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October 19, 2011 | 9:52 AM | By

The Rise of Interracial Marriage

Adele Booysen / Flickr

The changing attitude surrounding interracial marriages, which now make up 7.4 percent of all American marriages, was the subject of a recent NPR  piece that aired on All Things Considered.

According to recent data, the least common pairing is between black women and white men, followed by white women and black men. The most likely interracial marriage is between Hispanics and non-Hispanics, followed by those between white men and Asian American women. So what does that tell us about race in America? From NPR:

“It reflects the status hierarchy,” says Roderick J. Harrison, a demographer at Howard University. “If you’re trying to marry up, clearly whites are it. If you’re trying to avoid marrying down, it would still look like blacks might be the least preferred.”

But even though a relatively small percentage of all American marriages are interracial, attitudes have changed much more rapidly in recent years. In 1987, 48 percent of Americans felt it was okay for whites and blacks to date. By 2009, it jumped to 80 percent. And in 2008, almost 15 percent of all new marriages were interracial, a record number according to the Pew Center.

D.C. is a diverse, vibrant city, and the number of multiracial people living here has increased by about 2 percent over the past decade. By 2010, about 17,316 D.C. residents were multiracial, about 7,000 of whom reported to be black and some other race.

What do you think: do attitudes in D.C. reflect the national increase in interracial marriages? Is it more accepted in D.C. than in other places or is there still a taboo? What have been your experiences with interracial dating and marriage?

FILED UNDER: The People, Interracial dating, Interracial Marriage, Multiracial
October 18, 2011 | 2:15 PM | By

ICE Deportations Reach Record Levels

John Moore / Getty Images

Undocumented Guatemalan immigrants are body searched before boarding a deportation flight to Guatemala City, Guatemala at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport on June 24, 2011 in Mesa, Arizona.

The United States has deported more people over the past fiscal year than ever before, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

ICE deported 396,906 people between October 2010 and September 2011. About 55 percent of those deported had been convicted of felonies or misdemeanors.

“These year-end totals indicate that we are making progress, with more convicted criminals, recent border crossers, egregious immigration law violators and immigration fugitives being removed from the country than ever before,” ICE Director John Morton said in a press release.

ICE officials see the deportation numbers as positive, but the agency has come under heat for its recent practices, particularly over the controversial Secure Communities program. It directs local police departments to share finger prints and other arrest information with immigration officials. Critics say domestic violence victims and witnesses have been deported as a result, and that can foster distrust between immigrant communities and police. Federal officials have announced reforms, although there is still skepticism over how such changes will be implemented.

D.C. has yet to implement Secure Communities, but it may soon be mandatory around the country.

 

FILED UNDER: The People, ICE, Immigration
October 17, 2011 | 5:26 PM | By

MLK Memorial: A Complex D.C. Legacy

PBS NewsHour / Flickr

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, dedicated on Sunday as a tribute and reminder that King’s vision of equality isn’t yet fully realized, evokes an additional memory for those living in D.C. The statue is a reminder of the pain and frustration felt after King’s assassination, which gave birth to the 1968 riots that forever changed D.C.’s landscape, setting the stage for the gentrification the city is undergoing today.

One of Sunday’s speakers, president of the Children’s Defense Fund Marian Wright Edelman, shared this moving recollection from that moment in time:

The day after Dr. King was shot, I went into riot-torn Washington, D.C. neighborhoods and schools, urging children not to loot, get arrested and ruin their futures. A 12-year-old black boy looked at me straight in the eye and said, “Lady, what future? I ain’t got no future. I ain’t got nothing to lose.”

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FILED UNDER: History, The People, Gentrification, Martin Luther King Memorial
October 7, 2011 | 12:19 PM | By

Occupy Protests: Are They Representative?

Andrew Bossi / Flick

A protest sign during the first day of Occupy DC.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have spread to other cities, including the District. Protesters are are calling for an end to corporate greed and proclaiming the vast majority of Americans suffer while the rich haven’t.

