SOURCE: Battle

Nora Howell explores the construct of "whiteness" in "Spotless," right outside of Ben's Chili Bowl in the U Street corridor of Washington, D.C.

Nora Howell thinks deeply about what it means to be white in America.

She’s spent much of her adult life wrestling with terms such as “privilege,” “responsibility,” “fear,” and “opportunity,” as they relate to people and race in this nation. Now, at age 26, she’s surrendered to exploring themes of what whiteness means in her life by making performance-based art and by teaching art in inner-city schools in Baltimore.

This is hard work. Pondering such heavy thoughts can be paralyzing, which is why she suspects so few other white people pause to think about being white and what effect it has on their lives. “I try to understand what it means to be white in 2013,” Howell told me yesterday. “I’m trying to understand the privileges you have as a white person and what your job is once you acknowledge that privilege.”

With blobs of paint splotching her fingers and sheetrock dust in her dark hair, Howell paused from whitewashing the walls at the Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington, D.C., where she was setting up her upcoming show.

Titled “Spotless,” the part art exhibition, part performance show is a monochromatic study of the imagery and fixations with cleanliness. Installation pieces include oversized white representations of household products such as toothpaste tubes, bathroom cleaner, soap bubbles, and the like. The centerpiece of the show will be Howell’s opening-day performance piece, titled “Rub-A-Dub-Dub,” featuring three nude women of varying races bathing in claw-footed tubs filled with marshmallows.

As Howell explains it, the oversized pieces and obsessive effort at cleanliness are artistic and physical “metaphors for the equivocation of whiteness to purity, cleansing, and superiority.”

This theme is kicked up a notch by the decision to showcase the art and performances at a gallery in the U Street corridor, one of Washington’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Over the past decade, the community surrounding the Hamiltonian Gallery has transitioned from a space of hot-dog shacks, nightclubs, and shoe-shine parlors that catered to mostly poor and working-class black customers, to upscale watering holes and European-themed eateries that attract white hipsters and young suburbanites looking to get their inner-city groove on.

In a notable Washington Post essay, Stephen A. Crockett Jr. coined the phrase “swagger jacking” to describe what’s happening in the U Street neighborhood:

Look. I get it. The Chocolate City has changed. It isn’t what it used to be, and I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that D.C. was once so marred by murder that it was nicknamed Dodge City or that there is now a hipster bar on U St. that holds the same name. Point is, there is a certain cultural vulturalism, an African American historical “swagger-jacking,” going on on U Street. It’s an inappropriate tradition of sorts that has rent increasing, black folks moving further out—sometimes by choice, sometimes not—while a faux black ethos remains.

The raw feelings of some black Washingtonians toward swagger jacking inspired Howell to make one of the photographs in the exhibitions, an image of a black woman using an enormous bottle of Wite-Out correcting fluid to swab away a historic marker on U Street.

Though she always wanted to be an artist, Howell didn’t start her career with race-themed work. It slowly came upon her, she said, as she became increasingly aware that being white was critical to her experiences in every place she lived. In some cases, being white was obvious by its stifling vastness, such as when her art studies took her from a multicultural high school in her hometown of Cincinnati to the nearly all-white Wheaton College outside of Chicago. But in other places, whiteness was noticeable by its absence. Teaching at an all-black public school or choosing to live in a row house in a predominately black West Baltimore neighborhood rendered her the lonely white face adrift in a sea of black bodies.

This experience of choosing to see whiteness in American society is rare for white Americans but fuels Howell’s creative spirit. For example, one of her most powerful works, “Racial Make Up: More Than Skin Deep,” grew from the realization that being a white person prevented her from having the connection she desperately wanted with her black students. The minute-and-a-half video makes the inescapable point that whiteness is a sticky mess with in-your-face clarity.

“I knew that my race was a barrier with my students,” Howell said of the piece, her favorite. “I wanted it so badly for my race not to matter with them. I just didn’t want to be white, if it kept us apart.”

Howell is frustrated by some reactions to her work, notably from white viewers who feel as if she’s putting them down in some sly way. Or, in some cases, from her young, urban, white audiences, she wonders whether they have the cultural frame for her exploration of whiteness. A clear example is “Cracker Dress,” a performance piece where Howell parades in public wearing a sundress fashioned out of saltine and oyster crackers. “Sometimes it just goes over their heads,” she said with a laugh and a wave of her palm skyward. She continued:

Maybe it’s a good thing that people don’t get the reference to “crackers” as a derogatory term, but I made the dress as visual representation of what I felt like to be stared at as the only white person in a community. I know that people of color get those stares all the time. I wanted to get people to think and talk about what it means if you’re white.

At its core, art is about finding the humanness in all people, she told me. It’s about bringing people together, not pulling them apart. When people think about these things and find the courage to talk about them civilly, then racial understanding is inevitable.

Howell finds it amusing that some people question whether she’s really white, given her work and her determination to confront white people with being white. “People ask me that all the time: ‘What are you trying to get at?’ ‘Are you really white or multi-racial?’” she said. “The assumption is that if you’re white, you’re not going to be challenging whiteness. You just embrace it.”

But that’s not possible for her. She believes whiteness demands examination with the same detail and precision that attaches to being black in America.

“I don’t want to speak for black people or presume what they think in my work,” she said. “I don’t want to make those assumptions. That’s something white people are really good at. I work from the spaces I know best.”

“Spotless” runs from June 22 through July 27 at the Hamiltonian Gallery, 1353 U Street NW, Washington, D.C. The show opens with the “Rub-A-Dub-Dub” performance at 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday, June 22. Howell will present an artist talk about her work at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, July 16.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: iStockphoto

A father plays with his son.

As we celebrate Father’s Day on Sunday, it is worthwhile to reflect on the importance of fathers who too often go unrecognized in family and social policy: low-income fathers of color, who are frequently dogged by negative stereotypes.

More than two-thirds of Latino fathers reside in the same household with their children, cohabitating at rates on par with the national average of 68.6 percent. Although black men are the demographic group least likely to live with their children, noncustodial black fathers participate in their children’s upbringing at rates nearly double that of noncustodial white and Latino fathers, and their children are more likely to report positive contact and relationships with their fathers.

Improvements in a father’s economic security better prepare him to provide financial support to his children, who need to be lifted and kept out of poverty. Leaders from across the country, including President Barack Obama, are supporting efforts such as the Center for Urban Families, or CUF, in Baltimore, Maryland, which offers low-income fathers parenting and workforce-development services. These valuable community assets are providing ladders of opportunity, generating significant progress in helping low-income fathers improve their economic standing, and shifting the narrative on fathers of color.

More policy attention, however, must be paid to their needs and those of all low-income fathers. In terms of employment, health, housing stability, incarceration, and mental health, low-income fathers fall far behind other fathers, as the data presented below demonstrate.

Employment

• 13.7 percent: the nationwide unemployment rate for black men, compared to 8.6 percent for Latino men and 6.6 percent for white men in April 2013
• 4 million: the number of private-sector jobs lost between 2006 and 2012 for workers with only a high school diploma, an educational-attainment level in which Latino and black men disproportionately fall

Despite steady declines in the overall unemployment rate, disproportionate joblessness persists in low-income communities and communities of color. To avoid the long-term consequences of disparate economic distress, investments in jobs, as well as education and training, are critical supports for communities currently being left behind in the recovery. Assistance and services that improve work opportunities for disconnected men also support the well-being of children, women, and families.

President Obama’s proposed Pathways Back to Work Fund includes $8 billion for subsidized employment, as well as $2 billion to provide job training for low-income people and the long-term unemployed. CAP’s recently released report, titled “It’s Time to Hit the Reset Button on the Fiscal Debate,” includes this fund as a critical approach to faster long-term growth.

Health

• 53 percent: the percentage of men among the 15.1 million adults lacking health insurance who could gain coverage under Medicaid if all states expand eligibility
• 7 million: the approximate number of people without health insurance who qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, but are not enrolled
• 40 percent: the rate of African American men who die prematurely, compared to 37 percent of Latino men and 21 percent of white men

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or ACA, will significantly improve access to health care coverage for millions of low-income men. Even when black and Latino men have coverage, however, they are less likely to receive consistent quality care and preventive services.

Sick fathers or fathers who die prematurely are unable to provide for their families. Low-income men of color could benefit from greater community-based outreach to boost enrollment and eliminate barriers to treatment. The ACA’s Prevention and Public Health Fund, if fully implemented, will reduce health care costs through improved detection and management of chronic conditions and the promotion of wellness in underserved communities.

Housing stability

• 8.48 million: the number of low-income renters spending 50 percent or more of their household income on housing in 2011
• 104 hours: the number of weekly hours a minimum-wage worker must earn to rent a two-bedroom apartment in 2013
• $18.79: The minimum hourly wage one must earn in order to afford the average cost of rent in the United States
• 60 percent: the proportion of the largely male sheltered-homeless population that is a racial minority, a population that is composed mostly of African Americans (38.1 percent) and Latinos (16.4 percent)

Because men of color face high levels of homelessness, unemployment, underemployment, and wage gaps, housing affordability is critically important. Housing instability negatively impacts health outcomes, recidivism, employment opportunities, and family stability, as well as the ability of fathers to be present in their children’s lives. “Making the Mortgage Market Work for America’s Families,” a recent joint report by CAP and the National Council of La Raza, outlines opportunities to improve housing affordability, including investments in the construction and preservation of affordable rental units and the launch of a Market Access Fund to provide targeted lending to communities of color and low-income people.

 Incarceration

• One in nine: the number of black children who have an incarcerated parent, compared to 1 in 28 Latino children, and 1 in 57 white children
• 54 percent: the number of incarcerated fathers who were primary providers for their families
• 21 percent: how much slower wages grow for formerly incarcerated black men, compared to their white counterparts

Given persistent incarceration disparities and the deep effect it has on communities of color, more should be done to support alternatives to incarceration and to improve community re-entry services. The removal of fathers and the wage gap they encounter upon return affects entire families. Due to workplace discrimination, returning fathers often face limits to their ability to support their children. Often in order to make ends meet, fathers will repeat the very crimes that led to their initial incarceration.

Social impact bonds provide a source of funding to support programs that lower recidivism through family planning, drug treatment, employment, and mentoring services. President Obama’s fiscal year 2014 budget includes a request for $500 million to support this innovative funding approach.

Mental health

• 4.1 times: the rate at which Latino men face post-traumatic stress disorder when compared to white men, while black men face rates 2.5 times greater than white men
• 1 in 10: the number of men of color who will face major depression, and the number of depressed men who will receive adequate care for their condition

Most Americans with a mental illness remain untreated or receive poor treatment, and this is especially true for men of color, who are less likely to be connected to mental-health services. One significant but particularly overlooked cause of mental illness in men is sexual violence, including rape. Male victims suffer from similar mental-health disorders as women who are sexual assault victims, but men are far less likely to disclose the assault. Consequently, it is highly likely that they must cope with the psychological impact on their own.

Untreated mental illness in fathers means the whole family is likely to suffer, as fathers are severely incapacitated in their ability to parent when dealing with mental trauma. The president’s requested $235 million provides critical resources to improve mental-health detection and train and expand the mental-health workforce.

Conclusion

Fathers of color need increased access to vital wraparound services. Programs such as the Center for Urban Families in Baltimore are critical to addressing the challenges mentioned above and should be supported on a much greater scale. Additionally, to ensure progress for our nation’s fathers of color, policymakers and program directors must eliminate systemic barriers that actively prevent fathers from supporting their families.

A number of proposed policies offer significant opportunities to improve the circumstances of fathers of color and low-income fathers. This Father’s Day, our leaders should seize the opportunity to move beyond the stereotypes and protect and strengthen economically vulnerable fathers, their children, and their families.

Zach Murray is a Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellow with the Poverty and Prosperity program and Progress 2050 project at the Center for American Progress.

SOURCE: AP/Susan Walsh

First Lady Michelle Obama signs copies of her book American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America at the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, Tuesday, May 7, 2013.

Commenting on his Facebook page, my friend Dick Peery compared Ellen Stutz—the lesbian activist who interrupted First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech last week during a private fundraiser—to Eartha Kitt’s defiant act of protest against the Vietnam War at a 1968 White House luncheon with then-First Lady Lady Bird Johnson. Peery wrote:

Despite the massive criticism Ellen Stutz received for confronting First Lady Michelle Obama after paying to attend a fundraiser, she was only following a precedent set by Singer Eartha Kitt 45 years earlier. When Kitt used a White House luncheon on juvenile delinquency to challenge Ladybird Johnson on her husband’s pursuit of the Vietnam War, she drove the first lady not to anger, but to tears. Kitt paid dearly for speaking out. Her flourishing entertainment career was brought to a screeching halt in the United States. She had to work in European exile for the next decade to make a living. The CIA reportedly stalked her and branded her “a sadistic sex nymphomaniac.”

