Tagged: societal racism

Lauryn Hill — “BLACK RAGE” (sketch)

blackragelyrics

Lauryn released a more sped up version of “Black Rage” around the time she went on the road with Nas in the fall of 2012, but late Wednesday night, she released a more stripped down “sketch” of the song, in response to the social unrest that’s occurring in Missouri (and throughout the world). I love this version so much more!!

 

“I’m Sorry Son…” by Andy Marlette

imsorryson

Do you think white racism is becoming more explicit as the racial make up of America begins to shift and whites are expected to become the minority by 2050?

read Zbigniew Brzezinski’s (aide to Obama) March 17, 1978 Memorandum re: “Black Africa and the U.S. Black Movement.”

ZbigniewBrzezinskiandregan

Click here to read his racist report so you can understand why the black community has struggled to produce another leader of the caliber of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X, since making many civil rights gains during the 1960s and 1970s: http://www.finalcall.com/memorandum-46.htm.

I used this picture because Brezezinski wrote the memorandum while serving as the US National Security Advisor to Democratic President Jimmy Carter and two years later,  he (man on the far left) would go on to work under Republican President Ronald Reagan — a former Hollywood actor who as President, would help the Republican party usher in a more conservative form of politics that was  (and still is) anti-black and extremely hostile to civil rights. Clearly, he has power and I’m sure Brezezinski’s strategies were extremely influential in helping Reagan (as well as other Presidents) and the U.S. government achieve that racist shift that still dominates America’s conscience today.

Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington

While doing more research on Brzezinski, I saw a recent article which reported that he has condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza and that his “strong criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza indicates a ‘fundamental change in policy’ by the US government and is a ‘clear message’ to Israel.” Kinda shocking that he would lend his support to the Palestinians given his stance on Black Africa and African Americans in the U.S…

For more information, click here: http://www.albawaba.com/news/advisor-obama-administration-condemns-israels-actions-592985.

Google and Twitter release its first “Diversity Report[s].” Both companies state African Americans represent a MEASLY 2% of their respective work forces!

Lack of Diversity at Twitter [July 23, 2014]:

Twitter disclosed the diversity numbers for its global and U.S. employees Wednesday, following in the footsteps of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and LinkedIn.

Like these companies, Twitter is composed of a workforce that’s primarily white and male, especially when it comes to tech-related positions.

At Twitter, 70% of employees are male and 30% are female. When you look at the numbers for tech-related jobs, that ratio switches from 90% male employees to 10% female workers. The statistics are split straight down the middle in terms of gender for non tech jobs, and male employees account for 79% of leadership positions within the company.

The majority of Twitter’s employees are white as well. At Twitter, 59% of U.S. employees are white, while 29% are Asian, 2% or African American or Black, and 3% are Hispanic. And 72% of leadership roles are occupied by white employees.

While these numbers are troubling, Twitter isn’t the only company with a diversity problem. Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Google all reported similar statistics earlier this year.

Similar to these companies, Twitter admits that it has a lot of work to do in the diversity department. As part of its initiative to improve diversity in Silicon Valley, Twitter says that it supports Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping women get into computer engineering. The social media giant also mentions that it regularly hosts Girl Geek Dinners in San Fransisco and Boston.

Lack of Diversity at Google [May 29, 2014]:

The lack of diversity among Google’s workforce has been highlighted by the company’s first diversity report, which reveals that only 30% of its staff are female.

The search company’s US workforce also comprises 61% white people, with Asian staff making up 30%, Hispanic people 3% and black staff just 2% of employees.

The data highlights the lack of representation of women and ethnic groups in technology companies, despite a much more diverse customer base for mainstream technology products and services.

“Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it’s hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts,” acknowledged Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, in a blog post

Google has released this, the first of its diversity reports, because the company believes that an open dialogue about diversity issues is the only way to solve them, something others like Nunno agree is the right course.

Google believes that tackling diversity in computer science education is the way forward, and has donated over $40m (£24m) to organisations aiming to help increase the number of women and girls in science education.

The company is not alone in its efforts to aid science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) diversity in education. Many groups from both the UK and globally have been set up to actively encourage girls into Stem education, while the government has worked to remove barriers to women in science.

The problems facing both gender and ethnic diversity in technology are not insurmountable, but no one organisation can do it alone, according to Nunno, which makes Google’s release of its data a good step forward in tackling the issues as an industry.

We ONLY account for 2% of their work forces?!? I am quite sure that most of those individuals fill the lower-status, lower-paying positions (e.g. support staff, mailroom) like at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment.

What’s crazy is that this is the first time they are releasing diversity reports, although I thought all businesses had to submit this type of data to the EEOC each year. Hmmm…it is clearly industries like this that the EEOC’s Systemic Initiative needs to focus on. If there wasn’t a demand from the public for various companies in Silicon Valley to start releasing information on its workplace demographics, this problem would continue to go unnoticed. Yet, companies like William Morris Endeavor Entertainment and other businesses in Hollywood, as well as other industries like advertising and Wall Street, can continue to maintain their discriminatory employment practices, policies  and procedures without any repercussions or intervention from our government.

At the macro level, how does this impact African American unemployment and why isn’t this REALITY — discrimination occurring in the present — being discussed by the media or our nation’s “first black” President as the cause for why our unemployment numbers in this country have historically remained double that of whites? If Google can acknowledge its wrongs (at least with regards to its lack of gender diversity), why can’t William Morris do the same? They don’t, because after 116 years of spreading racism throughout the world, they have no desire to change. Smdh.

Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-massive-diversity-problem-two-210742686.html [Twitter] and http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/29/google-diversity-women-black-people [Google].

 

 

15 FACTS which “prove” that AmeriKKKa has NEVER gotten “over racism” and that “post-racial liberalism,” as advocated by President Obama, is NOT the solution to eradicating global white supremacy (racism).

On July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, officially banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It also ended racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and in general public facilities. Fifty years removed from that milestone, it’s apparently easy to think that we’re over racism. Here are 15 facts that prove that’s not the case.

1) Affluent blacks and Hispanics still live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with working class incomes.

An analysis of census data conducted by researchers at Brown University found that income isn’t the main driving factor in the segregation of U.S. cities. “With only one exception (the most affluent Asians), minorities at every income level live in poorer neighborhoods than do whites with comparable incomes,” the researchers found.

2) There’s a big disparity in wealth between white Americans and non-white Americans.

White Americans held more than 88 percent of the country’s wealth in 2010, according to a Demos analysis of Federal Reserve data, though they made up 64 percent of the population. Black Americans held 2.7 percent of the country’s wealth, though they made up 13 percent of the population.

3) The racial wealth gap kept widening well after the Civil Rights era.

It nearly tripled between 1984 and 2009, according to a Brandeis study.

4) The Great Recession didn’t hit everyone equally.

Between 2007 and 2010, Hispanic families’ wealth fell by 44 percent, and black families’ by 31 percent, compared to 11 percent for white families.

5) In the years before the financial crisis, people of color were much more likely to be targeted for subprime loans than their white counterparts, even when they had similar credit scores.

The Center For Responsible Lending came to that conclusion after analyzing government-provided mortgage data for the year 2004, supplemented with information from a propriety subprime loan database.

“For many types of loans, borrowers of color in our database were more than 30 percent more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than white borrowers, even after accounting for differences in risk,” the authors of the report wrote.

6) Minority borrowers are still more likely to get turned down for conventional mortgage loans than white people with similar credit scores.

An Urban Insititute data analysis found that mortgage denial rates from government-sponsored servicers are higher for black applicants with bad credit than for white applicants with bad credit:

7) Black and Latino students are more likely to attend poorly funded schools.

“A 10 percentage-point increase in the share of nonwhite students in a school is associated with a $75 decrease in per student spending,” a 2012 analysis of Department Education data by the Center For American Progress found.

8) School segregation is still widespread.

80 percent of Latino students attend segregated schools and 43 percent attend intensely segregated schools — ones with only up to 10 percent of white students. 74 percent of black students attend segregated schools, and 38 percent attend intensely segregated schools.

9) As early as preschool, black students are punished more frequently, and more harshly, for misbehaving than their white counterparts.

“Black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment, but 42 percent of the preschool children suspended once, and 48 percent of the preschool children suspended more than once,” a Department of Education report, released in March, noted.

10) Perceptions of the innocence of children are still often racially skewed.

A study published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that participants estimated black boys to be older and less innocent than white boys of the same age.

When participants were told that the boys, both black and white, were suspected of crimes, the disparity in perceptions of age and innocence became more stark:

Separate research by Stanford psychologists suggests that these kinds of racialized perceptions of innocence contribute to non-white juvenile offenders receiving harsher sentences than their white peers.

11) White Americans use drugs more than black Americans, but black people are arrested for drug possession more than three times as often as whites.

This contributes to the fact that 1 in 3 black males born today can expect to go to prison in their lifetimes, based on current incarceration trends.

12) Black men receive prison sentences 19.5 percent longer than those of white men who committed similar crimes, a 2013 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found.

13) A clean record doesn’t protect young black men from discrimination when they’re looking for work.

Young white men with felony convictions are more likely to get called back after a job interview than young black men with similar qualifications and clean records,a 2003 study published in the American Journal of Sociology found.

14) Black job seekers are often turned away by U.S. companies on the assumption that they do drugs.

The presence of drug testing may actually help to correct this and increase black job seekers’ chances, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study released in May.

15) Employers are more likely to turn away job seekers if they have African-American-sounding names.

Applicants with white-sounding names get one callback per 10 resumes sent while those with African-American-sounding names get one callback per 15 resumes, according to a 2003 National Bureau of Economic Research report. “Based on our estimates,” the researchers wrote, “a White name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience.”

Check out the link to see the graphs that accompanied this article.  This list is definitely not exhaustive, but it clearly demonstrates that much “progress” hasn’t actually been made, although from the outside looking in, it appears that way. Until we acknowledge and address the role institutionalized forms of racism play in maintaining these various race-based disparities, our nation will never achieve the intended goals of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/02/civil-rights-act-anniversary-racism-charts_n_5521104.html?&ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000051. 

“In 2013, more than half (55.9 percent) of employed black recent college graduates were in jobs that did not require a four-year degree. Not only did young black college graduates have the highest underemployment rate of the groups examined here, they also saw the greatest increase in underemployment during the latest economic downturn. Between 2007 and 2013, the underemployment rate for all recent college graduates increased 3.7 percentage points. Since 2007, the underemployment rate for young black college graduates rose 10.1 percentage points, reaching a high of 55.9 percent in 2013.”

don’t think for a second that racist LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling is alone in his views regarding African Americans and other “minorities.” he’s just the only NBA owner who’s had his private conversations publicly exposed.

Please read William C. Rhoden’s Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Black Athlete. http://www.amazon.com/Forty-Million-Dollar-Slaves-Redemption/dp/0307353141.