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Racial disparities

Southern Reckoning With Medical Myth Of Race As A Diagnostic Tool

Throughout my early medical education in the Deep South, race was ever-present, shaping the way we were taught to diagnose, treat, and even perceive human beings. It wasn't just a footnote; it was the lead. At medical schools across the country, we were trained to introduce patients starting with their race: "An 82-year-old Black female presents with…" as if the race descriptor was a biological diagnostic tool in itself. Our lecture slides often oversimplified the complexity of human life into neat, racialized boxes. Clinical "risk factors" were organized by skin color, and certain diseases were described as if they only belonged to specific groups.

Black Adults And Their Families Face Worsening Financial Stability

The Trump-Vance administration inherited a strong labor market with record employment and wage gains. But after a year of the administration’s economic mismanagement, workers are feeling more vulnerable to the softening labor market. While the president is busy touting the stock market’s performance, working people and families are expressing concerns about job security and affordability. This is evident in the Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), which shows an increase in the number of adults who worry about finding or keeping a job.

Drowning In The Cesspool Of Racism

August 2 is an anniversary that no one wants to celebrate but one that needs to be remembered. On that day in 2010, six Black teenagers from two families drowned in the Red River in Shreveport, Louisiana. It was a day that would break your heart. The children and their families went on an outing to barbecue and cool off on a hot summer’s day. One of the children, Dekendrix Warner, stepped from a shallow sandbar into water 28 feet deep and started thrashing around. The teenagers responded to Dekendrix’s yells for help and jumped in to try to save him. But they could not swim. All began to drown.

Over 160 Years After Abolition, Racism Still Structures US Economy

More than 400 years have passed since the first white colonists arrived in North America to establish a settlement, and more than 160 years since slavery was abolished, yet structural racism is still alive and kicking in the U.S. In the interview that follows, two economists, Michelle Holder and Jeannette Wicks-Lim, co-authors of a new book titled The Political Economy of Racism: The Persistence of Anti-Blackness in the United States, discuss how anti-Black racism developed and the role that it continues to play in the contemporary United States.

We’ve Been Here Before, And We Know What Comes Next

We’re a little over a year into the second Trump presidency. That second term began with the establishment of “The Department of Governmental Efficiency” (DOGE), a sustained campaign to discredit and undermine the usefulness and work of federal institutions and employees, and the issuance of multiple executive orders rescinding prior guidance on equity, including those related to federal affirmative action. The dismantling of entire federal agencies, alongside massive cuts in their capacity to make progress toward equity goals, swiftly followed (USAID, HHS, and the Department of Education are some of the most impacted agencies).

One Of Hurricane Katrina’s Most Important Lessons Isn’t About Storm Preparations

Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans, the images still haunt us: entire neighborhoods underwater, families stranded on rooftops and a city brought to its knees. We study disaster planning at Texas A&M University and look for ways communities can improve storm safety for everyone, particularly low-income and minority neighborhoods. Katrina made clear what many disaster researchers have long found: Hazards such as hurricanes may be natural, but the death and destruction is largely human-made. New Orleans was born unequal. As the city grew as a trade hub in the 1700s, wealthy residents claimed the best real estate, often on higher ground formed by river sediment.

As The State’s Complexion Darkens, Minnesota’s Liberalism Wanes

My, how times have changed. Ninety-three percent white as recently as 1970, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St, Paul has seen its minority population nearly quintuple to 31 percent since Mary Tyler Moore last tossed her bonnet towards the Minneapolis skyline in the iconic opening of her eponymous show. An influx of African Americans, Hmong, Laotians, Latinos and east African refugees has reshaped the politics of this metropolitan area that was widely regarded as among the most liberal in the country a generation ago, eclipsed only by San Francisco and Seattle in the minds of many. The arrest Monday of a Minnesota man on charges that he assassinated one state lawmaker and shot another is yet another reminder that the state is not the quaint, Scandinavian enclave that was the basis of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon.