Among our small circle of acquaintances trafficking in Facebook and email messages, Peery sparked an insightful and lively debate. What’s more, his comment captures the immediate and historical views of racial and political relativism that are at play in observations of the Obama administration. At the heart of it all, a question emerges: Are President Barack Obama’s black supporters reflexive in their sense of racial outrage at any and all criticism of him or his wife?

I think so. In fact, Stutz wasn’t the first person to heckle a first lady with hopes of trying to impress a change in policy by her husband. Then-First Lady Hillary Clinton was booed and jeered during a 1994 speech in Seattle, where she talked about health care reform. In 2004 Sue Niederer wore a T-shirt with the message “President Bush You Killed My Son” to a campaign speech by then-First Lady Laura Bush and screamed questions at her, temporarily disrupting the program as the audience shouted “Four more years!”

The private conversations among my friends fail to recognize this history, casting instead the passion exhibited by Stutz, who is white, as more racial, personal, and disrespectful of Michelle Obama, the nation’s first black first lady. Many pundits have forcefully and publicly made this point such as Anna Holmes in an essay on Time.com.

But First Lady Obama isn’t a shrinking violet to be coddled or protected from racial attacks, real or imagined. If she and her husband are willing to engage in the public marketplace of ideas, then they should expect—encourage, even—some Americans to disagree and test the mettle of their policies. To be sure, Mrs. Obama has demonstrated amply that she’s capable of standing her ground. As for Mr. Obama, well, let’s agree that he’s no Michelle.

But what of the rest of us, we who hold forth on the give and take of politics? Are we to believe that all disagreements are disrespectful? Hardly. If we do that, then what are we to make of the long, glorious history of black people, black women in particular, speaking their minds in the face of power and against the tide of popular opinion?

As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made clear in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” defenders of the status quo never believe there is a time and place for expressing dissent, even when they agree with the sought-after change. The tactics of change will never be universally embraced or celebrated—until after those tactics have proven successful. Remember the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins, for example. Fifty years ago, fearful middle-class black folks disagreed with those now-celebrated tactics.

The arc of historic protest is long and often led by black women who are unafraid to say what is on their minds to whomever is in the audience. Sojourner Truth defied the conventions of her time and place to deliver her famous “Ain’t I A Woman” speech at an 1851 women’s convention in Akron, Ohio. The same held true more than a century later, when Fannie Lou Hamer dared to speak up for her right to vote at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Knowing and remembering this history makes all the difference and brings me back to my friend Dick Peery and his remembrance of Eartha Kitt, who died on Christmas Day in 2008.

Peery, a former colleague at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and a past president of Northeast Ohio’s Local 1 of the Communications Workers of America, also posted excerpts of The New York Times story that covered the luncheon back in 1968. According to Peery’s posting, Kitt was one of about 50 black and white women invited to hear the first lady talk about efforts to reduce urban crime. But Kitt wasn’t having any of it:

“You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed,” she told her fellow guests. “They rebel in the street. They will take pot … and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.”

Unlike Michelle Obama, who responded to Stutz’s heckling by appealing to the audience and shutting her down, First Lady Johnson lost her composure and shed tears at Kitt’s heartfelt outburst.

Similar to Stoltz, Kitt did not back down when interviewed after the heckling. Upon her return to Los Angeles after the White House luncheon, Kitt told reporters that she spoke “only what was in my heart and head.” She continued:

People thought I was rude, but there’s nothing rude about telling the truth. All those very nice people kept saying very nice things about putting flowers in Harlem and making bigger street lights to keep the cities safe. I thought they were avoiding talking about the reasons we have problems with crime and problems with our children.

Clear-eyed Americans now know that Kitt was correct. I’ll concede that she—and Ellen Stutz—defied social conventions and the niceties of the day to make their points. But can anyone tell me: When and how is there ever a proper and universally agreeable time, place, or method to protest injustice?

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/Danny Johnston

Boxes of Cheerios cereal are displayed at a Little Rock, Arkansas, grocery store.

If you haven’t seen the Cheerios ad, check it out.

The ad is called “Just Checking” and opens on a cute, frizzy-haired, and brown-skinned girl asking her mother about the heart-healthy benefits of eating oat-bran cereal. It then cuts to her sleeping dad, who wakes to find his chest covered with the little “O’s.” By the way, in this commercial family, Mom is white and Dad is black.

The commercial’s obvious point is that the little girl wants her dad to be healthy, and eating Cheerios will help keep him that way. But a less-than-subtle point is also being made: A modern-day family is a far cry from what used to be commercial fare. I never imagined seeing anything like the “Just Checking” commercial when I was growing up and watching 1960s-era television shows such as “Leave it to Beaver” or “Father Knows Best.”

Given this contemporary commercial is artfully produced and broadcast, General Mills executives know what they’re doing. They’re chasing a growing market of Americans who self-identify as mixed-race. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that their number swelled 32 percent to 9 million people between 2000 and 2010.

And it will continue to grow as interracial marriages become more and more the norm in America. Love knows no boundaries, and the acceptance of mixed-race couples is a testament to progressive social change and evolving attitudes toward race, sex, and marriage. Indeed, it was less than 50 years ago that the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark civil-rights decision in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case, invalidating antimiscegenation laws across the nation.

We have come a long way since Richard Perry Loving, a white Virginian, risked jail time—and very possibly vigilante death—for clandestinely marrying Mildred Delores Jeter, a woman who claimed black and Native American heritage. At this moment in our nation’s history, the president is a mixed-race man, the product of a black Kenyan man and a white woman from Kansas. On television, popular shows such as “Scandal” and “Parenthood” feature interracial liaisons and parenting. For the most part, relatively few people are shocked by the sight of interracial couples strolling hand-in-hand at most every shopping mall or seated in darkened movie theaters.

These modern attitudes even hold true in the heart of conservative America, where last Saturday, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) son, Jack McCain, married Renee Swift, a black woman and a captain in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. Us Weekly called it “an All-American wedding!” Also, last month House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) witnessed his daughter, Lindsay Marie Boehner, marry Dominic Lakhan, a black, Jamaican-born construction worker.

So when a consumer-goods manufacturer uses an interracial couple as a mainstream marketing tool, you can bet that the corporation is on to something. Big businesses such as General Mills, the Minneapolis-based food company that makes Cheerios, rarely venture too far out on reedy limbs. They’re in business to make profits, not to make social statements. If nothing else, this commercial is another sign of the times, proof that demographic change will alter our understanding of who and what is America.

Unfortunately, that scares the bejesus out of some closed-minded Internet trolls. Alarmed by the depiction of an interracial couple in a wholesome food commercial, racists swamped the commercial’s YouTube site last week with nasty comments. According to a post on the Adweek website, the YouTube video’s comments section “devolved into an endless flame war, with references to Nazis, ‘troglodytes’ and ‘racial genocide’” forcing the sponsors to disable comments altogether.

That, in turn, led to greater palaver about the commercial on Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media outlets. As of this writing, late Monday afternoon, more than 1.7 million people had viewed the YouTube video, with 22,000 likes and about 1,500 dislikes.

Clearly, the Cheerios folks are delighted. Camille Gibson, the vice president of marketing for Cheerios, said in a statement that the company was proud of the commercial. “Consumers have responded positively to our new Cheerios ad,” she said in the news release. “At Cheerios we know there are many kinds of families, and we celebrate them all.”

As well, should we all. Who wants to be on the wrong side of love—no matter what color its package?

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/Tony Dejak

A woman votes at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland, January 31, 2012, as early voting began in Ohio's March 6 presidential primary.

Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF version of this issue brief.

Coming out of the 2012 presidential election, women’s role in determining its outcome—the so-called gender gap—was a dominant narrative. Women played a large part in President Barack Obama’s re-election, with 55 percent voting for him compared to 44 percent supporting his Republican rival, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

A parallel narrative last November was that of the potential of the rising electorate—the demographic populations that are increasingly becoming larger segments of the voting-eligible population—influencing election outcomes. Women of color are a particularly important demographic because they stand at the center of the intersection between the rising electorate and the women’s vote.

In this brief, we update the numbers from our October 2012 report, “A Dual Disenfranchisement: How Voter Suppression Denies Reproductive Justice to Women of Color,” which described how women of color are voting at increasing rates yet have been more at risk of disenfranchisement as attacks on voting rights have persisted. This update reflects the most recent data available from the Census Bureau on the voting turnout rates of people of color and women, focusing specifically on the voting power of women of color.

The gender gap

Much has been made of the historic gender gap in the 2012 election. Women were the majority of voters overall, as well as the majority of voters who supported President Obama. Indeed, the gap between the women who voted for President Obama and the men who voted for Gov. Romney was among the largest ever recorded.

The new Census data show that not only were women more likely to vote for the president, they were also more likely to vote overall, which further increased their influence in the outcome of the election.

The rising electorate

The rising electorate encompasses people of color, unmarried women, and young people. Over the past 12 years, members of the rising electorate, especially people of color, have steadily increased their electoral participation. They have become a growing segment of both the overall U.S. population and the voting-eligible population itself.

Reflecting on the Census reports, commentators have already begun to remark on the fact that overall, black voter turnout surpassed white voter turnout. While Latino turnout rates declined slightly from 2008, their share of the electorate grew, rising from 7.4 percent to 8.4 percent in 2012.

Women of color at the intersection

Women of color stand at the intersection of the rising electorate and the gender gap. They currently make up 18 percent of the United States population, and by 2050 the Census Bureau estimates that they will comprise 27 percent of the population. And while the gender gap was found to transcend race, it was sharpest among women of color.

In examining the exit polls from the 2012 election, it is clear that women of color provided the crucial votes that comprised the gender gap. While 42 percent of white women voted for President Obama, 96 percent of black women and 76 percent of Latinas voted for him, leading to a cumulative 55 percent of all women voting for him. Indeed, President Obama did not win white women and, in fact, would have lost the women’s vote without the overwhelming support of women of color.

As we noted in our 2012 report, women of color have been voting at increasing rates since 2000, showing dramatic growth over time. In 2008 black women’s turnout outpaced white women’s for the first time, and their turnout only grew in 2012, breaking 70 percent—a new record. Particularly noteworthy is the steady growth of voter turnout rates of Asian and Pacific Islander, or API, women, which have nearly doubled since 2000, when the Census Bureau first started recording API voter turnout rates. In 2000 24.5 percent of API women voted. In contrast, 48.5 percent voted in 2012. According to Census Bureau data, APIs are the fastest-growing racial group in the general population.

And in 2012, for the first time, women of each race and ethnicity turned out both at greater rates and also in higher numbers than the men in their respective race and ethnic groups, according to the Census data.

Conclusion

So what does this all mean?

Women of color stand at the center of the rising electorate and were the driving force behind the gender gap. They are more likely to vote than the men in their communities, and they are voting at dramatically increasing rates.

This doesn’t come as a great surprise, considering that women of color are disproportionately affected by a variety of critical issues. Some examples include:

• Reproductive rights: All women of color have experienced various forms of reproductive oppression, both throughout history and still to this day. From forced sterilization, childbearing, and removal of their children to restrictions on immigration visas based on hypersexualized myths to targeting of pregnant women of color for drug testing, the examples abound. Women of color are also disproportionately impacted by laws such as the Hyde Amendment, which restricts Medicaid coverage of abortion services.
•  Pay equity: Women on average earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns for comparable work. In comparison, African American and Latina women earn 64 cents and 55 cents, respectively, for every dollar a man earns.
• Immigration reform: Family reunification, protection for survivors of sexual violence and trafficking, and access to health care are all crucial issues that need to be addressed in immigration reform.

SOURCE: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

President Barack Obama speaks at the start of a cabinet meeting in the White House. Obama has been criticized for a lack of diversity in his cabinet.

To mark the culmination of the current class for the Center for American Progress Leadership Institute program, regular “Race and Beyond” author Sam Fulwood III asked Dennis Vega, one of the program’s graduating Fellows, to write this week’s column. The opinions and views expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily of the U.S Agency for International Development.

