Recent quotes:

Economic Mobility Is Better in Rural Than Urban Areas - Bloomberg

In Iowa and the Dakotas, rural areas afford much greater prospects for upward mobility compared to urban centers. But in Georgia and the Carolinas, rural areas offer much less opportunity for economic mobility than urban centers.

Air pollution and COVID-19 mortality in the United States: Strengths and limitations of an ecological regression analysis | Science Advances

We found that an increase of 1 μg/m3 in the long-term average PM2.5 is associated with a statistically significant 11% (95% CI, 6 to 17%) increase in the county’s COVID-19 mortality rate (see Table 1); this association continues to be stable as more data accumulate (fig. S3). We also found that population density, days since the first COVID-19 case was reported, median household income, percent of owner-occupied housing, percent of the adult population with less than high school education, age distribution, and percent of Black residents are important predictors of the COVID-19 mortality rate in the model.

African-American mothers rate boys higher for ADHD: Maternal race may impact racial differences in ADHD diagnosis more than child race, researchers report -- ScienceDaily

"Differences in ADHD symptom ratings were influenced almost entirely by maternal race."

The Parisian Label That Grapples with Race, Class, and Gentrification | Cody Delistraty

He calls the spirit of his brand “mixity,” and he has tapped into both a sense of bohemianism and basketball culture to gain the support of Nike and global celebrities like Rihanna and A$AP Rocky, while also attracting the praise of the established fashion elite, including Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, who has been mentoring the thirty-five-year-old designer. The result is a mass of super-fans who run across the fashion spectrum, from streetwear fanatics to high-fashion devotees.

British conductor sacked by US music festival after 'innocent' joke with his African-American friend was labelled racist

“A lot of our allies have become so eager to help the race and fix the scars they almost go too far,” said Mobley. “They think they are at the point where they understand racism more than those who have really encountered it in their lives and they make assumptions on our behalf about how we might feel, as if we don’t understand when something said to us or done to use is racist. “It’s well meaning, but the path to hell is paved with good intentions. “It also demeans and cheapens the very serious work done by civil rights activists and abolitionists to have the difficult nuances of racism and microaggressions taken seriously.”

Black moms die in childbirth 3 times as often as white moms. Except in North Carolina. - Vox

When a woman on Medicaid in North Carolina becomes pregnant, her doctor is incentivized (through Medicaid financial reimbursements) to screen for issues that might make her pregnancy high-risk, looking out for potential obstetric or psychosocial risks as early as possible, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or depression. If the patient is deemed to be high risk, she’s connected with a “pregnancy care manager,” who helps the mom understand and adhere to steps needed to reduce her health risks.

White skin an evolutionary adaption for low sunlight in north latitudes?

In the July 2000 issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, California Academy of Sciences anthropologists Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin wrote that because dark skin requires about five to six times more solar exposure than pale skin for equivalent vitamin D photosynthesis, and because the intensity of UVB radiation declines with increasing latitude, one could surmise that skin lightening was an evolutionary adaptation that allowed for optimal survival in low-UVR climes, assuming a traditional diet and outdoor lifestyle.

Wealth gap compounds

One powerful factor seems to be that whites are five times as likely as blacks to receive substantial gifts and inheritances, and the sums they get tend to be much larger. The money “can be used to jump-start further wealth accumulation, for example, by enabling white families to buy homes and begin acquiring equity earlier in their lives,” the study says. The result is that whites’ wealth advantage—and blacks’ disadvantage—gets passed down from generation to generation. Which means that forms of racial discrimination “that happened in the past, like redlining, continue to show up in bank accounts today,” says Traub.

Why Black Americans Stay Poor - Bloomberg View

a study exploring the idea that racial wealth inequality stems from life choices and personal achievement -- that is, that blacks would be as rich as whites if only they got good educations, formed stronger families, worked hard and saved money. Using data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the researchers found that, as of 2013, none of that seemed to matter: Whether they were college-educated, married with kids, employed full-time or prudent savers, black families’ net worth was invariably many times lower than that of white families with the same characteristics.

White supremacy is more than racism?

“With the exception of actual neo-Nazis and a few others, there isn't anyone in America who's trying to promote the idea that whites are inherently superior to blacks or Latinos,” he argued. “Conversely, there are loads of Americans who display signs of overt racism—or unconscious bias or racial insensitivity or resentment over loss of status—in varying degrees. This isn't just pedantic. It matters. It's bad enough that liberals toss around charges of racism with more abandon than we should, but it's far worse if we start calling every sign of racial animus—big or small, accidental or deliberate—white supremacy. I can hardly imagine a better way of proving to the non-liberal community that we're all a bunch of out-of-touch nutbars who are going to label everyone and everything we don't like as racist.”

