PostWidely content : Race

"...the real complaint is that affirmative action undermines long-established patterns of favoritism."

A 2013 Pew study showed that 54 percent of blacks said there were strong or very strong conflicts between races compared to 34 percent of whites that shared the same view.

"The number of Americans in state and federal prisons has quintupled since 1980."

Chicago Lawyers' Committee Civil Rights Fellow Shubra Ohri presents on the alternatives to incarceration.

These billboards are a clear, targeted, and disgusting voter suppression tactic to minimize the impact of minority communities in this election.

Disturbing lack of vetting- or cavalier attitude- in who represents a political campaign

If race is purely a social construct, and negative perceptions of certain races are taught and not innate, racism can be solve-able. It's still a very difficult problem, but not an impossible one.

Yet another reason why we need nonpartisan poll watching. It's a fine line between "challenging" voters and harassing or intimidating them.

While I do not question the need to improve the quality of education for black children, I do question the specific targeting of President Obama's new executive order. Not only do black children receive a poor quality education, on average, but so do Hispanic children, poor children, etc. Is there a way to address the quality of education for all students without splintering our efforts by sub-populations?

The recent attacks on both the Sikh temple in Wisconsin and the Mosque in Joplin highlight the importance of hate crime awareness and strong enforcement of hate crime laws.

The disparity in suspensions between white and minority students in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and in Illinois is extremely troubling. CPS has the right official policies, but doesn’t follow them. CPS should record and publish suspension and expulsion statistics school by school, with details like the race of the student and the nature of the offense, so that school administrators’ decisions can be analyzed and there can be accountability.

Here's what we know: 1) Under the direction of John Burge, hundreds of suspects were tortured and coerced into confessing to crimes. 2) Many of these tortured suspects are still detained in IDOC. 3) Cook County has the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the country. 4) Defunding the Torture Injury Relief Commission leaves these victims with virtually no means of recourse.

Interesting article on the Pennsylvania lawsuit. Not only does it highlight the problems with voter ID, it touches on race and socioeconomic status in the courtroom.

This link between racial resentment and support for voter identification persists even after you control for partisanship, ideology, and a range of other demographic variables. That said, there was a strong partisan division: Republicans were the most likely to hold negative attitudes toward blacks and support voter identification laws.

There have been more challenges to the Voting Rights Act in the past 2 years than in the previous 45 years combined.

The Supreme Court will soon rule on an Affirmative Action case. This upcoming deliberation has obviously received less publicity than the Affordable Healthcare case, but it will be addressing a fundamental civil rights issue. The Supreme Court's decision may set up new regulations with regard to how institutions of higher education use race in their admissions process. I think this will be a very fascinating one. I will be staying turned because Affirmative Action continues to be a very complex issue. The biggest question seems to be this: How can one be in favor of both racial equality and policies that may give a deliberate advantage to certain racial groups? Thoughts?

Truly an American Hero -- consistently fighting for this country to realize that children are categorically different than adults and should be treated accordingly.

Certain groups, namely ones that tend to have a lower income than other Americans, actually pay more for car insurance. I think this quote sums up the issue nicely: “We are somehow talking about poverty traps. By all appearance, financial benefits seem to stay with those who already have them. The important task is to know the mechanisms and to overcome them; ultimately to join the club of those who are better off. There is no systemic reason why a member of a minority group should not enjoy the same rates as any 'average citizen’. High auto insurance rates should not just be taken as destiny.”

On Saturday, June 23, the Chicago Police Department and the City of Chicago held a gun turn-in event to get guns off the streets. I posted the event last week. As I mentioned, the procedure was as follows: "Turn in your gun and receive a $100 MasterCard gift card. No questions asked. Really. No questions." The event collected 5500 guns, of which only 700 were fake. The slogan for the event was "Don't Kill a Dream, Save a Life."

“We have the same cemetery, but we don’t mix the white and the black graves. They’re separate. Put a black up here? No, no, we wouldn’t do that. That would be against our custom, against our way of doing things.”-- Board Member of Jasper City Cemmetary

Chicago consistently has some of the worst gun violence numbers in the country. The Chicago Police Department and the City of Chicago are fighting back with a gun turn-in event on Saturday, June 23 from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Turn in your gun and receive a $100 MasterCard gift card. No questions asked. Really. No questions. This is not the first time the City has hosted such an event. As such, people should know about it, even those who do not own a gun. I think this is a very interesting way to fight crime violence. Thoughts?

University of Chicago law students are participating in some really valuable work through the Exoneration Project, a clinic that "engages law students in vital cases, representing prisoners convicted on flawed evidence." The program gives students experience in cases that a large number of full-time attorneys do not take. Moreover, it instills the importance of pro-bono work. Please read to find out how many convicts they have released since 2008! It is quite impressive.

This is a fascinating race question. Moderate race matching in adoption cases, which is premised on the idea that same-race adoption is more suitable than interracial adoption, is not strictly illegal. It is also an interesting social justice issue insofar as the policy disproportionately impacts black youth, who comprise a large proportion of orphans in the United States and who do not have a sufficient number of black adults willing to adopt them.

Fashion Faux Pas or Race Discrimination? You be the Judge!

Disparate treatment in discipline along racial lines not only negatively impacts educational outcomes but also dramatically affects students' perceptions of justice and fairness.

Everyone who cares about race and poverty should be reading Deepak Bhargava's essay on Social Justice Movements in a Liminal Age in this month's PRRAC newsletter, Poverty & Race.

I challenge you to answer this question -- How much has America's first black president changed race relations?

Great article about harsh sentencing of youth and particularly, the reasons that kids often get sentenced more harshly than adults.

Kristof's comment about property rights brings to mind the research done on how the rule of law and effective property rights regimes make the difference between wealthy societies and underdeveloped ones. But one also notices the lack of a wider critique about reservations' abandonment by the larger society.

The product of a transformative school with transformative teachers. We must explore how these results can be replicated countrywide in all schools.

This shocked me.

Disturbing account of alleged racism

In direct counterpoint to the Manhattan Institute study

This only tells part of the story.