When President Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he insisted that his administration would be one that “looked like America.” Although there were undoubtedly political reasons behind this remark, President Clinton clearly realized that diversity is imperative to good government and good policy. Despite this sentiment and subsequent efforts to diversify the policymaking arena, however, diversity continues to escape influential positions in Washington both in and out of government.

Although the diversity of the Obama administration is comparable to that of the Clinton administration, broad demographic shifts have taken place across the United States during the past two decades. Demographers at the Census Bureau project the United States will become a plurality nation by 2043. “The new projections—the first set based on the 2010 Census—paint a picture of a nation whose post-recession population is growing more slowly than anticipated, where the elderly are expected to make up a growing share of the populace, and that is rapidly becoming more racially and ethnically diverse,” The New York Times reported in December. “All of these trends promise to shape the nation’s politics, economics and culture in the decades to come.” But administration staffing has not kept pace. In other words, the current administration fails to look like today’s America.

The potential effect of high-velocity demographic trends on the political landscape makes diversity in the policy world a major topic of discussion. This is especially the case in the wake of the 2012 election in which groups of African Americans, Latinos, and other ethnic voters proved decisive in re-electing President Obama. Media outlets have largely focused on voting projections, warning that Democrats and Republicans alike will need to change their policies, messaging, and outreach in order to take advantage of the growing number of people of color in the electorate.

This media coverage, however, simplifies a much larger and much more important narrative. Reflecting diversity is not just about winning votes. It is about developing and implementing relevant policies that are supported by the people they are designed to serve, and it requires drawing on and including the voices of people of color.

The world has changed significantly since President Clinton’s attempt to build a representative administration. At the heart of CAP’s Progress 2050 program is an understanding that “[t]he United States will become a nation with no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050. This expected transition provides the progressive movement with an exciting opportunity to help America live up to its ideals of equality and justice for all.”

Real change will only come about if progressive leaders seize this moment and opportunity to more deliberately engage diverse stakeholders in the policy process. Policymaking behind closed doors is a thing of the past. Further democratization of the policy process, including by finding ways to engage a wide range of stakeholders at every stage of policy development, can positively transform our approaches to the key challenges of our day and achieve greater impact.

Central to this approach should be the reminder that ethnic groups are not monoliths. Policymakers should seek out innovative ways to engage constituents that draw a diversity of perspectives and facilitate nuanced approaches to challenges.

Traditional policymakers have a responsibility to develop a policy apparatus that looks like America. But that’s not enough; people of color must also become more centrally engaged. If we are to expect legislative and policy outcomes that reflect the diversity of America, we must demand that the policy machinery includes people of color in a formal way, through active engagement at each stage of the policy process.

Importantly, all Americans also have a distinct responsibility to demand that policy institutions take steps to increase diversity within their own ranks. Discussing the virtues of diversity is not enough. Organizations should play a key role in engaging with and introducing younger generations of people of color to policymaking whenever possible.

Programs such as the Center for American Progress Leadership Institute are an important step in the right direction. The Leadership Institute is a program that seeks to identify, equip, and advance a new generation of policy experts from communities of color to assume responsible leadership in the development and implementation of progressive public policies. Despite its virtues, however, the Leadership Institute, as well as similar programs, are not a replacement for policy leaders to do even more to incorporate diversity at all levels of its organization and operations.

Policy institutions should critically examine their internal makeup and judge whether they reflect the diversity needed to advance the most effective policy positions. The most hotly debated and critical policy issues of the day, including immigration, access to education, health care, gun violence, and criminal justice, disproportionately affect people of color. That alone speaks to the need and the benefit of recruiting a diverse staff that can develop and enact effective policies that respond to today’s America.

At a time when progressive organizations are pushing the Supreme Court to recognize the benefits of diversity to the educational experience, actions must match rhetoric. Think tanks, academia, strategic consulting firms, and government agencies must take proactive steps to increase diversity in the policy world and fulfill the promise that President Clinton envisioned with a team of policymakers that “look like America.” And progressive organizations must lead by example by deliberately seeking out and fostering diverse backgrounds and diverse thought in our own efforts, capitalizing on the diversity of America at every stage of the policy process.

Dennis Vega is the chief of staff at the Office of Budget and Resource Management at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He is a Fellow in the 2013 class of CAP Leadership Institute.

Tomorrow the Center for American Progress will host “The Case for Diverse Voices in Public Policy: Emerging Themes on the Road to 2050.” Sen. William “Mo” Cowan (D-MA) and Laura Murphy, Washington legislative office director of the American Civil Liberties Union, will address how the nation’s leaders must understand the complexity of policymaking in a diverse nation. Additionally, a panel of the CAP Leadership Institute Fellows will discuss how they are preparing themselves to grapple with these critical issues.

SOURCE: AP/Gerald Herbert

Xavier University student Triton Brown studies in a common area on campus before going to one of his part-time jobs in New Orleans.

It seems as though everyone from homeowners to state and local governments are refinancing their debt. Refinancing allows the borrower to replace his or her existing debt with a new loan that has a lower interest rate and better conditions. Doing so would allow borrowers to lower their monthly payments, freeing up income for other necessities such as groceries or gas and creating a ripple effect, putting money back into the economy.

For former students, however, that is not currently an option. Student-loan debt in the United States now exceeds $1 trillion, and borrowers of color are disproportionately affected. Refinancing is just one option to address the looming student-debt crisis, but for borrowers of color it is one that could significantly ease the student-debt burden that drags on individuals and on our economy as a whole.

Students of color have higher loan debt

Today’s average college graduate holds $26,600 in debt when he or she graduates, and the numbers for borrowers of color are more severe. A 2010 study by the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center found that 27 percent of black bachelor’s degree recipients had student-loan debt of $30,500 or more, compared to just 16 percent of their white counterparts. Additionally, 69 percent of black students who did not finish their college degree cite the high cost of tuition, compared to 43 percent of their white peers.

These borrowers will be affected for years to come as they attempt to buy homes, open businesses, and begin families. The burden of student debt is one that is carried long after graduation, forcing borrowers to delay homeownership and retirement savings in order to pay off their loans. Since fewer workers now have access to traditional pensions, maintaining long-term savings is crucial to a secure retirement for many Americans.

The option to refinance can especially help Latinos, who continue to face an achievement gap. In 2011 only 13.2 percent of all U.S. Latinos over the age of 25 had bachelor’s degrees, compared to 31.8 percent of their white peers. A 2009 Pew Hispanic Center survey found that the most common reason for this gap was pressure to support their families financially, which forces many Latinos to choose between attending college and caring for their families. Low-interest-rate loans would therefore help open doors for Latinos to be able to go to college without having to make that difficult choice.

According to our calculation, refinancing student loans would save borrowers roughly $14 billion in 2013 alone, creating a boost of about $21 billion for the nation’s economy. For borrowers of color who face higher interest rates from private loans, refinancing is a vital option to reducing their student debt. If a student with $30,000 of student-loan debt, for example, were allowed to refinance his or her loan and reduce the interest rate on it from 6.8 percent to 3 percent for repayment over 10 years, he or she could save $6,667.05 in interest payments over the life of the loan.

The burden of student debt on borrowers of color puts communities of color at a disadvantage when compared to their white peers and exacerbates pre-existing socioeconomic inequalities.

The burden of debt on borrowers of color

About 20 million Americans attend college each year, and about 60 percent use loans to help offset the costs. About 81 percent of black students borrow money, compared to 65 percent of their white peers. The impact of student debt on borrowers of color is twofold: Students of color tend to borrow more, and when they do borrow, they often face higher interest rates than their white counterparts. Coupled with lower graduation rates and higher levels of youth unemployment, borrowers of color face unique burdens.

Higher interest rates

Students of color take out private student loans at a higher rate than white students, making them more financially vulnerable to risky interest rates. Private-loan distribution trends differ by students’ race or ethnicity, meaning that students of color take out more risky unregulated private student loans. In 2008 black students had the highest private student-loan participation rate despite the fact that only four years earlier, they had a smaller percentage than both white and Latino students. Mounting levels of high interest rates on student loans leave borrowers of color struggling to make payments on time, often resulting in unforeseen fees for deferment or forbearance—processes that can prevent or delay loan payments. Though these processes may make it easier month to month for borrowers of color, they also make loans more expensive in the long term once tacked onto the increasing interest rates that may have accrued.

Enrollment in for-profit institutions

Students of color are also more likely to enroll in for-profit schools—the payments for which currently account for nearly half of student-loan defaults. For-profit colleges and universities tend to have higher tuitions, higher dropout rates, and higher occurrences of insurmountable debt for students. This puts economic and academic barriers on students of color by reducing college affordability and shifting more of the financial burden onto students and away from college institutions.

High youth unemployment rates

Youth unemployment—defined as the unemployment rate for those ages 16 to 24 years old—is higher among people of color. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in August 2012 youth unemployment was 28.6 percent for blacks and 18.5 percent for Latinos, compared to 14.9 percent for their white counterparts. Given this high youth unemployment, more young people are realizing that leaving the labor force to go to school has never been a better option. But once they graduate and are faced with significant student debt—often from predatory financial institutions offering high-interest loans to students—they are faced with a double whammy: a lot of debt and a staggering economy.

The impact of long-term debt on borrowers of color

More than 13 percent of the students whose loans came due in 2009 defaulted within three years as a result of their long-term failure to make payments. Since borrowers of color tend to take out more money at a higher interest rate to finance their college expenses and have higher rates of unemployment, it is no surprise that students of color have higher default rates as well. The long-term impact of student debt is crippling, hindering youth and inevitably preventing future generations from home ownership and a secure retirement.

Debt not only holds individuals back, it also holds back their families, communities, and the economy at large. Past-due payments on loans lead to plummeting credit ratings, lower wages, and loss of federal benefits such as tax refunds that offset loan debt. Borrowers are losing money out of their own pockets, using more of their income to pay back their student-loan debt instead of saving to buy a home or for retirement. This causes a ripple effect throughout the economy: If fewer people have money to spend throughout the greater economy, less growth will occur and industries will stagnate.

One example of this is in the housing market. First-time homebuyers are essential to the recovery of the housing market. According to the Federal Reserve, however, fewer young people are getting mortgages. Only 9 percent of 29- to 34-year-olds got a first-time mortgage from 2009 to 2011, compared to 17 percent in 2001. For those with significant student debt, the debt-to-income ratio puts homeownership out of reach.

Additionally, young people who are swimming in education-loan debt are less likely to participate in wealth building mechanisms such as 401(k)s and other retirement savings plans. Refinancing their student debt would give students of color the opportunity to save more over their lifetime, allowing them to spend more on long-term savings and leading to wealth accumulation. In fact, the wealth gap among communities of color and their white counterparts is astonishing. In 2007, the latest year for which data are available, the median wealth for married or cohabitating white non-Hispanic couples was $167,500, compared to $31,500 for blacks and $18,000 for Latinos. The numbers are bleaker for single women: White single women have a median wealth of $41,500, compared to $100 for single black women and $120 for single Latino women.

Asset and wealth building occurs over generations, providing communities with economic stability. When barriers such as significant debt hinder young people from saving and building wealth, it can have a long-term effect on their children and grandchildren. In fact, from 1999 to 2007 the Urban Institute estimates that the median net worth of black families was $18,181 and that it was $33,619 for Latino families, compared to $122,927 for whites. These gaps stem from lower asset holding over generations for communities of color.

Long-term loan debt puts entire communities at risk, especially those of color, who have historically faced higher levels of unemployment and barriers to achieving wealth over time. While programs for refinancing student debt are just one of many options to address our nation’s student-loan crisis, the need for reasonable interest rates is crucial for borrowers of color.

Sophia Kerby is a Research Assistant for Progress 2050 at the Center for American Progress.

SOURCE: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

Audience members cheer as President Barack Obama holds a campaign rally at Centreville High School in Clifton, Virginia, on Saturday, July 14, 2012.

Sherrilyn A. Ifill opined in a column posted on CNN’s website in early October of last year that she was unsure whether black voters would turn out and vote in overwhelming numbers to re-elect President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, but was dead certain they wouldn’t vote for his opponent, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R).

At that time, Ifill was a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and chairwoman of the U.S. Programs Board of the Open Society Foundations. She was tracking the GOP nominee’s campaign, noting that his standing with black voters hit rock bottom even as a late summer NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll revealed Gov. Romney was rebounding nationally after a strong debate performance against the president.

“But Romney’s reinvigorated campaign is unlikely to move black voters,” she wrote.