More than a hundred people gathered at Freedom Plaza on Thursday, some wielding signs with statement like “We are the 99%.”

It would make sense that such a movement would have particular relevance for communities of color, who are facing higher unemployment rates and are largely on the losing side of the wealth gap. So some have wondered why the crowds in some cities have been mostly white.

Racialicious compiled a number of dispatches from activist reporting many people of color are absent from leadership positions or feel marginalized at the New York protests. Such rumblings helped spur the formation of “The People of Color Working Group,” which issued a statement:

… The economic crisis did not begin with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers in 2008. Indeed, people of color and poor people have been in a state of crisis since the founding of this country, and for indigenous communities, since before the founding of the nation. We have long known that capitalism serves only the interests of a tiny, mostly white, minority.

The vast majority of the crowd at Occupy DC’s Thursday protest was white, but a number of people of color said they felt speakers’ messages and the crowd assembled was representative of those who are suffering.

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FILED UNDER: Around the City, The People, Occupy DC, Race and Class
October 6, 2011 | 12:13 PM | By

Battling Unemployment Among D.C.’s Low-Income, Black Youth

Many of D.C.’s young people who live way below the poverty line, aren’t in school or looking for work are black, a new report finds.

Researchers at The Brookings Institution examined these disparities in an effort to propose some solutions. About 28,000 D.C. residents aged 16 to 24 lack a bachelor’s degree and live 200 percent below the poverty line. And 22,000 of those young people are black.

Low-income D.C. black youth lacking bachelor’s degrees

The Brookings folks propose a few solutions, and among them is abandoning the “college for all approach.” But, as they note, there is a history of discrimination when it comes to who has been deemed worthy of higher education (emphasis mine):

Integrating employment and occupational skills into the high school and post-secondary curricula is often disparaged, with career and technical education (previously known as vocational education) seen as a dumping ground for students not deemed “college-ready.” The legacy of tracking, segregation, and discrimination in the educational system certainly provides support for that view— education can be a vehicle for upward mobility but it can also perpetuate inequality based on race and class.

Here are a few more recommendations in the report:

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FILED UNDER: Education, The People, Race and Class, Unemployment
September 28, 2011 | 3:26 PM | By

‘Does Gentrification Mean Eradication?’

We’ve pondered before whether Anacostia, a neighborhood in Ward 8, is actually being gentrified. But residents will get their chance to chime in on the topic during tonight’s roundtable focusing on the “demographic transformation” of Ward 8.

The event, which starts at 7 p.m., is sponsored by Ward 8 Councilman Marion Barry and the Advisory Neighborhood Commission 8D. I’ll be there, so follow me on Twitter for occasional updates.

FILED UNDER: Around the City, The People, Gentrification, Ward 8
September 28, 2011 | 10:59 AM | By

Finding Space to Create in Pricey D.C.

Courtesy of Bora Chung

Aaron Martin (left), Brandon Moses (middle) and Michael Andrew Harris (right) practice in Gold Leaf Studios.

Brandon Moses and Michael Andrew Harris, members of the band Laughing Man, met up at their studio space in a worn warehouse on a recent Thursday evening. Moses strummed his guitar and sang into the mic. Aaron Martin, who shares the studio with the band, joined in on his saxophone for an impromptu jam session.

Seemingly neglected, the vacant warehouse has been repurposed for just this sort of activity — for artists to create without concern of disturbing neighbors. Harris rapidly hit his snare drum without constraint. The music went through open window and spilled onto the Mt. Vernon street below.

But through that window, you could see the new high rises across the street, a sign of D.C.’s healthy real estate market. And soon, the warehouse — home to Gold Leaf Studios — will be replaced with a $57 million, 11-story mixed-used complex. About 30 artists who work out of 11 Gold Leaf studios will have to vacate by January 2012.

“Obviously they’re going to make a lot more money,” Harris, 31, said. “We’re just artists paying a couple of hundred dollars for the space.”

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FILED UNDER: Culture, The People, Gentrification, The Arts
September 27, 2011 | 1:57 PM | By

Courtland Milloy, DCist Bike PSA?

