to abuse prescription drugs. Hispanics are becoming as likely as whites to abuse prescription opioids and stimulants, according to her research. She was not involved in the current study.
The study's authors said doctors may be less likely to see signs of painkiller abuse in white patients, or they may be undertreating pain in minority patients.
Patient behavior may play a role, Pletcher said. Minority patients "may be less likely to keep complaining about their pain or feel they deserve good pain control," he said.
Stricter protocols for prescribing narcotics may help close the gap.
A New York hospital recently studied its emergency patients and found no racial disparity in narcotics prescribed for broken bones. Montefiore Medical Center aggressively treats pain and is developing protocols for painkillers that dictate initial dosages and times to check with patients to see whether they need more pain medicine, said Dr. David Esses, emergency department associate director at Montefiore.
Such standards may eliminate racial disparities, Esses said.
In the study, opioid narcotics were prescribed in 31 percent of the pain-related visits involving whites, 28 percent for Asians, 24 percent for Hispanics and 23 percent for blacks.
Minorities were slightly more likely than whites to get aspirin, ibuprofen and similar drugs for pain.

In more than 2,000 visits for kidney stones, whites got narcotics 72 percent of the time, Hispanics 68 percent, Asians 67 percent and blacks 56 percent.
The data came from a well-regarded government survey that collects information on emergency room visits for four weeks each year from 500 U.S. hospitals. The new study was funded by federal grants.
"It's time to move past describing disparities and work on narrowing them," said Dr. Thomas L. Fisher, an emergency room doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center who was not involved in the study.
Fisher, who is black, said he is not immune to letting subconscious assumptions inappropriately influence his work as a doctor.
"If anybody argues they have no social biases that sway clinical practice, they have not been thoughtful about the issue or they're not being honest with themselves," he said.

So there ya have it. If your white, apparently you are more believable. The sad thing is that these Doctors are highly educated, and are falling victim to racial stereotypes despite the contradictory data. Who knew? Well actually, Black people probably did. That's the thing with White Privilege, we are so closed to it that we are in shock when we hear this kind of information. What's worse the more you know about White Privilege, the less shocked you are. I wasn't aware of this statistic, but sadly not surprised either.