Ifill’s prognostication was correct, even if she didn’t realize at the time how right she was. Definitive proof came last week in the form of a Census Bureau report that showed black voters turned out in enormous numbers, casting a higher percentage of votes than white voters for the first time on record.

According to the Census Bureau’s figures, 66.2 percent of eligible black voters cast a ballot in 2012, compared with 64.1 percent of eligible non-Hispanic white voters. Moreover, an estimated 2 million fewer white Americans voted in the election, while about 1.8 million more blacks surged to the polls. And, as exit polls suggested, an estimated 90-plus percent of black voters chose President Obama over Gov. Romney.

I called Ifill, who has since changed jobs and is currently the president and director-counsel for the Legal Defense Fund in New York, to find out what made her so prescient. How did she figure this out well before Election Day? She demurred, saying she didn’t know any more than what any other black person would have said at the time.

“There was a determination on the part of black voters to not allow the stories about voter-repression efforts to keep them from voting,” she said. “Those concerns, the fear that someone was trying to keep black people from exercising their rights, created a historic memory for black folks and they were determined not to let that happen.”

Postelection analysis seems to support that view. Political observers say black voters turned out partly in support of President Obama, who in 2008 became the first black American elected to the White House, and partly out of outrage at the efforts to keep them from voting.

“We are accustomed to people trying to deny us things, and I think sometimes you wake the sleeping giant, and that’s what happened here,” Marvin Randolph, the NAACP’s senior vice president for political campaigns, told a reporter writing about the Census Bureau report.

Michael Blake, who ran Operation Vote—the Obama campaign’s effort to energize black and minority voters—put it more colorfully. “In 2008, we changed the guard,” he recently told The New York Times. “In 2012, we guard the change.”

In her new job, Ifill directs an army of lawyers who fight in court for civil rights and she believes there are more voting-rights cases that require defending. “This is a key time for us because we’re nonpartisan, but deeply concerned about the black vote and any efforts to suppress the black vote,” she said.

In particular, Ifill and the Legal Defense Fund are monitoring the Supreme Court as it decides whether to eliminate a key section of the Voting Rights Act—Section 5—which requires Justice Department “preclearance” of any changes to districting or voting laws in jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination.

“The Section 5 decision could be a game changer in whether black voting rights are suppressed, because the law is a key protection for minority voters,” Ifill said. “We’re watching this very, very closely.”

Just as Ifill knew before Election Day, she’s right once again. Even without knowing in advance how the Supreme Court will rule on Section 5, she’s clear about its importance to our democracy. And so should all of us. Above all else, voting is a fundamental right, and we should never waver in our efforts to defend and safeguard it for every American.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/Evan Vucci

Robert Rector, author of a Heritage Foundation report on immigration amnesty, speaks during a news conference at the Heritage Foundation, Monday, May 6, 2013, in Washington.

In what might be called something of a policy-political family squabble, the Heritage Foundation crossed signals with fellow conservatives by releasing yesterday a controversial, cost-benefit study related to comprehensive immigration reform. I wish this was a joking matter, but it’s a gravely serious concern.

The newsy tidbit in the conservative think tank’s document isn’t the erroneous attempt to attach a $6.3 trillion price tag to legislation under consideration to allow a path to citizenship for some 11 million undocumented immigrants. Numerous reviewers, including an excellent takedown by The Washington Post’s editorial board, attacked that miscalculation and set the record straight.

As my ThinkProgress colleagues noted, a previous 2006 Heritage report stood in stark contradiction to the one released yesterday. In its earlier study, Heritage visiting fellows Tim Kane and Kirk A. Johnson wrote, “the argument that immigrants harm the American economy should be dismissed out of hand” and urged for a comprehensive immigration bill. “A lopsided, ideological approach that focuses exclusively on border security while ignoring migrant workers (or vice versa) is bound to fail.”

So the top-line message of the latest report isn’t focused on Heritage’s empirical shortcomings and the study’s inaccuracies, but rather that the corrections came so quickly and vehemently from fellow conservatives. It is a point that Think Progress’s Rebecca Leber highlights: “The study stands alone in a field of research that finds legal immigration to be a net plus in tax revenue, education, and higher average wages. As a result many conservatives do not buy Heritage’s findings … ”

But don’t take Leber’s or my word for it. After all, we’re on a perch across town from Heritage, and speaking for myself, I find little to cheer that comes from the other side. Rather, let the right wing speak for itself:

• Via Twitter, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) complained that the Heritage report “ignores economic benefits.”
• Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) chief of staff Cesar Conda joined the fray, also via Twitter, arguing the report failed to evaluate the economic impact of immigration reform through “dynamic scoring,” which takes into account a broader array of benefits produced by immigrant workers.
• Conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, was perhaps the most prominent and outspoken of the critics. He told The Washington Post’s Jim Tankersley that the conservative think tank he leads will release its own analysis today—Tuesday—that anticipates growing tax revenues that would cut federal deficits by $2.5 trillion. “It’s very important to recognize that this is a core economic policy decision,” Holtz-Eakin told The Post. “Let’s acknowledge the value” of immigrants to the U.S. economy.

Lest anyone misunderstand, I’m not indulging here in some gleeful schadenfreude over the dissention among conservative thought leaders. Rather, there’s a frighteningly real issue at stake, one that repeatedly has emerged in our stagnant, left versus right debates over public policies.

What is the value of fact-based reality in political debates? All too often, those seeking to sway public opinion—in this case, immigration; but it could just as easily be health reform, gun control, or abortion rights—supply their own set of facts to support their beliefs.

And, in some cases, even when people are confronted with information that calls into question those “facts,” researchers have found that many people just choose to ignore inconvenient truths. In a 2010 paper titled, “When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions,” Brendan Nyhan of the University of Michigan and Jason Reifler at Georgia State University noted a “backfire effect” tends to take place when popularly held beliefs are challenged by corrective facts. The paper documents “several instances of ‘backfire effect’ in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question,” the scholars write.

I’m pleased that conservative supporters of immigration reform recognize the value of clearing a path to citizenship, which is vital to our nation’s future. It’s rare and refreshing to hear self-criticism from within conservative circles on this issue. If only they would do that on other issues, say background checks for gun purchases.

But it’s equally frustrating to see how far a small, determined band of right-wingers is willing to go with twisted facts and illogical arguments to support wrong-headed policies. This is the most troubling part about the Heritage report. It gives a lift to willful ignorance to advance its policy objectives.

How can we know whether we’re living in the real world or some Matrix-like alternate reality, where facts as reasonable people understand them actually don’t apply? Worse, what hope is there for immigration reform—or any rational public policy—if what passes for scholarship at Heritage is challenged and yet citizens and their elected lawmakers choose to embrace a gross and calculated misunderstanding of what’s real?

Indeed, if lies and distortions prevail, then democracy can only suffer.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/ Burhan Ozbilici

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks at a news conference in Ankara, Turkey. Ankara is the fifth leg of Kerry's first official overseas trip to Europe and the Middle East. Most Americans cannot pass a basic global geography test or international current events test.

My cyber-friend Eric Garland, whom I wrote about late last year, recently undertook an intriguing experiment. He eschewed U.S.-based English-language mass media for a week and replaced it with news from around the globe that was written, produced, and/or broadcast in languages that are foreign to most Americans and targeted to a public beyond our shores.

Garland, a writer who focuses on future trends, is one of the smartest people I’ve come across. He’s something of a Renaissance man: the author of three books, an in-demand orator, and a groovy bass player. He also travels the world and studies global cultures and languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Japanese.

For his American media fast, he focused on reading and watching news reports only produced in French, Spanish, and Portuguese for native consumption and concentrated in Western Europe, where many of the media outlets for those languages are based. His findings, posted last week on his eponymous blog, were as unsettling as they were brutally honest:

The United States is the only country in the world that treats other nations as completely optional. … culturally, America acts as if Other Countries are places that exist only in text books or vacation brochures. This is most acutely evident in the narrative projected by our media outlets: America remains the center of the world and Other Places are only worth describing if 1) something is on fire or 2) we have declared war on the people there. So if you live in the United States, your view of global events is myopic at best and completely distorted at worst.

That’s a damning indictment of both the American public and the sources of information that Americans consume. Sadly enough, I think he’s spot on.

It’s an old story that’s worth retelling: Most Americans can’t pass a global geography or current events test that citizens of other developed nations can recite from a dead sleep. One of the first to observe and document our lack of knowledge was scholar Martin Kreisberg, who characterized the U.S. public’s misunderstanding of international relations as “dark areas of ignorance” in his seminal 1949 article for Public Opinion and Foreign Policy.

More than a half-century later, the situation remains deficient. A study conducted in 2009 by an international team of university researchers notes that Americans still lag behind Europeans in their understanding of international events. Authors Shanto Iyengar at Stanford University, Kyu S. Hahn of the University of California at Los Angeles and Yonsei University, and Heinz Bonfadelli and Mirko Marr at the University of Zurich wrote:

In the post-cold war era, notwithstanding their massive advantages in education, Americans continue to lag behind citizens of other industrialized democracies on measures of foreign affairs information. In 1994, for example, citizens of Spain, Italy, Canada, Germany, Britain, and France were generally more likely to provide correct answers to a series of questions tapping international affairs. Using the percentage of the sample unable to provide the correct answer to a single question as the indicator of public ignorance, the United States trailed other nations by 50 percentage points: 37 percent of the American sample was classified as ignorant compared with an average of 19 percent for Italy, France, Britain, Germany, and Canada.

In 2011 Newsweek magazine reported that the European Journal of Communications asked citizens of Britain, Denmark, Finland, and the United States to answer questions on international affairs. In the results of that 2009 study, “[t]he Europeans clobbered us. Sixty-eight percent of Danes, 75 percent of Brits, and 76 percent of Finns could, for example, identify the Taliban, but only 58 percent of Americans managed to do the same—even though we’ve led the charge in Afghanistan,” Newsweek reported.

Garland’s one-man observations offer an unscientific yet insightful demonstration of why Americans are so lacking in global understanding. We could, he suggests, blame it on the news we consume:

To sum up, your choice of media very much shapes your perception of the world; my experiment reminded me that it shapes mine. This week showed me how much American media is focused on propping up authority figures, reinflating unsustainable financial bubbles, and maintaining the lowest possible cultural and intellectual standards. … If you live in the U.S. and want a global perspective, getting away from the US-American media bubble is going to require effort on your part.

That effort is precisely the reason why most Americans don’t know much about current events, aside, of course, from last week’s winner of American Idol or the plotlines of “Scandal.” But it is now a civic necessity to be an informed global citizen in an increasingly interconnected world.

The ignorance, however, isn’t limited to international news. It’s homegrown, too.

Michael Schudson, author of The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life, notes that our political system, compared to the politics in many European nations, keeps a lot of Americans in the dark. Voters have to figure out the complexities of municipal, state, and federal elections as they vote for all sorts of offices—from judges and sheriffs to school boards and from mayors to congressional leaders and the president. That’s often just too much for any citizen to fully comprehend.

“Nobody is competent to understand it all, which you realize every time you vote,” Schudson said in a 2011 interview with Newsweek. “You know you’re going to come up short, and that discourages you from learning more.”

As someone who spent the bulk of his professional life in U.S. newsrooms, I can add with authority that editors and publishers are in lockstep with consumer demands. If valued readers and viewers aren’t interested in learning more about international affairs—or even parts of their own communities—then the purveyors aren’t going to spend dwindling resources serving unwanted fare.

As Garland accurately notes, the sorry state of U.S. media and the absence of public awareness of the world is a national information-health concern.

“You wouldn’t be very healthy if your food diet was both limited in diversity and low in quality,” Garland writes. “Sadly, America’s intellectual diet is increasingly resembling its food choices—heavily processed, weighted towards a juvenile palate, providing little value for a balanced life.”

As leaders in an increasingly global world, Americans ought to be setting an example, or at least striving to set one. Instead, we’re letting ourselves fall behind. The question is, are we going to start changing up our media diet, or are we going to keep gorging on the same old nonsense.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

Roland Martin arrives at the 44th Annual NAACP Image Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Friday, February 1, 2013. Martin's recent removal from CNN's lineup of contracted pundits sparked an online debate.

Michael K. Fauntroy, an associate professor of public policy at George Mason University, last week stumbled into an online debate with Roland Martin, a prominent and popular multimedia journalist, about the recent decision to remove Martin from CNN’s lineup of contracted pundits.