Why does sugar in cornbread divide races in the South? | The Charlotte Observer

So many Southern food traditions are shared by both races. Most Southerners, black and white, revere fried chicken, pursue pork barbecue and exalt their grandmothers’ garden vegetables. So why is there such a fundamental difference between two styles of one basic bread? Culinary historians have debated this one for years: Did the descendants of slave cooks who were exposed to British baking styles come to value cornbread that was lighter and softer? Did the children of farm-based white Southerners get used to unsweetened cornbread that tasted more emphatically like corn? Whatever caused it, the line is drawn.

The ugly rotten roots of the war on drugs..

I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

What we really learn from James Meredith: Now you've gotten in the door, give thanks and shut up?

In Tablet, James Kirchick wrote, ‘‘When I hear, in 2015, students complain about feeling ‘marginalized’ at Yale due to their racial, ethnic, religious, sexual or any other identity ... I can’t help but think of James Meredith.’’ […]To listen to James Meredith is a different thing entirely. ‘‘Ole Miss kicked my butt, and they’re still celebrating,’’ he said in an interview with Esquire in 2012. ‘‘Because every black that’s gone there since me has been insulted, humiliated, and they can’t even tell their story. Everybody has to tell James Meredith’s story — which is a lie. The powers that be in Mississippi understand this very clearly.’’ He continued, ‘‘They’re gonna keep on doin’ it because it makes it impossible for the blacks there now to say anything about what’s happened to them.’’

The blank blackness of Ferguson

According to a recent analysis by the Times of American communities with at least ten thousand black residents, the city with the largest proportion of black men who are “missing”—in jail or prematurely dead—is Ferguson. Foster said, “There’s no real design for a middle class, or even a lower-middle class, in this area.”

The Man Who Shot Michael Brown - The New Yorker

From 2012 to 2014, the Ferguson police issued four or more tickets to blacks on seventy-three occasions, and to whites only twice. Black drivers were more than twice as likely as others to be searched during vehicle stops, even though they were found to possess contraband twenty-six per cent less often. Some charges, like “manner of walking in roadway,” were brought against blacks almost exclusively.

The economics of poor policing in poor towns

There are almost fifty municipalities in North County. The officers in some of the towns are not just fighting crime; they also issue countless traffic tickets and ordinance-violation citations. The local governments often rely on the fines generated by tickets and violations to balance their budgets. (In 2013, the town of Edmundson, which comprises less than a square mile, issued nearly five thousand traffic tickets.) Police officers, meanwhile, can be paid as little as ten dollars an hour, according to Kevin Ahlbrand, the president of the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police. Ahlbrand says that the low pay can create “unprofessional police officers,” adding, “You get what you pay for.”

Black as the ink blot

Racism is the fact that “White” means “normal” and that anything else is different. Racism is our acceptance of an all white Lord of the Rings cast because of “historical accuracy,” ignoring the fact that this is a world with an entirely fictionalized history. Even when we make shit up, we want it to be white. And racism is the fact that we all accept that it is white. Benedict Cumberbatch playing Khan in Star Trek. Khan, who is from India. Is there anyone Whiter than Benedict fucking Cumberbatch? What? They needed a “less racial” cast because they already had the Black Uhura character?

Clarence Thomas on cross burning's noxious odor

Thomas wrote in dissent that the O’Connor majority erred in finding that cross-burning could have any legitimate expressive value deserving of First Amendment protection. “In our culture,” he wrote, “cross-burning has almost invariably meant lawlessness and understandably instills in its victims well-grounded fear of physical violence.” He added: “A conclusion that the [Virginia] statute prohibiting cross-burning with intent to intimidate sweeps beyond a prohibition on certain conduct into the zone of expression overlooks not only the words of the statute but also reality.”

