Click here to read about these women and others on Black Enterprise
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Friday, April 29, 2011
Do Black Women Have a Preference for Thugs? (Video)
In this episode of Your Black Love, Deborrah Cooper and I ask whether or not black women have a preference for dating men that are not good for them.
Do you know a woman who dates one bad guy after another and then seems to spend all of her time whining about the fact that she can never find a good man? Yea, I have too. Well, it seems to me that, at some point, we must all have some degree of accountability for our relationship choices.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Should You Need a License to Braid Hair? A Woman Files a Lawsuit Over the Issue
by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Your Black World – Scholarship in Action
Jestina Clayton is a woman in Utah who is originally from Sierra Leone in West Africa. She does African braiding part-time in order to make extra money. She is now being confronted with the loss of significant income, since a law in the state of Utah claims that you must have a full cosmetology license in order to braid hair.
Clayton filed suit this week in the court of law. She is being backed by the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based organization that helps people like Clayton challenge unjust laws.
Black Unemployment Reaches Depression Levels in Many Major Cities
by Janell Ross, Huffington Post
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- In the decade leading up to the Great Recession, Wanda Nolan grew accustomed to steady progress.
From an entry-level job as a fill-in bank teller, she forged a career as a commercial banking assistant, earning enough to become a homeowner. She finished college and then got an MBA. Even after the recession unfolded in late 2007, her degrees and her familiarity with the business world lent her a sense of immunity to the forces ravaging much of the American economy. Nolan was an exemplar of the African American middle class and the increasingly professional ranks of the so-called New South.
But in September 2008, everything changed.
A bank human resources officer called her into a private conference room. “All I heard was, ‘Your position has been eliminated,’” says Nolan, 37, who, despite being one of the more than 13 million officially unemployed Americans, still spends most days in her self-styled banker’s uniform of pearls and pants and practical flats. “My mind started racing.”
More than two years later, Nolan is still looking for a job and feeling increasingly anxious about a future that once felt assured. Her life has devolved from a model of middle class African American upward mobility into an example of a disturbing trend: She is among the 15.5 percent of African Americans out of work and still looking for a job.
For economists, that number may sound awful, but it’s not surprising. The nation’s overall unemployment rate sits at 8.8 percent and the rate among white Americans is at 7.9 percent. For a variety of reasons -- ranging from levels of education and continuing discrimination to the relatively young age of black workers -- black unemployment tends to run twice the rate for whites. Yet since the Great Recession, joblessness has remained so critically elevated among African Americans that it is challenging longstanding ideas about what it takes to find work in the modern-day economy.
Millions of people like Nolan, who have precisely followed the oft-dictated recipe for economic success -- work hard, get an education, seek advancement -- are slipping backward. Even as they apply for jobs and accept the prospect of a future with less job security and lower pay, they remain stalled in unemployment.
Trading down has become a painful truth for much of working America, but this truth becomes particularly stark when seen through the prism of race. Only 12 percent of all Americans are black, but working-age black Americans comprise nearly 21 percent of the nation’s unemployed, according to federal data. The growing contrast between prospects for white and black job-seekers challenges a cherished American notion: the availability of opportunity and upward mobility for all.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
A Black Prof Discusses Racial Bias in Financial Decisions
Your Black World reports
Have you ever tried to get a loan, and felt that you weren’t being treated the same as if you were white? What about watching that promotion at work being given to the white guy down the hall when you were the one slaving night and day for 20 years? Well, this feeling is not uncommon. A recent survey at YourBlackWorld.com showed that nearly 90% of African Americans feel that they’ve experienced some kind of discrimination in the workplace. In spite of our having a black president and attorney general, new laws have not been introduced to help people of color fight discrimination in the workplace.
Another prominent type of discrimination is the racial bias in other kinds of financial decisions. Millions of black people were victims of predatory lending during the recent financial crisis, leading to a massive decline in black family wealth over the last decade. Additionally, the ability to build a business, get government contracts or do other things to create financial security for your family can be impacted by the color of your skin. Prof. Stephanie Yates Rauterkus at The University of Alabama Birmingham speaks on the topic in the video below.
Click here to watch the video
To join the Your Black World Coalition, please visit YourBlackWorld.com.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
NAACP Report on Gulf Coast: Healing Is Nowhere Near Being Complete
“My Name is 6508799”
State of the Gulf, One Year After the Oil Drilling Disaster
This numbered moniker is how a participant at the Destin, Florida Town Hall meeting with Gulf Coast Claims Facility Administrator Kenneth Feinberg introduced herself.
For many residents residing in communities along the Gulf of Mexico, they feel as if their lives have been reduced to a number in the Gulf Coast Claims Facility database which holds so much power over life, livelihood, health and overall wellbeing.
One year after the Gulf Oil Drilling Disaster of April 20, 2010, thousands of Gulf residents not only have not been “made whole” from the disaster, but many have faced elevated levels of toxins in their bloodstreams, community conflicts, destruction of families, culture erosion, loss of property, including homes, cars, boats, etc., and, for many, an end to their way of life for the foreseeable future. Only a fraction of Gulf residents truly believe that the systems that have been set up to serve them have made demonstrable strides towards “making it right”, as has become the mantra representing the aim of recovery and restoration processes.
Based on dozens of interviews with affected communities and the organizations that represent them, a review of consensus documents and other reports from technical experts as well as organizations representing thousands of gulf residents, and examination of response systems set up to address the Gulf Oil Drilling Disaster, this report tells the illustrative stories and shares the analysis of the pervasive unmet needs and gaps in the response system one year after the Deepwater Horizon Macondo Well explosion took 11 lives and dealt a crippling blow to the ecosystem, including the communities, of the Gulf of Mexico.
Deborrah Cooper Explains What It Means for a Woman to “Submit” To Her Man
by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Your Black World
Given the importance of the critical theme of black relationships (which we’re hitting from various angles this week on YBW), I had to get another perspective on some of the things that folks are quoting from the bible as it pertains to how black relationships need to be structured. What does it mean for a black man to “lead” in his relationship? What does it mean for a woman to “submit?” One thing that many of us can agree on is the fact that black relationships have been falling apart for a very long time. The majority of our homes are being run by a single parent, and far too many children are growing up without their fathers in shouting distance. What some don’t acknowledge is that there is a direct correlation between the break down of the black family and the growth of the prison industrial complex. Locking up men for decades for the sale of drugs that were brought into our communities has devastated many of us, and urban decay in the 1980s led to job losses with few viable alternatives to illegal activity. A recent study in The Economist showed that a one percentage point increase in the incarceration rate leads to a 2.4 percent decline in the percentage of black women who eventually get married.
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