The exchanges between Fauntroy and Martin, both of whom are black and tilt toward progressive politics, didn’t rise to the level of the more famous debates between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, who disagreed nearly a century ago on the strategies for black social and economic uplift. Far from it. The Fauntroy-Martin dust-up was, by comparison, an unpleasant game of the dozens played largely on Twitter that apparently left all parties involved feeling unsatisfied and defamed.

It all began following the news that CNN was dumping Martin from its lineup of contracted pundits. Martin is a popular talking head with many black viewers, partly because of his strong and unapologetic black point of view and partly because he’s one of the few black personalities to regularly appear on those shows. Martin’s fans didn’t take kindly to the news from CNN and took to web-based forums to complain. The National Association of Black Journalists reacted to the CNN decision by naming Martin its 2013 Journalist of the Year.

Fauntroy, on the other hand, found all the laurels a bit too much, and he said so on his personal blog. In a post titled “Stop Shedding Tears for Roland Martin,” Fauntroy decried the attention being heaped on Martin and other television pundits who, he contended, lack expertise in politics or government:

Let’s resist the urge to make Roland Martin out to be some wrongly aggrieved talking head. He is a marginally knowledgeable loudmouth who was more sizzle than steak. No academic training in politics and government. No significant campaign experience. No experience as a political reporter at a major media outlet; he wrote opinion pieces at CNN. He is lucky to have had his turn. So, to those who are shedding tears following the announcement of his departure from CNN: your time would be better spent applying pressure to the cable networks to put minorities on the air who actually know something about politics and government.

In a rejoinder, Martin tweeted that, “I ought to send @MKFauntroy a LONG list of the black political scientists I’ve had on @tvonetv. Sounds like he’s mad he hasn’t been on! LOL.”

Fauntroy’s comments unleashed additional Twitter bile, mostly directed at him for saying such a thing in so harsh and public a manner about a fellow black man. Someone with the Twitter handle “@EsonBlack” asked Fauntroy, “[W]hy did you feel the need 2 write an article that bashes @rolandmartin credentials? What do u really gain out of it?” Another Twitter user with the handle @Rotankwot was more direct, deriding Fauntroy as a “hater with a PhD in political science.”

Web-based spats tend to be brief flare-ups that are ridiculously ugly and leave singed feelings that can last a lifetime. For that reason—along with the fact that I know and consider both Fauntroy and Martin friends—I was initially reluctant to wade into their fouled waters. Best to let them hash it out, keypad to keypad, while I stood on the sidelines and held their coats.

But as the war of tweets continued, I realized a larger and more serious point was going unnoticed: Why can’t black folks disagree in public and keep it civil?

Of course, black folks aren’t alone in their hyperbolic debates—have you noticed the rancor in Congress lately? Still, history suggests that when black people argue amongst themselves, the court of public opinion feels the need to support one side and vilify the other. Such was the case with Du Bois and Washington. And with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X; the former famously believed ardently in nonviolence, while the latter subscribed to a “by any means necessary” philosophy.

Neither Fauntroy nor Martin is a member of the vaunted pantheon of black icons, yet they’ve set themselves up as antagonists. To be fair, Fauntroy apologized for the “gratuitous and unnecessarily harsh” personal attack on Martin, but the damage is already done. As best as I can tell, Fauntroy and Martin won’t be exchanging Christmas cards, and I certainly won’t be inviting them to the same dinner party.

That’s the tragedy of it all: Both of them are smart, strong-voiced black men who ought to command public attention. That they disagree isn’t nearly as important as the fact that they both have something to say that the other should hear and respect. The same thing applies to any of us who might overhear a conversation between the two of them—or, indeed, any two others in this country.

A healthy discussion of divergent points of view is what makes a civil society civil. The Twitter-sphere would do well to remember that.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: iStockphoto

As women’s earnings continue to become increasingly important to families, closing the gender-based wage gap is crucial to gaining access to wealth accumulation in communities of color, which are still deprived of economic security.

Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF version of this issue brief.

Today, April 9, is Equal Pay Day—the date that marks how many extra days women must work in 2013 to earn what men earned in 2012. Unfortunately, the wages of working women and particularly the wages of women of color continue to lag behind the pay of their male counterparts. Moreover, for women of color there is a double pay gap. As a group, women of color earn less than their white female peers—a reality that means they need to work longer to earn the same pay as white women and then even longer to match the earnings of white men. The gender- and race-based wage gap affects families of color with long-term consequences that hinder wealth accumulation.

Women currently make up about half of all workers in the U.S. labor force and among mothers in the labor force the majority are either breadwinners or share that responsibility with a partner. In 2010, 13.1 percent of women in the workforce were black, 4.7 percent were Asian, and 12.8 percent were Latina. What’s more, these women of color are increasingly the breadwinners in their families—53.3 percent of black households and 40.1 percent of Latino households.

This issue brief will examine our nation’s gender-based wage gap and its racial overlay. It will look specifically at the long-term implications of the wage gap on communities of color and then suggest policy recommendations to narrow and eventually eliminate the wage gap to ensure equal work earns equal pay.

The wage and income gap

The gender-based wage gap disproportionately hurts women of color who have made less than their white counterparts for decades. Women of color are more likely to work in lower-paying jobs and experience higher levels of unemployment and poverty.

Women on average earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns for comparable work—a gender wage gap of 23 percent. Women of color suffer from an even more severe gap. According to the National Partnership for Women and Families, African American women and Latinas in the United States are paid $18,817 and $23,298 less than non-Hispanic white men yearly, respectively. That’s 64 cents and 55 cents for every dollar a man earns.

The gender gap persists for median weekly earnings as well. Women’s median weekly earnings in 2012 were $691, a marginal decline compared to 2011. Men’s median weekly earnings were $854, a marginal increase compared to 2011. Women of all major racial and ethnic groups earn less than men of the same group. The largest gap is within Asian American communities where women earn a median weekly income of $770 compared to $1,055 for Asian American men. While the wage gap between men and women is smaller within Latino and black families, their median weekly earnings are significantly lower. The weekly median earnings for Latinas are $521 compared to $592 for Latino men. For black women, their weekly earnings are $599 compared to $665 for black men. African American women’s median weekly earnings were only 68.1 percent, and Latina women’s only 59.3 percent of median weekly white men’s earnings of $854.

Nearly half of the wage gap between men and women is due to differences in occupations because women are concentrated in industries such as the care and social services sectors that historically pay less and provide fewer benefits. Another 10 percent of the gender wage gap is due to differences in work experience between men and women, which are often the result of caretaking responsibilities. Often times workers with care responsibilities, usually women, withdraw from the workforce or limit their time at work to allow them to provide needed care at home. As a consequence these caretakers earn less income in the short run, are less likely to earn raises and promotions, have less access to workplace retirement benefits, earn less in Social Security retirement benefits, and accumulate lower lifetime earnings.

Yet even when controlling for occupational differences, experience, and education level, economists cannot explain the remaining 40 percent of the wage gap between men and women. Certainly part of the gender gap is due to the fact that the American workplace and institutions, such as schools and churches, never adjusted to support working families. A lack of flexible structures for working families forces them to make tough decisions. Schools that do not offer early drop-off or late pick-up options to parents, for example, force families to decide between being missing work or paying for child care. For low-income families, such decisions could mean losing a job.

Long-term implications of the wage gap

Lower income for all women, particularly those of color, means less money to support their families with necessities such as housing, food, education, and health care. Closing the pay gap is even more important for women of color who are more likely than their white counterparts to be breadwinners.

The long-term wage gap hurts families of color tremendously, forcing families to choose between putting food on the table or saving for a college education and retirement. On average, an African American woman working full time loses the equivalent of 118 weeks of food each year due to the wage gap. A Latina loses 154 weeks’ worth of food. The stubbornly persistent gender-based wage gap adds up substantially over the lifetime of a woman’s career. For women of color the loss of savings over a 30-hour-a-week to a 40-hour-a-week work lifespan is significant. A woman of color will have to live on one-third to 45 percent less than a white man based on the average benefits that are afforded through Social Security and pension plans. Research shows that a woman’s average lifetime earnings are more than $434,000 less than a comparable male counterpart over a 35-year working life.

Analysis done in 2012 by the Center for American Progress illustrates that the money lost over the course of a working woman’s lifetime could do one of the following:

• Feed a family of four for 37 years
• Pay for seven four-year degrees at a public university
• Buy two homes
• Purchase 14 new cars
• Simply be saved for retirement and used to boost her quality of life when she leaves the workforce

Lifetime earnings are even lower for women of color because they face higher levels of unemployment and poverty rates. In March 2013 unemployment rates of black and Latina women were significantly higher than their white counterparts at 12.2 percent and 9.3 percent respectively compared to white women at 6.1 percent. According to the National Women’s Law Center, poverty rates among women, particularly women of color, remain historically high and unchanged in the last year. The poverty rate among women was 14.6 percent in 2011—the highest in the last 18 years. For black and Latina women that same year, the poverty rate was 25.9 percent and 23.9 percent, respectively.

Pay gap among Millennials

Furthermore, the gender wage gap often starts right out of college. The American Association of University Women reports that women are less likely than men to be fully employed in their first year out of college. When they do have a steady job, women earn less, adding to the burden of student loan debt. In fact, Millennial women—those born between 1978 and 2000—are paid 82 cents for every dollar paid to their male peers, and young women contribute a larger portion of their salaries to repaying student loans.  In 2009, 47 percent of young women were paying more than 8 percent of their income toward student loan debt one year after graduation. For Millennial men, only 39 percent were contributing more than 8 percent of their income to paying off their student debt.

These income disparities so early in a woman’s career create financial barriers that prevent women from obtaining the same types of economic advantages that are available to their male counterparts such as purchasing a house or saving for retirement. Women are losing out financially from their very first paycheck. Even when controlling for factors such as the type of degree earned, type of occupation right out of college, and hours worked in that job, researchers found a significant pay discrepancy across the board between Millennial women and men.

Millennial women of color are particularly impacted by the wage gap starting right out of college. Even while more women than men of color are graduating from college, the impact of student loans exacerbates the gender-based wage gap. From 2009 to 2010 black females earned 68 percent of associate’s degrees and 66 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded to African American students. Hispanic females earned 62 percent of associate’s degrees and 61 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded to Hispanic students. Since women of color are more likely to attend college within their communities, the amount of student debt that young students of color take out disproportionately impacts them. In the 2007-08 academic year, 81 percent of African Americans and 67 percent of Latinos with a bachelor’s degree graduated with student debt compared to 64 percent of their white peers. Although women of color are making progress in closing the achievement gap within their racial and ethnic groups, the impact of student debt on the wage gap right out of college puts women of color in a vulnerable state.

Barriers to wealth accumulation

Pay discrepancy often hinders wealth accumulation and creates barriers to moving into the middle class. Such income disparities translate into wealth gaps that fall particularly heavily on those living at the intersection of gender and race. Lower earnings mean fewer opportunities to participate in wealth-building mechanisms such as investments in stocks and bonds and pension plans. Access to these opportunities is often unavailable in low-paying jobs that are predominantly held by women of color. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, black and Latino women were significantly more likely than their white counterparts to be among the working poor—those who are employed whose incomes fall below the federal poverty line. The working-poor rates for black and Latino women in 2011 were 14.5 percent and 13.8 percent respectively compared to white women who had a working-poor rate of 6.6 percent.

Closing the wage gap is crucial for women of color. The racial wealth differences in the United States are consequences of disparities occurring over a lifetime and result in a median wealth of only $5 for women of color between the ages of 35 to 49—virtually no wealth at all. Conversely, white women in that age cohort have a median wealth of $42,600, and white men in that age group enjoy a median wealth of $70,030. While earnings are important in accumulating wealth, other factors play a significant role in building wealth including paid sick leave, health insurance, pensions, and 401(k) plans. Over time the lack of equitable pay prevents women of color from taking advantage of wealth-building resources that act as a buffer to potential financial setbacks such as a health emergency, a death in the family, or temporary unemployment.

As women’s earnings continue to become increasingly important to families, closing the gender-based wage gap is crucial to gaining access to wealth accumulation in communities of color, which are still deprived of economic security. 

Impact on immigrant women 

Immigrant women face specific economic barriers that make them the least economically secure population in the United States and puts them at a unique disadvantage. These barriers include the realities of having language and cultural barriers, the complexity of their immigration status, the responsibility of caring for extended family members, working in low-paying jobs, and lacking eligibility for many public benefit programs.