DDOT DC / Flickr

A year ago, Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy penned his now infamous column after Mayor Adrian Fenty’s defeat, in which he described white gentrifiers as bike lane-loving, “myopic little twits.” Washington City Paper reporter Rend Smith asked Milloy to “reflect on his contribution to the District political dictionary.” He responded:

Yeah, another year and the Myoptic Twits are older, blinder and wise-asser. I did notice that a few volunteered to help spruce up some DCPS buildings before classes began. So miracles do happen. The rest of them seem more interested in bringing a 19th century flava to the city, with their gas lamps and trolley cars. Then again, when you’re on their side of the wealth gap, inheritance gap, employment gap, education gap, you can act like landed gentry. But Im not hatin’. In fact, what I’d like to do in this next year is team up with DCist for a Myo-Twit public safety campaign. Tell these folks that if they want more Bike Share they could at least learn how to ride the damn bike, stop weaving in and out of traffic. Car bumpers are harder than their butts if not their helmetless heads. Hey, I just want them to live to see another birthday.

To which DCist editor Aaron Morrissey writes: “Since we’ve been so far unable to connect via Twitter, feel free to drop us a line when you’re ready to film that public service announcement, good sir.”

FILED UNDER: Media, The People
September 26, 2011 | 11:31 AM | By

Poverty By Race in D.C.

Sharon Drummond / Flickr

The District’s poverty rate — 19.9 percent — is the third highest in the nation. But the way that rate breaks down by race shows that not all groups are affected equally by poverty.

These figures come courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau, which recently released its American Community Survey 2010 estimates for poverty and race. (Keep in mind the figures have various margins of error.):

Poverty Rate Median Income
White  8.5% $99,220
Hispanic 14.7% $60,798
Asian 20.1% $77,098
Black 27.1% $37,430
 *American Community Survey 2010 Estimates

Kathryn Baer of Poverty and Policy also points out that the percentage of D.C.’s children living in poverty has risen to 30.4 percent, the second-highest childhood poverty rate in the country. Baer writes:

In short, these are mostly grim figures — and a far cry from the “one city” Mayor Gray envisions.

To my mind, the child poverty rate rings the loudest alarm bells because we’ve got volumes of research showing that children who live in poverty have much higher risks of poor health, developmental delays, academic difficulties and other problems;

These, the research shows, pave the way for lifelong poverty — and thus another generation of children who are born with two strikes against them.

FILED UNDER: The People, 2010 Census, Income disparity, Poverty, Race and Class
September 21, 2011 | 1:05 PM | By

Troy Davis: What Role Does Race Play?

Alberto Pizzoli / AFP/Getty Images

Amnesty International activists hold banners in support of Troy Davis.

Troy Davis is set to be executed at 7 p.m., barring a last minute stay — which seems unlikely at this point. This, despite witnesses recanting testimony, lack of physical evidence and worldwide protests.

Davis, a black man, was convicted in the 1989 killing of off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail, who was white. In this case, Davis’ jury was majority black. But since the sentencing, three of the original jurors have publicly stated they regret their votes.

Much of the protests surrounding Davis’ execution aren’t based largely on claims of racial bias, but rather that overwhelming reasonable doubt should be cause enough to stay the execution. But what role does race play in such death penalty sentences? David C. Baldus, a prominent researcher whose work was at the center of a Supreme Court ruling, studied 2,000 death penalty cases in Georgia in the late 1980s. He found that black defendants were four times more likely to be sentenced to death for killing a white person than for killing a black person. Likewise, prosecutors sought the death penalty 70 percent of the time in cases with black defendants and white victims, and only 20 percent of the time when the defendant was white and the victim was black.

Of course, accusations of killing a police officer bring an added layer of complexity in death penalty sentencing. Still, perhaps the question isn’t whether Davis would be on death row if he were white. Rather, would he be on death row if MacPhail had been black?

 

FILED UNDER: The People, Courts, Race, Troy Davis