Race and Ethnicity

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares83 Views

    City of Miami Racially Gerrymandered Voting Districts, Judge Finds

    by

    The federal judge threw out the city’s voting map, rejecting the rationale that city commissioners have used for more than 20 years.The City of Miami unconstitutionally gerrymandered voting districts by race and ethnicity, a federal judge found on Wednesday, throwing out the city’s voting map and rejecting the way city commissioners have tried to hold on to power for more than two decades.Judge K. Michael Moore of the Federal District Court in Miami wrote that commissioners had used redistricting rationale since 1997 to draw five districts with the explicit intent of having voters elect three Hispanic commissioners, one Black commissioner and one non-Hispanic white commissioner.“Sorting voters on the basis of race, as the city did here, deprives Miamians of the constitutional promise that they receive equal protection under the law,” Judge Moore wrote. “These are the serious harms that the city perpetuated, and Miamians suffered. Today, the court permanently prevents the city from racial gerrymandering any longer.”The ruling comes as scandal has roiled City Hall.Mayor Francis X. Suarez, who briefly sought the Republican presidential nomination, has been dogged by controversies over undisclosed work for clients outside City Hall. Last year, a jury held Commissioner Joe Carollo liable for more than $63 million in damages for siccing inspectors on two businessmen as political retribution.A former commissioner, Alex Díaz de la Portilla, faces bribery and money laundering charges in a case involving a city land deal. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Another former commissioner, Sabina Covo, has been under investigation for bribery. (She has denied wrongdoing.) The city attorney, Victoria Méndez, has been accused in a lawsuit of being involved in a house-flipping scheme with her husband. (She has denied involvement or wrongdoing.)As a result of Judge Moore’s ruling, the city could be forced to hold a special election or to draw a new voting map. The next municipal elections are supposed to take place in November 2025. Commissioners, who are nonpartisan, serve staggered four-year terms.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares152 Views

      in Elections

      U.S. Officials Order Better Tracking of a Political Flashpoint: America’s Diversity

      by

      New survey questions in federal forms will draw a more detailed portrait of racial and ethnic origins. Officials point to the benefits, but the changes could face a conservative backlash.The Biden administration ordered changes to a range of federal surveys on Thursday to gather more detailed information about the nation’s ethnic and racial makeup.The changes — the first in decades to standard questions that the government asks about race and ethnicity — would produce by far the most detailed portrait of the nation’s ancestral palette ever compiled. And a new option will be available for the first time allowing respondents to identify as part of a new category, Middle Eastern or North African ancestry.But the changes also have the potential to rankle conservatives who believe that the nation’s focus on diversity has already gone too far.An American Puzzle: Fitting Race in a BoxCensus categories for race and ethnicity have shaped how the nation sees itself. Here’s how they have changed over the last 230 years.The revisions, released after 21 months of study and public comment, apply not just to the Census Bureau, but across the government, to forms as varied as the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Health Interview Survey and applications for Social Security cards. They take effect this month, but federal agencies will be allowed years to fully implement them.Current surveys contain a separate option for people of ethnic Hispanic and Latino descent to claim that identity, followed by another question that offers multiple options for respondents to choose one or more races.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares106 Views

      in Elections

      Shani Mott, Black Studies Scholar Who Examined Power All Around Her, Dies at 47

      by

      Her work looked at how race and power are experienced in America. In 2022, she filed a lawsuit saying that the appraisal of her home was undervalued because of bias.Shani Mott, a scholar of Black studies at Johns Hopkins University whose examinations of race and power in America extended beyond the classroom to her employer, her city and even her own home, has died in Baltimore. She was 47.She died of adrenal cancer on March 12, said her husband, Nathan Connolly, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins.Though Dr. Mott spent her career in some of academia’s elite spaces, she was firmly committed to the idea that scholarship should be grounded and tangible, not succumbing to ivory tower abstraction. She encouraged students to turn a critical eye to their own backgrounds and to the realities of the world around them. In a city like Baltimore, with its complicated and often cruel racial history, there was plenty to scrutinize.“How do we think about what we’re doing and how it relates to a city like Baltimore?” is how Minkah Makalani, the director of the university’s Center for Africana Studies, described some of the questions that drove Dr. Mott’s work. “There was this kind of demanding intellectual curiosity that she had that she brought to everything that really pushed the conversation and required that people think about what we’re doing in more tangible ways.”Her research focused on American books both popular and literary, and how they revealed the kind of conversation about race that was allowed by the publishing industry and other cultural gatekeepers. This work connected to a larger theme of her scholarship: how big institutions determine how race is discussed and experienced in America.As an active member of the Johns Hopkins faculty, she pointedly explored the ways the university engaged, or did not engage, with its own workers and the majority Black city in which it sits. In 2018 and 2019, Dr. Mott was a principal investigator for the Housing Our Story project, which interviewed Black staff workers at Johns Hopkins whose voices had not been included in the campus archives. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      What Really Causes Poor Performance in School

      by

      More from our inbox:Becoming a Republican to Vote Against TrumpCountering Propaganda From the Fossil Fuel Industry Wayne Miller/MagnumTo the Editor:Re “We’re Not Battling the School Issues That Matter,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, March 7):I completely agree with Mr. Kristof’s column. The situation is serious, not only for education but also for our embattled democracy.I would like to add some nuance. I have been working on a state-by-state analysis of the possible influence of racism, specifically anti-Black racism, on educational achievement.What I have found so far indicates that some children are taught quite well: those in private schools, of course; Asian American children (particularly those whose families are from India); white children of families prosperous enough to be ineligible for the National School Lunch Program; children of college-educated parents; and Hispanic children who are not English-language learners.Some students are in groups that are not likely to be taught to read effectively: Native Americans, children who are poor enough to be eligible for the National School Lunch Program and Black children.None of this will be news to Mr. Kristof. What is surprising to me is the sheer extent and arbitrary nature of the failure by school authorities. Almost everywhere that urban schools, in particular, are failing, socioeconomically similar children are being taught much more effectively in the nearest suburban districts.Part of the reason is money: Per-student expenditure is associated with educational achievement.But part of the problem — most of it — is a matter of administrative decisions: placing the best teachers in schools with the “best” students; equipping schools, in effect, in accordance with parental income; offering more gifted and talented classes to white students — all the perhaps unconscious manifestations of everyday racism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      The Obstacles to Buying Your First Home

      by

      The rate of homeownership continues to lag among Black, Latino, Asian American and Native American people, compared with America’s white population.This article is also a weekly newsletter. Sign up for Race/Related here.Every year, the Real Estate section of The New York Times tackles the subject of first-time home buying with all of the disappointments and joys that are associated with finally owning a house.For many Americans, a house is the biggest investment they will ever make. Their home is their biggest asset, paving the path to financial stability and even to generational wealth. But the rate of homeownership continues to lag among Black, Latino, Asian American and Native American people, compared with the country’s white population.As we developed stories that included buying your childhood home and buying while single, we were conscious of the imbalance of homeownership in the United States. In the past, the Real Estate desk has explored racial bias in home appraisals and the discrimination Black real estate agents face.For these most recent stories, Colette Coleman, a freelance reporter who contributes to The New York Times, found an optimistic trend in Latino homeownership. Speaking to the Urban Institute, a think tank, she learned that the homeownership rate among Hispanics increased more than any other demographic group between 2019 and 2022. The think tank estimated that an overwhelming majority of net new homeowners in the next 20 years will be Hispanic.Looking at the current market, Colette dug into a trend among Hispanic households: co-borrowing to afford a mortgage and pooling together resources to pay the mortgage. She talked to Danae Vega, who bought a home with her sister Ashley a year ago in San Bernardino County, Calif. Their whole family, including another sister, three brothers and their parents pitched in.In Las Vegas, Alexandra García and her father, Rosalio, bought a house for their family together, qualifying for a loan after she added her father, who is an auto mechanic, to her credit cards so that he could have an established credit history, they told Colette.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Racial Profiling in Japan Is Prevalent but Unseen, Some Residents Say

      by

      Experts say the country’s first lawsuit about police discrimination against foreign-born residents highlights a systematic problem.It’s not that there is anything bad about your hair, the police officer politely explained to the young Black man as commuters streamed past in Tokyo Station. It’s just that, based on his experience, people with dreadlocks were more likely to possess drugs.Alonzo Omotegawa’s video of his 2021 stop and search led to debates about racial profiling in Japan and an internal review by the police. For him, though, it was part of a perennial problem that began when he was first questioned as a 13-year-old.“In their mind, they’re just doing their job,” said Mr. Omotegawa, 28, an English teacher who is half-Japanese and half-Bahamian, born and raised in Japan.“I’m like as Japanese as it comes, just a bit tan,” he added. “Not every Black person is going to have drugs.”Racial profiling is emerging as a flashpoint in Japan as increasing numbers of migrant workers, foreign residents and mixed-race Japanese change the country’s traditionally homogenous society and test deep-seated suspicion toward outsiders.With one of the world’s oldest populations and a stubbornly low birthrate, Japan has been forced to rethink its restrictive immigration policies. And as record numbers of migrant workers arrive in the country, many of the people tidying up hotel rooms, working the register at convenience stores or flipping burgers are from places like Vietnam, Indonesia or Sri Lanka.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Why the N.Y. Fire Dept. Canceled Its Black History Month Celebration

      by

      A documentary screening about the city’s first Black fire commissioner was scrapped after his family objected to the film’s exclusion of a Black firefighter group.When the Fire Department sought to commemorate Black History Month this year, a worthy honoree seemed obvious: Robert O. Lowery, New York City’s first Black fire commissioner, who was appointed nearly six decades ago by Mayor John V. Lindsay.A documentary on Mr. Lowery’s life was to premiere Tuesday as the focal point of the department’s celebration of Black History Month, which ends this week. But the event was abruptly canceled after Mr. Lowery’s family protested the film’s failure to more fully include the Vulcan Society, the influential Black firefighters’ association.“My father would not have been fire commissioner without the Vulcan Society,” said Gertrude Erwin, Mr. Lowery’s daughter.The cancellation of the screening of “The First: Fire Commissioner Robert O. Lowery’s Story,” represents an awkward turn of events for an agency that is still struggling to overcome decades of racism and homogeneity in its ranks. All but one of its 23 staff chiefs are white men, while about 10 percent of firefighters are Black in a city whose population is about 23 percent Black.The department first approached Mr. Lowery’s daughters about making the documentary roughly two decades after his death, at a ceremony last year renaming its auditorium in his memory. The family was receptive, provided the department met certain conditions.“We made very clear from the outset that the Vulcan Society was a core element in telling my uncle’s story and that it was an expectation that the Vulcan Society would have some role in the film,” said Chris Lowery, the fire commissioner’s nephew. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Justice Thomas Hires Law Clerk Accused of Sending Racist Text Messages

      by

      Crystal Clanton, who is close with the Thomas family, has said she does not remember sending the messages, which emerged in 2017.Justice Clarence Thomas recently hired a law clerk who was previously accused of sending racist text messages, resurfacing the controversy around her.Crystal Clanton will begin clerking for the justice in the upcoming term, according to the Antonin Scalia Law School, from which she graduated in 2022.In late 2017, a New Yorker story reported that Ms. Clanton, who had served for five years as the national field director at Turning Point USA, a conservative student group, had sent the text messages, including the statement “i hate black people,” to another employee. The New York Times has not seen the messages.Ms. Clanton, who had resigned from the group by the time the article came out, told The New Yorker at the time that she had no recollection of the messages and that “they do not reflect what I believe or who I am and the same was true when I was a teenager.” (Ms. Clanton would have been 20 years old when the messages were sent.) She did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday.In the years since, Ms. Clanton has maintained a close relationship with Justice Thomas and his wife, Virginia Thomas. Ms. Thomas once served on the advisory board of Turning Point USA, and subsequently hired Ms. Clanton. The justice has called the allegations against Ms. Clanton unfounded and said that he does not believe her to be racist.Justice Thomas did not respond to a request for comment.The Thomases have welcomed Ms. Clanton into their inner circle. Photos from the Thomases’ 2022 holiday newsletter show that she joined the couple for Thanksgiving dinner. The Thomases also celebrated her graduation from Scalia Law.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More