There are approximately 4 million undocumented immigrant women living and working in the United States, but because of their immigration status, they work the lowest-paying jobs in the country. Undocumented immigrant women typically earn minimum wage or less, get no sick leave or vacation days, and receive no health insurance. Undocumented immigrant Mexican women face hourly wage disparity of 71 cents. Pay equity is often a lifeline for immigrant women since many are mothers and are most likely to support family members in their home countries.

Immigrant women, especially those who are undocumented, are especially susceptible to abuse in the workplace as they work in low-paying jobs with no benefits and have little access to public-benefit programs. Since immigrant women predominantly work in the domestic workforce, they face a host of barriers to achieving pay equity in the workforce.

Immigrants comprise 46 percent of the domestic workforce and almost the entire population of domestic workers in major cities such as New York. A study by Domestic Workers United found that 33 percent of domestic workers in New York City experienced some form of physical or verbal abuse, often because of their race or immigration status. Under these conditions immigrant women struggle to achieve pay equity against the numerous barriers put up against them such as language and cultural barriers, immigration status, and concentration in low-income jobs with limited benefits.

Impact on lesbian women of color 

Lesbian women of color struggle even more with issues of pay inequity, high poverty, unemployment rates, and discrimination. Working gay and transgender people of color still earn less than their heterosexual and white gay and transgender counterparts, but lesbian women of color struggle even more severely. The average Latina lesbian couple earns $3,000 less than Latino opposite-sex couples. Black lesbian couples face an even greater economic disparity earning $10,000 less than black same-sex male couples. Black same-sex couples significantly lag behind white same-sex couples with median incomes of $41,500 compared to $63,500.

Furthermore, lesbian couples of color experience high rates of poverty and unemployment. In 2012 the poverty rate for black lesbian couples was 21.1 percent; for Latina lesbian couples the rate, was 19.1 percent; for Native American lesbian couples, the rate was 13.7 percent; and for Asian Pacific Islander lesbian couples, it was 11.8 percent. These numbers stand in stark contrast to white lesbian couples who had poverty rates of only 4.3 percent.

Pay equity is imperative for lesbian couples of color who are more likely to have children than their white counterparts. An estimated 2 million children are being raised in gay, lesbian, and transgender families who tend to be more racially and ethnically diverse. In fact 46.7 percent of black lesbian couples and 41.5 percent of Latina lesbian couples are raising children compared to 23.1 percent of white lesbian couples. These families suffer when household incomes are unjustly decreased based on gender-, race-, and sexual orientation-wage bias.

What closing the wage gap means for families

The disparity in income adds up to more than $430,000 in lost wages for an individual woman and even more for a woman of color over her working life. This means less food on the table, less in savings for retirement and medical emergency, less money going toward a college education for their children to name just a few of the negative financial impacts. If the wage gap were closed today, a working black woman with her increased yearly pay could afford one of the following:

• Groceries for more than two years
• Mortgage and utilities payments for almost 10 months
• Rent on an apartment for more than 16 months of rent
• Health insurance premiums for more than three years
• 4,549 additional gallons of gas

Furthermore, women breadwinners are on the rise among all races and ethnicities. From 1975 to 2010 black and Latina women nearly doubled in percentage of working wives who are earning the same or more than their spouses. Among black families, 53.3 percent of women are breadwinners, up from 45.7 percent in 2007 and 28.7 percent in 1975. For Latino and white families in 2010, about 4 in 10 working wives are breadwinners—nearly double their rates from 1975.

As families continue to rely on women to contribute to household income and support their families, closing the wage gap for all women and in particular women of color is an imperative.

Policy suggestions and recommendations

The gender wage gap doesn’t just hurt women; it also hurts families. With nearly two-thirds of mothers being breadwinners or sharing the responsibilities of supporting the household, women’s paychecks are vital to families more than ever.

Below are CAP’s suggested recommendations and policy solutions to significantly reduce the pay equity gap among women of color:

• Support the Paycheck Fairness Act. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) co-sponsored the Paycheck Fairness Act, which will require that an employer to justify paying a man more than a woman for the same job. It would also make it easier for women to file class action suits against their employers for alleged sex-based discrimination. Though the bill failed to pass in 2011 and 2012, it was reintroduced this year. 
• Pass legislation to support paid sick and family medical leave. According to CAP’s paid family and medical leave report, federally required paid family and medical leave programs will likely have positive effects on employment and lifetime income. Requiring employers to provide sick leave not only ensures workers’ rights, but it will also help lessen gender-based pay disparities since women are more likely to use unpaid sick leave to care for their children.

Conclusion

Adequately addressing and eventually eliminating the income and wealth gap experienced by women of color requires a multifaceted approach led by engagement at both the state and federal level. As women’s earnings become increasingly important to family incomes, the wage gap becomes a family issue. Promoting and uplifting women of color is crucial to growing our economy. Ensuring that all working women, and particularly women of color, receive fair wages for their work not only means that they can adequately provide for themselves and their families, but also means they can make an even greater contribution to the nation’s prosperity.

Sophia Kerby is a Research Assistant with Progress 2050 at the Center for American Progress. 

SOURCE: AP/Rick Bowmer

Lone Peak coach Quincy Lewis, center, celebrates with his team after Lone Peak defeated Alta 72–39 in the state Class 5A boys basketball championship, Saturday, March 2, 2013, in Ogden, Utah.

The late sportswriter Pete Axthelm first coined the phrase “the city game” in 1970, in regard to the many ways in which basketball was played in New York City—from the playgrounds in Harlem to the bright lights of Madison Square Garden. His outstanding 1970 book of the same name followed the 1969-70 season of the New York Knicks and how it affected the black neighborhoods in New York City.

In his book, Axthelm codified the run-and-gun, fast-break, dunk-in-your-face style of play as a so-called black thing—something done mostly by black players. Though he didn’t say it explicitly, anyone who read the book recognized the implication. Such is the power of stereotypes, which stick like crazy glue even when subtly expressed.

Consider the images Axthelm evokes in the book’s opening pages:

Basketball is the city game.

Its battlegrounds are strips of asphalt between tattered wire fences or crumbling buildings; its rhythms grow from the uneven thump of a ball against hard surfaces. …

Basketball is a game for young athletes without cars or allowances—the game whose drama and action are intensified by its confined spaces and chaotic surroundings. …

The game is simple, an act of one man challenging another, twisting, feinting, then perhaps breaking free to leap upward, directing a ball toward a target, a metal hoop ten feet above the ground … And a one-on-one challenge takes on wider meaning, defining identity and manhood in an urban society that breeds invisibility. …

Other young athletes may learn basketball, but city kids live it.

There’s no mistaking that Axthelm is writing about black kids and their passion for hoops. In the decades since the book’s publication, the image of a black baller has conflated and morphed to the point that the game itself is inextricably a projection of black culture.

It comes as something of a shock to the system, then, when a basketball team breaks the stereotype. So dribbles the Lone Peak High Knights.

The high school is in Highland, Utah—almost as far as anyone can get from the tough inner-city nooks of Harlem. And the tall, quick, and showboating players aren’t sassy, street-smart black toughs seeking an escape from poverty. No, these players are white. And Mormon. And outstanding hoopsters.

The first two of these three attributes are more often associated with a high school chess club—which the team is often confused with being—rather than a top-caliber basketball team. And yet, against all the stereotypical odds, the Lone Peak High Knights are exploding on the high school baller scene.

The team’s best player, 6’10” center Eric Mika, recently told The New York Times that opponents are often surprised when he and his teammates come to play. “There was one team we played that was literally laughing when we were warming up,” Mika said. “And we beat them by 50.”

That’s the power—and folly—of prejudice. It clouds rational thought and creates embarrassing outcomes. In this case, the mistaken assumption is that talent on the basketball court is color coded. But it’s not. Not too long ago, largely because of racial prejudices, black athletes were invisible to most Americans, leading some to question whether they even had the ability to compete with white athletes.

Nobody thinks like that nowadays. Conversely, some will argue that in some sports such as basketball, white athletes can’t compete with black players.

Try telling that to the Lone Peak Knights. They finished the season with a 26–1 record, capped earlier this month by a 72–39 victory over the Alta Hawks in the Utah 5A state championships. In winning its third-straight state title, the team ran circles around its competition this season, with an amazing 28.5-point average margin of victory.

That run of success wasn’t against cupcakes either. The Knights seek out strong competition, traveling from gym to gym to play the best teams in the nation. The team hit the road during the winter holidays to play tournaments in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California—and it won, leaving shocked onlookers with mouths agape, all saying the same thing about their fast-paced dunking style.

Last season the Knights participated in the Beach Ball Classic, a high school tournament that attracts some of the nation’s best teams to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The team knocked off Chicago’s Whitney Young High 72–67 in a double-overtime thriller. Though the Knights lost the championship game to a team from Georgia, the school set scoring records and made people from beyond the Utah mountains take notice of the Mormon kids who can jump.

“They play like inner-city teams; how blacks consider black teams play,” Tyrone Slaughter, the Whitney Young High coach, told The New York Times. “I don’t know any other way to put it. … So many times we see the predominately white teams play a conservative style, precise style of basketball. When you see this team play, it is completely different.”

MaxPreps.com, an online site that tracks high school sports, ranked Lone Peak the nation’s top high school basketball team. The website also selected the Knights among its seventh-annual Basketball Tour of Champions, an honor that is reserved for 20 of the nation’s best high school basketball teams. Only nationally ranked and state champion teams are considered for the distinction and—given that there are more than 40,000 high school varsity basketball teams in the nation—the selection means the Knights are better than 99.9 percent of all the teams across the land.

If Axthelm, who died in 1991, had seen the Knights of Lone Peak High School play basketball, he might have reconsidered the underlying premise of his book.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) speaks during an interview with The Associated Press at his Capitol office in Washington, Wednesday, February 13, 2013.

I suspect that those who need to hear it most are unlikely to read—or heed—what I’m about to say. After poring through all 100 pages of the Republican National Committee’s soul-searching report released yesterday, the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” I feel compelled to offer the party faithful some advice.

Yeah, I know that I’m not the sort of person whose ideas are typically associated with a group that would nominate former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) for president. But, hey, I’m an American. I want to see a revitalized Republican Party because it’s good for the country to have at least two strong political forces battling in the marketplace of policy.

By all appearances, the GOP is careening out of control. I fear that the party’s center won’t—or can’t—hold its extremist wing from sending the entire enterprise over the abyss. How can it remain relevant by seeking guidance from the likes of Donald “You’re Fired” Trump, Sarah “Big Gulp” Palin, and Clint “I’m Talking to a Chair” Eastwood? Much more of this, and there won’t be a party of Lincoln in the near future.

That’s the part that nudges me into civil duty, to warn Republican leaders that they’re teetering perilously on the same precipice as their forbearers, the Whigs. History buffs will recall that the Whig Party disintegrated over issues of diversity of its day. Back in the 1820s and 1830s, slaves were the other Americans, unspoken as such but a fearful contradiction to the American ideal. The Whigs fought among themselves over slavery, failing to recognize or accommodate the social and demographic forces at play in the decades leading up to the Civil War. There’s nothing good about the Republican Party going the way of the Whigs, a party that died because it refused to shift in the winds of change blowing across the nation.

To be sure, signs of the impending GOP apocalypse appeared at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. I’ll have more to say about that in a minute, but for the moment, suffice it to know that I feel it is my patriotic duty to offer some advice to those Republicans who sincerely seek to improve their standing among the diverse groups of Americans. Whether they embrace it—well, let the record show that I warned them about the Whigs.

So without further ado, here are three quick ideas to help chart a new course for the Republican Party.

It’s not about messages, it’s about policy

Almost immediately after Gov. Romney lost to President Barack Obama, GOP strategists claimed that their woes were a failure of communication, not ideas. Wrong! A mistaken message is like, well, to steal a once-popular GOP talking point, “putting lipstick on a pig.”

Yet this foolish notion persists, even as a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll suggests that just 26 percent of the public approves of Republicans and their policies, compared to 44 percent who approve of Democrats and their policies. A recent Washington Post/ABC poll also showed a 20-point net negative rating for Speaker of the House John Boehner’s (R-OH) handling of the fiscal cliff negotiations with the White House. That poll showed 31 percent approving and 51 percent disapproving of his approach. Meanwhile, a majority of the respondents—52 percent—approved of President Obama’s efforts, while 37 percent disapproved.

But those facts and numbers didn’t stop Speaker Boehner from defending the party’s political stances last weekend on ABC’s “This Week,” saying that whatever is wrong can be fixed with a clearer public relations campaign. “There’s nothing wrong with the principles of our party,” he said. “But Republicans have not done as an effective job as we should in terms of talking about our principles in terms that average people can appreciate.”