Impact of housing vouchers

After the Los Angeles riots in 1992 the federal government tried to copy this scheme in other cities. Until recently, the results were considered disappointing. Those who moved out of public housing in crime-ridden places showed lower rates of diabetes than those who remained, and mothers who moved showed an increase in happiness similar to the effects of Prozac, an antidepressant. However, children did no better after moving and their mothers did not get better jobs. In a paper published this month, however, Raj Chetty and colleagues at Harvard re-examined the numbers and found that the children who moved earned considerably more in their 20s. This was true only of children who moved before their 13th birthday: older children saw no benefit later on. More recently, Baltimore lost a public-housing case similar to the one in Chicago and, in 2005, provided vouchers for 7,000 families to move to other parts of Maryland. They are still there, and three-quarters of their children are attending much better schools, says Stefanie Deluca of Johns Hopkins. Yet since giving a golden ticket to every poor black family would cost about $30 billion a year, those stuck in highly segregated places will have to save in order to get out.

Housing segregation in US

Baltimore was the first city to formalise residential segregation by race, but others soon followed. In 1942, with black GIs preparing to go to war, 84% of white Americans told pollsters that “there should be separate sections in towns for Negroes.” De jure racial segregation is now a thing of the past, and de facto segregation has declined since 1970. But it has not done so evenly: on a scale where 0 means blacks are evenly distributed and 100 means they live completely separately, Milwaukee scores 82, New York 78 and Chicago 76. Anything above 60 is high.

Was Dianne White Clatto first!?!

Establishing whether Ms. Clatto was actually the nation’s first full-time black weathercaster is problematic. “I have checked with numerous sources, and they all agree: She was the first black female weathercaster on television in the United States,” said Bob Butler, a reporter with KCBS Radio in San Francisco and the president of the National Association of Black Journalists. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story An article in the Sept. 4, 1963, issue of Variety headlined “St. Louis’s KSD-TV Sepia Weather Gal” said she would be “the first of her race to be booked as regular on-the-air talent in some years at a local commercial TV station here.” Jet magazine unequivocally credits Trudy Haynes, a New York native, as the nation’s first black weathercaster and television reporter. She joined WXYZ in Detroit in September 1963. But Ms. Haynes said in an interview that if Ms. Clatto began in 1962, then she would have indeed been the first. The reference guide “Contemporary Black Biography” describes June Bacon-Bercey as the first black female television meteorologist in the country, in Buffalo in 1970. (That was the same year that John Amos began playing Gordy Howard, the black weatherman on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”) “Weather on the Air: A History of Broadcast Meteorology,” by Robert Henson, says only that Steve Baskerville became the first black weathercaster on network television, for the “CBS Morning News,” in 1984. And in 1996, Mr. Roker began working as the regular weekday weather anchor on the “Today” show. Ms. Clatto was unquestionably a hometown pioneer who, she told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “felt the weight of the world on my shoulders” as a role model during her early years of broadcasting.

Income chasm in Minnesota

Since the 1970s, the city’s minority population has swelled, and segregation has worsened, particularly in its schools. About 62 percent of black students attend high-poverty schools, compared with 10 percent of white students. Beyond Minneapolis, the state of Minnesota has one of the largest gaps in black-white student achievement. Recently, WalletHub analyzed the black-white gap in census indicators such as household income, homeownership and educational attainment. It ranked Minnesota as the worst state for financial inequality.

North Carolina's racist roots

If you were driving through North Carolina in the mid-1960s, chances are you’d see this billboard:“You are in the heart of Klan country. Welcome to North Carolina. Join the United Klans of America, Inc. Help fight integration and communism!”

Evidence for rising intolerance in France

Nearly 7,000 French Jews moved to Israel this year, more than double the figure from the previous year.

Unpublished by Life Magazine, Gordon Parks Photos Document Segregation

In 1950, Gordon Parks was the only African-American photographer working for Life magazine, a rising star who was gaining the power to call his own shots, and he proposed a cover story both highly political and deeply personal: to return to Fort Scott, Kan., the prairie town where he had grown up, to find his 11 classmates in a segregated middle school.[…]For reasons that remain unclear, Life never published those words or the powerful pictures Parks took of nine of his classmates

What's a Center for Civil Rights for?

But UNC board member Steven Long took issue with what he said was a lack of diverse points of view at the center. […]“I’ve read your materials,” said Long, who was on the board of the conservative Civitas Institute, according to a 2013 news release. “There is no diversity of opinion in that center.”Shaw responded: “We are unapologetically representing clients in cases ... We’re civil rights advocates. We have a point of view.”Boger pointed out that the law school’s Banking Institute was created to support the banking industry in North Carolina. “We don’t ask that center to consider socialism as an alternative or to talk about the dissolution of large banks,” he said. Boger also pointed out that public health professors advocate against sugary drinks in the fight against obesity.