Saturday, January 11

Tag: black

How even a casual brush with the law can permanently mar a young man’s life – especially if he’s Black
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SOCIAL JUSTICE

How even a casual brush with the law can permanently mar a young man’s life – especially if he’s Black

George Floyd’s death highlighted how even a minor alleged infraction – in his case, over a fake $20 bill – can lead to a fatal interaction with law enforcement. As a result, a coalition of advocacy organizations, criminal justice reform advocates and everyday citizens have called for cities to take a wide range of actions to reduce the power and authority of local police departments. But loss of life isn’t the only potential consequence of a brush with the law. Even a single arrest, without conviction, can be devastating to the rest of a young man’s life – especially if he’s Black – particularly in terms of employment and earnings. And African American men are much more likely to get arrested than their white counterparts. My own recent research has been exploring what employers can do ...
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Kids’ perceptions of police fall as they age – for Black children the decline starts earlier and is constant
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SOCIAL JUSTICE

Kids’ perceptions of police fall as they age – for Black children the decline starts earlier and is constant

The deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and most recently Dijon Kizzee at the hands of officers come in an age when overpolicing and underserving minority communities has, as some experts believe, resulted in a “legitimacy crisis” in American policing. The reality is that these events are also impacting children. Youth today are growing up in what has been described as an “era of mistrust” of police. Across racial and ethnic groups, youths’ perceptions of police have dropped in recent years to a decades-long low. Yet, the amount of the decline differs across demographic groups. In fact, Black youth report the most dramatic declines, and the gap between their perceptions and white youths’ perceptions has been increasing. As scholars of policing and the criminal justice system, we stud...
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Homes in Black and Latino neighborhoods still undervalued 50 years after US banned using race in real estate appraisals
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VIDEO REELS

Homes in Black and Latino neighborhoods still undervalued 50 years after US banned using race in real estate appraisals

Racial inequality in home values is greater today than it was 40 years ago, with homes in white neighborhoods appreciating $200,000 more since 1980 than comparable homes in similar communities of color. Our new research on home appraisals shows neighborhood racial composition still drives unequal home values, despite laws that forbid real estate professionals from explicitly using race when evaluating a property’s worth. Published in the journal Social Problems, our study finds this growing inequality results from both historical policies and contemporary practices. In the 1930s, the federal government institutionalized a process for evaluating how much a property was worth. Often called redlining, this process used neighborhood racial and socioeconomic composition to determine home valu...
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Black Voters Know Climate Justice Is Racial Justice
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Journalism, POLITICS

Black Voters Know Climate Justice Is Racial Justice

It’s not only been a summer season (now autumn) of a deadly pandemic, toxic politics, and social unrest, but the nation has been rocked by a nonstop series of environmental calamities triggered by the human-pressed climate crisis. Hurricane Sally was a destructive slow-moving mix of high winds and epic flooding battering the Gulf Coast and other parts of the South. That was after Hurricane Laura and ahead of an unprecedented number of cyclones forming in the Atlantic for what’s building up into one of the most active—if not the most active—hurricane season on record. The entire West Coast is either, literally, on fire or under a blanket of choking smoke from said fire. This summer was the fourth hottest on record, with nights no longer cooler and city neighborhoods burning up because of l...
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Far from being anti-religious, faith and spirituality run deep in Black Lives Matter
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Religion

Far from being anti-religious, faith and spirituality run deep in Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matters (BLM) has been portrayed by its detractors as many things: Marxist, radical, anti-American. Added to this growing list of charges is that it is either irreligious or doing religion wrong. In late July, for instance, conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan tweeted that BLM was “incompatible” with Christianity. He isn’t alone in that belief. Despite receiving the backing of diverse faith leaders and groups, BLM has been attacked by sections of the religious right. One evangelical institution felt compelled to issue a statement warning Christians about the movement’s “Godless agenda.” Other evangelicals have gone further, accusing BLM founders of being “witches” and “operating in the demonic realm.” Joining conservative Christians are some self-proclaimed liberals and ...
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When police stop Black men, the effects reach into their homes and families
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IN OTHER NEWS