If Republicans are to regain their footing with the broadest segments of the electorate, moderation in policies affecting women, immigrants, gays, and racial minorities must be demonstratively shown—not just expressed in talking points.

But messengers do matter, so avoid the crazy

A panel discussion at last week’s CPAC gathering in suburban Maryland, just outside of the Washington Beltway, seemed tailor made for softening racial concerns about the GOP’s adherence to racism. But it went awry, badly awry—so awry that it confirmed some of the party’s worst fears.

KCarl Smith, an author and conservative activist with the Frederick Douglass Republicans, led the ill-fated discussion that was self-evidently titled “The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You’re Not One?”

As first reported by ThinkProgress’s Scott Keyes and Zack Beauchamp, Scott Terry, a 30-year-old audience member from North Carolina, challenged Smith during his presentation, defending slavery as good for African-Americans because it provided food and shelter for them. Keyes and Beauchamp’s blog post went viral, spreading like crazy through the political blogosphere. Ultimately, a reported description in The Washington Post called it “the most awkward CPAC panel ever.”

No matter what the message is or how well it’s crafted, when crazy talk disrupts serious political gatherings, only chaos can follow. For outsiders such as me, looking in on such a ridiculous display proves why the party must get a grip on the fringe element that ruins its name and reputation.

Latino voters understand that votes speak louder than English promises

It’s great that Republican leaders are coming around to embrace comprehensive immigration reform. Better late than never.

At yesterday’s release of the “Growth and Opportunity Project” report, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said, “When Republicans lost in November, it was a wakeup call” that the party must do more to reach out to minority voters, especially in fast-growing Latino communities. More bluntly, the report itself states: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink.”

To that goal, the RNC report announced plans to spend $10 million to send hundreds of paid activists into Latino, black, and Asian American communities by the end of the coming summer. It’s an ambitious endeavor, and one that is destined to fail if it isn’t backed up with substance.

If Republicans expect to win over Latino voters, they must demonstrate a commitment that’s greater than a one-time vote or paying millions of dollars to ambassadors carrying shop-worn messages into barrios or the ’hood.

If you’ve read this far, then I’m taking it as sign that you’re open to radical and fundamental changes. Oh, there’s no need to pay me. My thanks will come with a changed GOP and a competitive two-party system.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/Jessica Kourkounis

Over the past three decades, Houston has experienced explosive population growth—growing from 3.2 million people to 5.9 million people—mostly driven by the region’s communities of color.

Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF version of this report.

The United States is rapidly approaching the point where there will no longer be any clear racial or ethnic majority—the most recent census projections predict this will happen as early as 2043. At the same time, the fastest-growing racial and ethnic groups were hit first and worst by the recent economic downturn and face persistent barriers to achieving the levels of education, health, and employment that our nation needs to succeed in the global economy. As the entire country undergoes this dramatic demographic transformation, leaders in government, business, philanthropy, and the civic sector must take steps now to prepare for a more diverse future.

In many communities, these demographic shifts are well underway. People of color are already the majority in four states and in more than 300 counties across the country. And children of color comprise the majority of children in 10 states and 35 large metro areas. Community leaders working in these places may well have wisdom and relevant strategies to share with other communities preparing for similar population shifts.

It is in this spirit that Progress 2050—a project of the Center for American Progress—and PolicyLink—a national research and action institute advancing economic and social equity—partnered to hold a series of roundtables in communities that have already experienced aspects of this demographic shift. Over the last year we have traveled around the country to these bellwether communities to have a local dialogue with key community members about three questions:

• What are the opportunities and challenges of these demographic changes?
• What strategies are working at the local level that can inform other places and national policy?
• How can advocates shift the conversation—that most often occurs around demographic change—from one that focuses on deficits and gaps to one that is squarely focused on the opportunity of diversity?

This is the fifth report in a series documenting these roundtable discussions and describes a conversation that took place in Houston, Texas, in March 2012. Previous roundtables took place in Arlington, Virginia (July 2011); Los Angeles, California (October 2011); San Joaquin Valley, California (October 2011); and Raleigh, North Carolina (December 2011).

Roundtable participants included community activists, policy researchers, business leaders, academics, and staff from elected offices. (See the full list of convening participants on page 18.) The range of their expertise was diverse, spanning issues including—but not limited to—economic development, fair lending, financial security, education, incarceration, civil rights, and civic engagement.

We chose Texas—and specifically the city of Houston—as the site for this discussion because the Houston area is now the eighth-most diverse metro area in the nation, with 60 percent of its residents coming from communities of color. Over the past three decades, Houston has experienced explosive population growth—growing from 3.2 million people to 5.9 million people—mostly driven by the region’s communities of color. People of color accounted for 78 percent of the area’s population growth in the 1980s, 91 percent of growth in the 1990s, and 93 percent of growth in the 2000s. And as the 2012 election turned all eyes on the massive demographic shift that our nation is experiencing, Texas is a prime example of a state where both parties will be paying close attention and actively trying to engage its diverse population in the democratic process.

Houston has also experienced consistently strong job growth. Houston’s leisure and hospitality sector, for example, saw a job growth rate of 8.4 percent in the past year—four times the sector’s national increase of 2.1 percent. Moreover, its construction employment increased by 7 percent, compared to just 0.1 percent nationally. Many of these new jobs, however, are low wage, depressing incomes as a result. And since the Great Recession of 2007–2009, job growth is not keeping pace with the growing labor force. At the same time, the region’s fastest-growing groups face some of the highest poverty and unemployment and low levels of educational attainment.

Even still, our roundtable participants were optimistic that, with the right investments and changes in policy, the Houston area could make huge gains and take advantage of all the opportunities inherent in the region’s growing diversity.

We begin our account with some demographic context about Texas, particularly the Houston region. We then discuss the prominent themes—employment and education, integration, and civic engagement—that roundtable participants explained were the most pressing issues to address in the region, all the while highlighting best practices in the Houston area that can be employed on the national level.

Julie Ajinkya is a Policy Analyst for Progress 2050 at the Center for American Progress.

SOURCE: AP/Remy de la Mauviniere

Actor Forest Whitaker speaks in Paris, February 7, 2012.

Excited and agitated, my friend and colleague Liz Chen popped into my office yesterday to ask my opinion of the news that had her Facebook friends buzzing.

Last month noted actor Forest Whitaker was falsely accused of stealing from a popular New York City deli when he stopped in to buy a cup of yogurt. A Milano Market employee frisked the famous black actor, believing him to be one of the shoplifters who pocket items from the store without paying for them. As it turns out, however, Whitaker didn’t steal anything—and when the story hit the celebrity websites, the employee quit his job amid apologies from the storeowner.

But it wasn’t Whitaker’s plight that blew up Liz’s Facebook newsfeed. Instead, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s pensive New York Times essay, “The Good, Racist People,” had her Facebook pals talking about racism in a way that Liz told me she’d never experienced before. In his op-ed, Coates raises the question of what the appropriate response is from an individual, the larger public, and any sentient being to an exposed racist act.

“Facebook got started about the time I was in high school,” Liz explained. “I’d watched how conversations there have grown over time, but I’d never seen as many and as diverse a group of people all passing around that article and commenting on racism in our society as they did with this story.”

She said that the conversation among her friends—nearly all socially engaged progressives—moved from the virtual world to the physical, as a group of them gathered over the weekend and talked about Coates’s article nearly nonstop. “Most of my friends care only about their specific issues—women’s rights or gender equality or saving the whales or whatnot—but this was the first time they all came together to talk specifically about racism and issues surrounding white privilege,” she said, noting it was something of a breakthrough moment.

Liz, a Policy Analyst with American Progress’s Women’s Health and Rights Program, is a whip-smart graduate of the University of Chicago and the Washington University School of Law. Her parents are from China, but she has lived her entire life in the United States. And, like nearly every person of color that I know, she’s keenly sensitive to issues of race and identity in this country.

Liz and I talk often about these matters, partly because it’s my work and partly because of my experiences. I am 56 years old; Liz is 25 years old, not quite half my age. We learn from each other.

I came of age as the Great Society of the 1960s closed—a period defined as the “years of the black” by author and scholar David Bradley in a 1982 Esquire magazine essay. Bradley called my formative years a “fascinating epoch” during which benevolent, wealthy, and white liberals, driven by the guilt of their forefathers’ sins and the ranting of Afro’d, heat-packing, shades-wearing-at-night brothers in leather jackets persuaded politicians and activists to swallow an expensive set of social programs meant “to conceal evidence of a scandalous past or present.”

I’ve kept a copy of Bradley’s article—titled “Black and American, 1982: There Are No Good Times to Be Black in America, but Some Times Are Worse Than Others”—since the first time I read it. Back then I was starting my career as a reporter at The Charlotte Observer, my hometown newspaper, convinced that ambition and drive would take me places that my parents only imagined and that race would one day be unimportant in my life. I was right about the former and wrong about the latter.

Since my youthful days, newspapers have given way to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. But racism endures.

I have spent a lot of energy and emotion over the years on studying why that continues to be so. I haven’t figured it out. But this much I do know: Racism is like gravity. Its unseen force is omnipresent, pushing all of us to the ground. There is no permanent escape for anyone, only temporary reprieves that are more possible for those with means, contacts, and talents than those who lack such life benefits.

The most troubling part of this understanding that I’ve come slowly and unhappily over a lifetime to accept is that racism’s force seems only to be apparent to its victims. That’s why people of color—and black people, in particular—tend to make such a ruckus over the slightest of racial insults. We want “The Other” to see what they’re doing. Mostly they don’t open their eyes, but sometimes they do. It also explains why insensitive people tell us to “just get over it.”

Coates’s essay was an eye-bulging, get-’em-talking moment. Most significantly, he made it plain and put it before a larger, whiter audience of elite New York Times readers:

The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.

But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such.

In this mistakenly labeled “post-racial” period, Coates’s essay made it all the more difficult for the sighted to shield their eyes from how 21st-century racism grounds even the most exalted among us. And it begs the question: How do the rest of us respond? Do we demand an apology? Public humiliation? Boycotts? What happens when those tactics don’t produce satisfaction? I have many angry friends who tote in their heads a checklist of places and products—Shell Oil (apartheid), Denny’s Restaurants (racism), Wal-Mart (worker exploitation), Nike (child labor)—to avoid due to their past and current exhibitions of human indecency. For the most part, their individual and silent protest amounts to narcissism, a feeling of superiority over a corporation that doesn’t know they exist. Meanwhile, the vast majority of America yawns—if it even does that.

My young friend Liz and her friends are wrestling with this dilemma in their Facebook postings. Like me, they haven’t figured it out. What they do know, though, is that they can’t simply be mute. I find hope for the future in their refusing to let injustice pass without naming it.

“Maybe we are learning in a different way in the Facebook generation,” Liz said, just before our conversation closed. “I don’t have any expectations of racism ending, but on an individual level, my friends and I have a responsibility to call out people on their racism and do it in a way that they can hear.”

Who says youth is wasted on the young?

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/Lynne Sladky

Miami Heat's LeBron James speaks with Los Angeles Lakers' Kobe Bryant during a game on January 19, 2012. The media's stereotypical portrayals of race have obscured reality in sports.

I’m no longer sure that seeing is believing.

As a former newspaper journalist, I’m disheartened to say that what you now see in the media isn’t always an objective reality. Even when an article or broadcast reports the truth, the accompanying pictures and images can sometimes impress upon readers or viewers another set of facts that may be at odds with the story.

Harvard University professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, for example, delights in detailing how he used the gross distortion of media imagery of black men in sports to win a bar bet with the folks at the Veterans of Foreign Wars, or VFW, post in his hometown of Piedmont, West Virginia.

In an essay written for Sports Illustrated, Gates, an authority on African American literature and culture, told his drinking buddies that there were approximately 35 million black people living in the United States. He then wagered $5 to anyone who could tell him how many African Americans make a living playing professional sports in the United States.

The group of sports-loving men smiled, knowing they had a sucker in their midst. Everyone at the VFW post knew that blacks dominate some of the most popular sports in America. All they had to do was turn on their televisions, right?

Gates, a great raconteur, tells the story:

“Ten million!” yelled one intrepid soul, too far into his cups.
“No way … more like 500,000,” said another.
“You mean all professional sports,” someone interjected, “including golf and tennis, but not counting the brothers from Puerto Rico?” Everyone laughed.
“Fifty thousand, minimum,” was another guess.