Rising Temperatures And The Rising Need For A Black Radical Lens

This past weekend, over 500 Black folk and their comrades descended upon Indianapolis, Indiana, for the Second National Black Radical Organizing Conference (NBROC). The goal, in part, of the Second NBROC, in the words of the conference’s organizers, was to “create a space to discuss, debate, train, assess, and create a collective way forward for Black/African/New Afrikan organizations and organizers who believe that our struggle is paramount to our survival.” On the question of the survival of Black/African people the world over, climate change (or as we refer to it, the racial capitalocene ) represents a profound and salient challenge formed and sustained by root causes -white “supremacy” ideology, colonization, and patriarchy (which is to say racial capitalism) - we as Black, African, and all oppressed people have been struggling against for multiple millenniums.

Illinois Bans Police From Ticketing Students For Minor Infractions

Illinois legislators on Wednesday passed a law to explicitly prevent police from ticketing and fining students for minor misbehavior at school, ending a practice that harmed students across the state. The new law would apply to all public schools, including charters. It will require school districts, beginning in the 2027-28 school year, to report to the state how often they involve police in student matters each year and to separate the data by race, gender and disability. The state will be required to make the data public. The legislation comes three years after a ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation, “The Price Kids Pay.”

Anti-Poverty Experiment From The 1960s Could Inspire Housing Justice

In cities across the U.S., the housing crisis has reached a breaking point. Rents are skyrocketing, homelessness is rising and working-class neighborhoods are threatened by displacement. These challenges might feel unprecedented. But they echo a moment more than half a century ago. In the 1950s and 1960s, housing and urban inequality were at the center of national politics. American cities were grappling with rapid urban decline, segregated and substandard housing, and the fallout of highway construction and urban renewal projects that displaced hundreds of thousands of disproportionately low-income and Black residents.

Liberal Media Blames Trump For Economic Woes That Began Years Ago

It is not that Trump’s economic policies improve upon his predecessors in the White House. Indeed there is every reason to believe that his tariffs and deep cuts to the federal workforce will dry up even more the buying power that is the lifeblood of a consumer economy. A second Great Depression is not out of the question. But our economic woes did not begin under Trump; the country was already on the wrong path. Trump merely hit the accelerator. Said Desjon Yisrael, a 35-year-old African American who sells work boots and drives part-time for DoorDash to make ends meet near Greensboro, North Carolina: “It’s the gig economy. It really baffles me that people think that the economy (was) doing really well (under Biden)."

Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Reverse Globalization

While it was not technically a tariff, the 1808 law prohibiting the importation of enslaved people to the U.S. from Africa and the Caribbean had the same effect, protecting domestic industries—in this case the breeding of the enslaved for commercial trade—from foreign competitors. For everyone but the enslaved of course, the ban worked like a charm, raising significantly the sale price that slaveholders could demand for a bondswoman or bondsman. In the half-century that followed the embargo on international slave trafficking, the number of enslaved in the U.S. quadrupled from one to four million by the time the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter in 1861.

Natural Disasters Are Driving A School Crisis

Adrinda Kelly watched from New York as Hurricane Katrina swallowed her hometown of New Orleans in 2005. Floodwaters rose, neighborhoods disappeared underwater, and she felt a familiar ache deepen. Her family was safe, but devastation quickly compounded a painful realization: Black children were portrayed as disposable, and New Orleans’ education system was almost completely privatized. Black students’ test scores faltered. Almost two decades later and nearly 2,000 miles away, similar echoes reverberated in Altadena, California, as wildfires swept through Los Angeles County in January.

Redesigning Care For New Jersey’s Black Moms

Cherelle Lloyd had just given birth to her son two weeks prior when she sensed something was wrong. With her hands and breasts in pain, she decided she needed outside help. “It was hurting every time that [my son] latched,” says Lloyd. “It was just miserable.” Finding resources near where she lived in East Orange, N.J. wasn’t easy. When she searched for support, all the in-person lactation consultants covered by her insurance were more than fifty miles away. That’s when her doula connected her to Perinatal Health Equity Initiative (PHEI), a Black maternal health nonprofit offering community services in New Jersey.

The Military To Prison Pipeline

Like old soldiers around the country, a group of former service members gathered in Crest Hill, Illinois to remember fallen comrades on Memorial Day, 2024. Several months later, The Veteran, a newspaper published by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, ran a photo of the event they attended. It shows a multi-generational group of men--white, Black and Latino—lined up proudly between two flags. In his dispatch to the newspaper, African-American Navy veteran Robert Maury explained why everyone in the Stateville Veterans Group was wearing government issued clothing of a non-military sort.
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