Many a mailbox is clogged with fervent appeals for charitable donations. Often, these imploring letters and brochures feature heart-tugging images of black children in need. Newly published research suggests this strategy may be quite effective at getting people to open their wallets — so long as those deprived youngsters have yet to reach adolescence. “Charitable behavior toward African American children decreases — and negative stereotypical inferences increase — with the age of those children,” reports a research team led by Deborah Small of the University of ... Read More
Does Black History Need More Than a Month?
January 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Last February, Nike marked the annual celebration of all things African American with the limited release of four separate sets of sneakers. To quote from the company’s marketing copy describing the shoe: “The predominantly black upper of this Black History Month Air Force 1 is a nod to the past, because in the early days of the sport of basketball, shoes on the court were almost always black. The hints of gold all around the shoe are reminders of the golden moment we all are striving to achieve.” And here I thought the gold was a subtle reference to the mercenary nature of the slave ... Read More
Urban Renewal’s Record Shows It Wasn’t All Bad
January 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Tossed into the dustbin of history more than a generation ago, the concept of urban renewal, long derided as “Negro removal,” is getting a second look. The program began in 1950 and was scrapped in 1974, by then thoroughly discredited as unfair and unworkable. In the national war on blight, the poor were disproportionately targeted for eviction from dilapidated downtowns to make way for parks, office buildings, sports arenas, and high-rise apartments. But a new study for the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that urban renewal, or slum clearance, had some lasting positive ... Read More
Poor Neighborhoods Mean Fewer High School Grads
October 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
"There's a lot of talk about how we live in a post-racial society, but that certainly isn't true," says Geoffrey Wodtke, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies the effects of growing up in the bad part of town. He and two other researchers tracked 2,100 children from age 1 to age 17, and they report that children growing up in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty and unemployment are much less likely to graduate from high school. While the results may seem expected, much of the previous research in the field had taken only snapshot measurements of such "neighborhood ... Read More
Exploring Grays in a Black-and-White World
July 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Defining racial identity in the United States has always been a fraught enterprise, involving shifting intersections of law, custom, class, ancestry and choice. Physical appearance and money have mattered, but so have family history and community attitudes — and not always in the ways we might suspect. Two intriguing new books — Daniel J. Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White and Julie Winch’s The Clamorgans: One Family's History of Race in America — underline the fluidity of racial categories over nearly three ... Read More
Could More Interracial Marriages Cure Inequality?
June 12, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
True to its name, GOOD magazine happily reports that Americans of differing races are intermarrying more than ever and "that it's a clear indication that attitudes and behaviors are shifting with the times." In the middle of a colorful infographic on GOOD's website is an illustration of a black groom and white bride. Before we pat ourselves on the back for our open-mindedness about race, comparatively few blacks and whites rush hand in hand to the altar. Instead, it remains the least common type of interracial union. Asians, it turns out, are most open to marrying whites. Sociologist ... Read More
Middle School Music Lessons Enhance Algebra Skills
June 14, 2010 • By • 12 Comments
Algebra, according to the Great Schools website, “is frequently called the gatekeeper subject.” It provides a solid foundation for later learning by teaching abstract reasoning skills. What’s more, its lessons apply to an increasing number of jobs in our technologically sophisticated society. So how can you increase the chances your son or daughter will excel at algebra? A new study provides a surprising answer: Have them learn a musical instrument. Researcher Barbara Helmrich of Baltimore’s College of Notre Dame examined a sample of 6,026 ninth-graders enrolled in six Maryland ... Read More
The New York Times and a Mistaken Infant Mortality Trend
February 18, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
Anecdotes and stories have long been a dominant means of conveying information and establishing principles, especially moral and religious ones. In a science-oriented society that has entered the information age, the public appetite for empirical data about every aspect of life has emerged as a complementary and sometimes competing way of understanding the world and, particularly, governmental decisions. But if policy-relevant data are often widely available, the capacity to effectively analyze and fully comprehend that data is more limited. As presented in the news media, anecdotes and ... Read More
The Revolution Will Be Mapped
December 28, 2009 • By • 14 Comments
To get to the headquarters of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities, visitors have to navigate a lengthy dirt road past white picket fences, grazing horses and a variety of outbuildings in various stages of disrepair. Set in a one-room former Primitive Baptist church on a 43-acre spread in rural Orange County, N.C., the institute holds a collection of old, ergonomically incorrect wooden desks and metal filing cabinets. The only signs of modernity are computers atop the desks. Institute founders Allan Parnell and Ann Joyner, who live in a modest country house a stone's throw ... Read More