At the end of the day, nobody won the money—all of the men grossly exaggerated their numbers. As Gates reported in Sports Illustrated, the facts about black athletes in America at the time his article was published were stunningly low:

• There were 1,200 black professional athletes in all U.S. sports.
• There were 12 times more black lawyers than black athletes.
• There were 20 times more black dentists than black athletes.
• There were 15 times more black doctors than black athletes.

Arkansas Gazette sportswriter Jon Entine surveyed all professional sports teams in 2008 and figured that while 13 percent of the nation’s population is black, 80 percent of the players in the National Basketball Association and 67 percent of the players in the National Football Association are black. Or, to put it another way, Entine calculated that the odds of a black teenager in America becoming a professional athlete are 4,000-to-1.

Such hard-to-believe facts contradict what so many Americans imagine they know based on what they see on TV. After all, this is a sports-crazed nation, and what sports fan doesn’t watch ESPN—and especially its popular “SportsCenter” program—where black people are overrepresented as athletes and announcers? The sports media industry doesn’t have to say explicitly that black athletes dominate sports. They just show an endless highlight reel of slam dunks and touchdown runs, and the pictures speak for themselves.

But a picture can—and often does—lie.

Which brings me to the cover art of last week’s Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. Illustrating a story about the rebounding U.S. housing market, the Bloomberg editors chose inexplicably to run a cartoonish drawing of people with overt racial and ethnic features apparently swimming in a cash-filled house.

The cover drew almost immediate—and all negative—reactions. My colleague at ThinkProgress, Alyssa Rosenberg, described the cover as “awful as art” and quoted media critic Ryan Chittum’s description of the cover in the Columbia Journalism Review as “awful as journalism.”

Of course, a Bloomberg Businessweek editor soon apologized. “Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret,” Josh Tyrangiel, the magazine’s editor, wrote in a statement sent to several news outlets. “Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again, we’d do it differently.”

But that’s not good enough. As Rosenberg argues, the magazine’s editors and publishers need to come clean, not issue a mealy mouthed apology. “If you want to walk a line and publish edgy covers, you have a particular obligation to think about where the line is,” she writes. “And if you want forgiveness, you need to actually look at yourself and your practices in a systemic way.”

The NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the National Fair Housing Alliance, and the Center for Responsible Lending have taken up the charge as well, demanding a full explanation and apology for the offensive cover. In an email sent to NAACP supporters, Dedrick Muhammad, senior director of the NAACP Economic Department, condemned the magazine:

The insulting part of this cover isn’t just the derogatory and cartoonish depiction of racial and ethnic minorities, but rather the insinuation that homeowners—coincidentally all people of color—are somehow greatly profiting today as the housing sector slowly recovers … We know where the fault really lies: unscrupulous banks and predatory lenders who exploited our most vulnerable citizens with reckless abandon. It is these institutions who have had a “Great American Rebound” as the article itself notes.

But that’s not what the image shows. Whether in professional sports or big business, stereotypical images steep into the collective consciences of those who view them and mistakenly believe they’ve seen the entire truthful picture.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050. 

Patrick Oakford is a Research Assistant in the Economic Policy department at the Center for American Progress. Vanessa Cárdenas is the Director of Progress 2050 at the Center. 

SOURCE: AP/Barry Williams

Emory University Chairman of the Board of Trustees Ben Johnson III, left, introduces the University's next president, James W. Wagner, Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at the Emory Conference Center Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia.

Emory University President James W. Wagner is having a horrible start to the winter term on his Atlanta campus. Unfortunately for him, his woes are self-inflicted.

Attempting to make the case for greater cooperation toward finding solutions for politically and socially difficult issues, Wagner argued in a recent campus magazine column that compromise is a good and noble tool. Specifically, he referred to the stalemate in Congress, which has failed to find common ground on the nation’s budget. So far, so good.

But to drive home his point, he favorably cited the three-fifths clause in the U.S. Constitution—perhaps the worst historic example of a compromise. Wagner wrote:

One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress. Southern delegates wanted to count the whole slave population, which would have given the South greater influence over national policy. Northern delegates argued that slaves should not be counted at all, because they had no vote. As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution—“to form a more perfect union”—the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation. Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.

A sidebar history lesson is necessary here: The three-fifths clause wasn’t actually a compromise. It was a provision of the Constitution that the Framers inserted to apportion voting rights and taxation policies in slave-holding states.

As Paul Finkelman, author of Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, noted in a recent article for The Root, the three-fifths clause “is perhaps the most misunderstood” part of the document. He wrote:

The clause provides that representation in Congress will be based on “the whole Number of free Persons” and “three fifths of all other Persons.” The “other Persons” were slaves. Despite popular understandings, this provision did not declare that African Americans were three-fifths of a person. Rather, the provision declared that the slave states would get extra representation in Congress for their slaves, even though those states treated slaves purely as property.

Predictably, Wagner’s comments sparked viral outrage on social and digital media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Emory faculty members censured him for a gross misunderstanding of history and for bringing academic discredit to his office. Students marched in protest and called for his resignation. Moreover, Emory has been pilloried in the national media.

This is not the most unfortunate part of the story, however. As awful as Wagner’s comments were, the most obvious lesson learned from his mistake might well be not to bring racial history into contemporary discourse. Indeed, Wagner’s ambition was to link a historic compromise to a current concern. I’d argue that his impulse was noble, maybe even courageous. It’s just that Wagner lacked knowledge and failed to fully understand the point he was trying to make.

Seeking to put the matter behind him, Wagner has apologized with great personal shame. “Certainly, I do not consider slavery anything but heinous, repulsive, repugnant, and inhuman,” Wagner wrote to the campus in an addendum to his magazine column. “I should have stated that fact clearly in my essay. I am sorry for the hurt caused by not communicating more clearly my own beliefs. To those hurt or confused by my clumsiness and insensitivity, please forgive me.”

It’s unlikely the brouhaha will bring down the president, whose academic background is in electrical engineering—not in history or the humanities. But clearly, Wagner has learned a valuable lesson. But will anyone one else daring to talk about race benefit from his painful, public example?

By holding Wagner out for intense ridicule, the message that I fear others might take away from this mess is to steer clear of race talk when a slip of the tongue might cause an equal measure of public shame to be heaped upon them, too. That would be a mistake of even greater consequence.

Certainly more knowledge—not less—is needed about our racial history and how it might affect us today. But whatever we do, we shouldn’t avoid public engagement of the topic. That only magnifies ignorance.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/Mel Evans

Then-Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) holds the hand of Nikita McFarland, a student at Isles YouthBuild Institute, Friday, February 29, 2008, in Trenton, New Jersey.

Thanks to congressional Republicans putting the economy in jeopardy during the debt ceiling debacle in the summer of 2011 and again in 2012, a package of automatic across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration is set to go into effect on March 1, 2013. Senate Democrats have proposed a balanced approach to resolve this crisis, urging congressional Republicans to avoid the damaging sequester cuts by accepting a package of more tax revenue coupled with targeted spending cuts. But once again Republicans are threatening the economy by risking massive and harmful spending cuts that will hurt the middle class, damage the economy, kill hundreds of thousands of jobs, and harm the most economically vulnerable among us.

Sequestration will impact all Americans but will have a particularly harmful effect on communities of color, who were hit first and worst by the Great Recession and have yet to significantly feel the effects of the recovery. Our nation’s demographics are changing, and communities of color are the fastest-growing group of Americans. It is important that we invest now in these communities, as we prepare for our nation’s economic future and upcoming workforce needs.

Our driving focus should be on averting crises that slow our economy and instead, promoting policies that help all Americans.

Below are the top 10 reasons why communities of color should pay attention to sequestration and the impact it will have in these communities:

1. Deep cuts to long-term unemployment benefits will disproportionately affect people of color. Extended federal unemployment benefits remain vulnerable under sequestration, and the long-term unemployed—those out of work and searching for a new job for at least six months—could lose almost 10 percent of their weekly jobless benefits if the sequester cuts go into effect next week. These cuts will have a greater impact on people of color, as 9.7 percent of Latinos and a staggering 13.8 percent of blacks are unemployed, compared to only 7 percent of whites. What’s more, in 2011, 40 percent of unemployed Asians, 38 percent of unemployed blacks, and 28 percent of unemployed Latinos were unemployed for more than 52 weeks.

2. Workforce development programs that are vital to communities of color such as YouthBuild and Job Corps face significant cuts. YouthBuild, a program connecting low-income youth to education and training, could be cut by about 8 percent under sequestration. Coupled with previous federal appropriation cuts in fiscal year 2011 by 37 percent, the program could see about one-third of its federal funding cut between fiscal year 2010 and fiscal year 2013. In 2010, 54 percent of YouthBuild participants were African American and 20 percent were Latino. Job Corps, an education and training program geared toward young adults, faces about $83 million in cuts in FY 2013 under sequestration. In 2011, 72 percent of Job Corps participants were people of color.

3. Cuts to critical job-creating programs such as the Build America Bonds program are also on the chopping block. Build America Bonds, which were created in the 2009 stimulus bill, provides incentives for infrastructure investments through the tax code. Since its inception, the program has helped states and cities fund thousands of job-creating infrastructure projects at lower costs than traditional tax-exempt municipal bonds. Build America Bonds could see budget cuts of up to 7.6 percent, however, if sequestration goes through. Build America Bonds benefit all Americans, as more than $106 billion of Build America Bonds have been issued by state and local governments in 49 states and the District of Columbia since the program started. Infrastructure investments stimulate employment in sectors that employ disproportionately high rates of workers of color, such as construction and public transit.

4. Federal budget cuts under sequestration would quickly mean cuts to federal, state, and local public-sector jobs, which disproportionately employ women and African Americans. In 2011 employed African Americans comprised 20 percent of the federal, state, and local public-sector workforce, and women were nearly 50 percent more likely than men to work in the public sector. According to the Congressional Budget Office, scheduled cuts in federal spending were the primary driving force behind slow economic growth projected for this year, meaning thousands of lost jobs and cuts to federal contractors. 

5. Early child care funding could be cut by more than $900 million, impacting the thousands of children of color who benefit from these programs. Such cuts will mean 70,000 children will be kicked out of Head Start, a federal program that promotes the school readiness of children from low-income families from birth through age 5. Sixty percent of program participants are children of color.

6. Programs that directly help the most vulnerable families and children—such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC—are threatened by sequestration. WIC serves as a supplemental food and nutrition program for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and postpartum women and for children under age 5. The program could be cut by $543 million—a devastating loss to the more than 450,000 people of color who benefit from its services.

7. Federal education funding cuts will disproportionately hurt students of color. If the sequester goes into effect, nearly $3 billion would be cut in education alone, including cuts to financial aid for college students and to programs for our most vulnerable youth—English language learners and those attending high-poverty, struggling schools—impacting 9.3 million students. Such cuts will affect key programs that receive federally funded grants such as Education for Homeless Children and Youth and federal work study. The lack of access to financial aid for people of color will further exacerbate the student debt rates in these communities. In the 2007-08 academic year, 81 percent of African Americans and 67 percent of Latinos with a bachelor’s degree graduated with student debt, compared to 64 percent of their white peers. Cutting access to these vital financial aid programs will curtail the higher education aspirations of tens of thousands of students of color.

8. Cuts to critical medical research put patients at risk. The National Institutes of Health would lose $1.5 billion in medical research funding, meaning fewer research projects would be aimed at finding treatments and cures for diseases such as cancer and diabetes—both of which are among the leading causes of death for African Americans.

9. Since 2010 funding for housing has been cut by $2.5 billion, meaning any additional cuts would significantly hurt low-income families and communities. Many housing programs such as Section 8 Housing Assistance provide vouchers to low-income families for affordable housing in the private market. In 2011 Section 8 aided more than 2 million low-income families across the country. Data from 2008 indicate that 44 percent and 23 percent of public housing recipients are African American and Latino, respectively. 

10. As the nation continues to endure a cold winter, programs such as the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which helps bring down the cost of heating for low-income households, are crucial. The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helped about 23 million low-income people pay their winter heat bills, is in jeopardy of being cut in FY 2013. Low-income communities, which tend to disproportionately comprise of people of color, depend on such programs to make ends meet during these tough economic times.

In order to avoid significant damage to the U.S. economy—and particularly to communities of color across the country—congressional Republicans should agree to a balanced package to replace the sequester and its damaging cuts.

Sophia Kerby is the Special Assistant for Progress 2050 at the Center for American Progress.