When police stop Black men, the effects reach into their homes and families

While much of the world was sheltering in place in the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, many Americans’ undivided attention was focused squarely on Minneapolis, Minnesota, where George Floyd was killed at the hands – and knees – of the police. Floyd’s murder evoked memories of other murders by the police, including those of Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Philando Castile and Samuel DuBose. Most recently, another unarmed Black man, Jacob Blake, was shot seven times in the back in Kenosha, Wisconsin. We are a sociologist and a social worker who study racism, inequality and families, including a focus on Black men and their interactions with law enforcement. Each of these killings serves as confirmation that concerns about those interactions are warranted. The problem isn’t just that Black ...
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Why companies were so quick to endorse Black Lives Matter
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Journalism, SOCIAL JUSTICE

Why companies were so quick to endorse Black Lives Matter

It’s not every day that you see companies switch gears on a dime. Not too long ago, few companies paid much attention to Black Lives Matter. Today, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, it seems as if most major companies including Apple, Amazon and Facebook have endorsed the movement – or at a minimum pledged millions of dollars to fight racism and vowed to do more to end discrimination in their workplaces. CC BY-ND So how did companies so swiftly decide to align with Black Lives Matter? As with anything, there usually are lots of reasons. But, as a scholar who studies the psychology of consumer behavior and how companies respond to it, I believe that one stands out: young people. A post-Floyd poll found that nearly 90% of members of Generation Z – those born from 1997 to 2005 – b...
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Black and Latino essential workers experience greater safety concerns than their white counterparts
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Journalism

Black and Latino essential workers experience greater safety concerns than their white counterparts

The big idea Black and Latino essential workers are more likely to feel stressed over job safety and security as well as family pressures than white workers, according to a recent survey of essential workers we conducted in Massachusetts, among them doctors, sanitation workers and grocery employees. Specifically, 70% of Black workers and 78% who are Latino reported that they didn’t feel safe on the job, compared with 58% of white people. This is not simply because Latino and Black workers were more likely to be in low-wage jobs. When we analyzed low-wage workers separately, Latino and Black people in this group were still far more likely to feel unsafe in the pandemic than their white counterparts. We found that access to benefits on the job is critical to maintaining personal and famil...
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African Americans have long defied white supremacy and celebrated Black culture in public spaces
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LIFESTYLE

African Americans have long defied white supremacy and celebrated Black culture in public spaces

From Richmond to New York City to Seattle, anti-racist activists are getting results as Confederate monuments are coming down by the dozens. In Richmond, Virginia, protesters have changed the story of Lee Circle, home to a 130-year-old monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. It’s now a new community space where graffiti, music and projected images turn the statue of Lee from a monument to white supremacy into a backdrop proclaiming that Black Lives Matter. This isn’t a new phenomenon. I’m a historian of celebrations and protests after the Civil War. And in my research, I have found that long before Confederate monuments occupied city squares, African Americans used those same public spaces to celebrate their history. But those African American memorial cultures have often been o...
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John Lewis and the masks Black preachers wear on the public stage
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Journalism

John Lewis and the masks Black preachers wear on the public stage

U.S. Congressman John Robert Lewis was a Black preacher, inescapably so. Like his spiritual mentor, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the long-standing congressman was an ordained Black Baptist minister. It meant that he not only knew how to parse legislative briefs but also ancient biblical texts and extrapolate wisdom from them to address social issues of great urgency. For Christians like Lewis, preaching, though not an end in itself, is a means by which God reminds a society of God’s concern for community wellness, life, human dignity and freedom in a less-than-perfect world. Preaching, in their understanding, tells the truth about suffering in the contexts of fear and death. Ultimately it declares that evil and despair have an appointed end. Because of this, as John Lewis said i...
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