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One reason why some parts of D.C. have such high jobless rates is that many of the unemployed lack the skills and credentials to qualify for D.C.’s jobs. While most available jobs require a bachelor’s degree, 21 percent of people living in Ward 8 haven’t even completed high school.
Dropping out of high school has far-reaching effects on one’s life, family and community. WAMU 88.5′s Kavitha Cardoza reports on why people leave school in her examination of D.C.’s dropout crisis. In her first installment, she profiles a family with a history of dropping out:
The causes and consequences of dropping out are often intertwined. Low-income students are more likely to drop out, which means they can’t get jobs that pay well and continue lives of poverty.
Four generations of Walker’s and McMillan’s family haven’t graduated from high school. They have many of the risk factors for dropping out, including learning disabilities, teen pregnancy, and drug abuse. And it’s not clear whether or how the cycle could be broken.
The story, which you can read here, is the first of a nine-part series.
African Americans have been hit harder by the recession and the foreclosure crisis. And now a new study published in The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies shows disparities persist even when they want to resolve debts. Blacks filing for bankruptcy are more likely to end up in a costlier and more time-consuming process than whites. Such a bias exists even when controlling for factors such as income, education and assets.
The study’s authors didn’t find that overt discrimination by lawyers was the cause of the disparity. “But when you have a complex system,” Robert M. Lawless, one of the authors, told the New York Times, “these biases can play out and the people within the system don’t see the pattern because nobody is in charge of looking at these big issues.”
… A survey conducted as part of their research found that bankruptcy lawyers were much more likely to steer black debtors into a Chapter 13 than white filers even when they had identical financial situations. The lawyers, the survey found, were also more likely to view blacks as having “good values” when they expressed a preference for Chapter 13.
Read more at: www.nytimes.com
The Washington Post is running a series on black women, largely based off of results of a survey conducted by the paper and the Kaiser Family Foundation.
It’s difficult to paint a portrait of an entire group of people, whether it’s defined by race or class. Although statistical and demographic data can be used, there will always be exceptions and nuances because people are nuanced. Here, Washington City Paper’s Shani Hilton offers her thoughts on the series, including, “The group most frequently out of touch with everyone surveyed? White men. Still waiting on the story about their hopes and dreams.”
Richard Florida of The Atlantic Cities explores the economic repercussions of prejudice. He created a Global Prejudice Index by examining how hospitable countries are for ethnic and racial minorities, immigrants, religious minorities and gays and lesbians; countries with more prejudice tend to be poorer. The United States ranks as the fifth most tolerant country in the world.
David McNew / Getty Images
A reward poster near television news trucks in San Diego, Calif. advertises the reward for finding Danielle van Dam, 7.
A new TV show premiered this week on TV One, focusing on cases of missing African Americans. One of the first featured stories was about a missing D.C. black woman.
The show, “Finding Our Missing,” aims to correct the disparity in coverage of missing African Americans. For years, critics have blasted media outlets for devoting significant airtime to cases of missing white women, while not devoting similar coverage to cases of missing blacks or Latinos.
Why is there such a disparity, or “coverage gap?” Our sister blog Multi-American pointed to an interview with Poynter Institute faculty member and media ethics expert Kelly McBride. Here is an excerpt:
It’s possible that the people making decisions in newsrooms have a default assumption about what’s normal (functional) and not normal (dysfunctional) for white families. And it’s possible that they have a default assumption about families of color that are the opposite of what they assume for white families. Maybe some of that is true or all of it is true. But it plays into how editors make news judgments.
McBride continued, saying that it’s easier to fix the coverage gap on a local level. She suggested a few strategies:
.. Journalists simply need to make sure they are examining all murders and missing people and giving them similar coverage. (That’s actually really hard to do, but it’s easier than the national solution.) And because local journalists are loyal to their local community, they are generally motivated to serve that audience well.
On a national level, journalists are not accountable in the same way. So there’s less motivation to change the dynamics that lead to tilted coverage. It would take a significant act of leadership at a place like CNN or Fox to break out of this cycle. And I’m not sure there’s enough accountability to make that happen.
You can read the entire Q&A here.
D.C.’s Chinatown isn’t, well, the most authentic Chinatown around. Only about 500 Chinese immigrants remain in the neighborhood, and because of D.C. regulations, businesses have to display signs with Chinese characters.
But the Associated Press reports that what has happened in the District is no anomaly. Across the country, Chinatowns have lost their Chinese populations. Yet, many retain their neighborhood names and are serving as tourist attractions.
“The traditional Chinatown is changing, and in most cities it is no longer the residential, political and cultural center of Asian-American life that it once was,” said Wei Li, an Arizona State University professor who chairs the Census Bureau’s advisory committee on the Asian population.
She explained that urban Chinatowns continue to serve a role for newly arrived immigrants with less education or lower skills who seek entry-level work, as well as for elderly residents with poor English skills who cannot drive. But middle-class families are almost nowhere to be found, and in many cities, rising downtown property costs and urban gentrification threaten their traditional existence.
Read more at: www.google.com
WAMU 88.5′s Patrick Madden has been reporting on the ineffectiveness of past D.C. job training practices and changes the city is making to how it prepares residents for jobs. His investigation revealed that much of job training money went to training people to be bus drivers and Metro train operators. But such training programs haven’t resulted in graduates getting jobs.
The debate over job training has particular relevance for D.C.’s black and Hispanic communities. This chart shows 2010 D.C. unemployment rates by race, with the numbers coming courtesy of the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics [PDF]:
DCentric has previously explored the causes behind D.C.’s unemployment disparities. One major reason is the mismatch between the skills people have and those required by District jobs. For instance, unemployment is at 25 percent in Ward 8, where more than 20 percent of residents lack a high school diploma. Without effective job training, can that unemployment number go down by very much?
The [Stuff] people say meme has come to D.C., courtesy of this SocialStudies DC video (which you can watch at the bottom of this post). Some choice lines include, “Wait, where are you from, originally?” and “It’s only $1,400 a month for their converted sunroom, so, not bad.”
But who’s really saying this stuff? Is it really accurate to call it “[Stuff] D.C. says?”
A couple of people, including @clintonyates, tweeted the video is really things that white people in D.C. say.
A few folks pointed out that race and class don’t always intersect:
There are questions over the effectiveness of job training in D.C., a city where the unemployment rate is higher than the national average and peaks at 25 percent in some wards. Today, WAMU 88.5′s Patrick Madden continues his series on District-funded job training efforts. He found that the companies getting the most money in contracts are those offering commercial drivers licenses, or CDLs. D.C. Department of Employment Services Director Lisa Mallory tells Madden that companies offering CDLs will no longer get contracts because they don’t get people hired.
“There is a problem with offering CDL to anybody,” she says. “If you don’t have a clean driver’s record, or even a record, or you’re not clean, in terms of being able to pass the drug test, you’re not gonna be able to be successful in that area.”
Read more at: wamu.org
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