by Latoya Peterson

Yesterday, a headline in the Post-Gazette worked its way around Twitter:  Study finds median wealth for single black women at $5. Most outlets qualified the link by calling it “shocking” or mentioning the five dollar figure was not a typo.
I called up a fellow young black professional friend of mine and told her [...]

By Guest Contributor ishita, originally published at Restore Fairness
This post elaborates on the excerpt we ran last week about David Dow.

It is no secret that our country’s criminal justice system has consistently proven to be biased against minority communities of color. Statistics published by the NAACP show that even amongst those found guilty of crimes, [...]

By Guest Contributor Daisy Hernandez, originally published at RaceWire
Eva has worked low-wage jobs in Hartford, Conn., since she was 16, and she managed over the years to support herself and her two daughters. But with the worst job crisis in a generation, even those low-wage jobs Eva once relied on have now vanished. To make [...]

By Guest Contributor Ishita Srivastava, originally posted at Restore Fairness

Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot [...]

By Guest Contributor Seth Wessel, originally posted at RaceWire

President Obama says the stimulus saved or created 2 million jobs in 2009. But is the recovery really working? The American dream of good jobs and strong communities is still just a dream for too many. The unfair economy hurts certain groups more, and that ends up [...]

by Latoya Peterson

When you see a headline like “30 Asian Students Attacked,” one would think there would be massive rage.  An outcry about violence in schools.  A discussion of why our kids aren’t safe.  But in the wake of the attacks and continuing coverage by outlets like the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Asian-American blogosphere, the [...]

By Guest Contributor gwen, originally published at Sociological Images

In the early 1980s the Reagan Administration engaged in an active campaign to demonize welfare and welfare recipients. Those who received public assistance were depicted as lazy free-loaders who burdened good, hard-working taxpayers. