Salon.com > African American

Jason Collins: Black — and gay — like me

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’d never heard of Jason Collins when I saw a friend's Facebook status earlier today announcing the news that he was gay. (I prefer college basketball over the NBA.) As I googled his name to find out more, one thought kept running through my mind: "Please be black."

I wanted Jason Collins to be black, because I knew what it would mean to black gay youth in this country. I wanted him to be black because I’m hyper-aware that the list of influential LGBT celebrities like Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper and Neil Patrick Harris is very white. Most important, I wanted Jason Collins to be black because I know exactly what it's like to be a gay teenager with dark brown skin who comes out but cannot find anyone gay who looks like you on television. Or in magazines. Or on the news. These days, when I lecture about LGBT issues on college campuses and various other events, people often tell me I’m the only black person they’ve ever seen speak out for gay rights. The pride I feel is mixed with uneasiness because I wish that weren't the case.

Census reveals historic black voter turnout

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:01:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) — America's blacks voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time, reflecting a deeply polarized presidential election in which blacks strongly supported Barack Obama while many whites stayed home.

Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press.

Census data and exit polling show that whites and blacks will remain the two largest racial groups of eligible voters for the next decade. Last year's heavy black turnout came despite concerns about the effect of new voter-identification laws on minority voting, outweighed by the desire to re-elect the first black president.

William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, analyzed the 2012 elections for the AP using census data on eligible voters and turnout, along with November's exit polling. He estimated total votes for Obama and Romney under a scenario where 2012 turnout rates for all racial groups matched those in 2004. Overall, 2012 voter turnout was roughly 58 percent, down from 62 percent in 2008 and 60 percent in 2004.

Steve Harvey says Hollywood is more racist than America

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:45:00 +0000

Comedian Steve Harvey is one of the most successful daytime talk show hosts of today. He's also a best-selling author, host of a radio show with 6 million listeners, and is now reviving the ailing game show "Family Feud." In a profile in the March 29 issue of the Hollywood Reporter, Harvey reveals that he has done all of this despite knowing that "Hollywood is still very racist."

THR explains:

"That Harvey could dramatically turn the fortunes of 'Feud' and succeed in daytime where failure is the default -- and the fact that the average African-American spends close to 47 hours a week watching live TV, more than the U.S. average (34 hours), Hispanics (28 hours) and Asians (21 hours), according to Nielsen -- has spurred industry players to say they are on the hunt for 'someone like Steve Harvey' to front their latest programming pitch. Or, in other, less coded words, 'We need a black host.' "

But, "To say Steve Harvey is succeeding because he's black is just racist," says "Family Feud" distributor Debmar-Mercury co-president Ira Bernstein. "He's an extraordinary talent. 'Feud' is not successful because Steve Harvey is black.' "

“Negro” to be dropped from census surveys

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:17:00 +0000

The news that the term "negro" has remained on census surveys up until now seems even bigger than the news that the Census Bureau is dropping it. But, as recently as the 2010 census, "negro" appeared as one of five options for respondents to identify their ethnicity.

"Instead of the term that came into use during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, census forms will use the more modern labels 'black' or 'African-American'," reported the AP. The terms "black" and "African-American" were already present on recent census surveys, but "negro" was included too, reportedly for the benefit of "a small segment, mostly older blacks living in the South, [who] still identified with the term," noted the AP.

“The intent of every word on the race and ethnicity questions is to be as inclusive as possible so that all of us could see a word here that rings a bell for us,” Robert Groves, then-Census Bureau director, told journalists in 2010. In the most recent surveys (2010), information provided to the AP indicated that 36,000 people chose to identify as "negro." However, the term's inclusion also drew a significant number of complaints.

Pick of the week: An impressive all-black crime drama

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

It’s tempting – and perhaps not wholly inaccurate -- to consider “LUV,” the impressive new feature from young African-American director Sheldon Candis, in demographic or sociological terms. Many scholars and commentators, both black and otherwise, have discussed the relative absence of fathers and positive male role models within the African-American community, and “LUV” depicts that problem in its most toxic and ruthless form. (These days, you can no longer say this issue is limited to the black community, if you ever could.) Candis spins an archetypal fable about a wide-eyed 11-year-old kid (Michael Rainey Jr.) who spends one disastrous day with his charismatic Uncle Vincent (the Chicago rapper Common) absorbing a full dose of seductive and destructive lessons on how to be a man in inner-city Baltimore.

Can the black middle class survive?

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 14:00:00 +0000

On the night of Barack Obama’s election, I was reporting in the crowd of Chicago’s Grant Park, and like many Americans felt hopeful that our country was finally ready to deal with the vexing matters of race. Obama’s election was an incalculable accomplishment, and the arrival of a middle-class black family in the White House seemed to tell the world that the American Dream is alive, that our country’s establishment has successfully absorbed a people it once enslaved, and unapologetically marginalized.

And yet, when the Obamas moved into the White House, the country’s economy was already in free fall, and its fragile black middle class was, to put it simply, vanishing. Between 2005 and 2009, the year the Great Recession officially ended, the average black household’s wealth fell by more than half, to $5,677, even as their white peers held about $113,000 in assets. Nearly one-quarter of African-Americans have no assets besides a car, and roughly the same share have lost their homes, or they’re close. The African-American unemployment rate hovers around 14 percent, and according to a Pew report released in July, nearly 70 percent of blacks raised in families at the middle of the wealth ladder fall to the bottom two rungs as adults. The exodus of blacks from cities like Washington, Atlanta, New Orleans and even Detroit is driving a sense of eroding political power. Perhaps most depressingly, one in three black boys can expect to be incarcerated at some point in his life.

Politicizing black hair

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Full Disclosure: I’ve been natural for nearly 12 years. Many years ago, when I was working on a big real estate project as an entry level project manager, a fellow black woman admonished me for wearing a colorful headscarf. At the time, I wore my hair in double strand twists that I would do myself, a tedious,painstaking project that would warrant me wearing a headscarf for a day or two because until I completed it. She told me that she ‘didin’t want people to get the wrong idea about the project.’ Her hair, by contrast, was chemically straightened, permed in the natural parlance of black hair styles. She occassionaly wore hair pieces as well.

Context here is king: we were black women in a predominantly white male environment represented a contrasting view of black female identity. And hair, is a trait of that identity. I naively assumed that at the dawn of the 21st century, my hair was not relevant fact in convincing loan officers to invest in a real estate transaction.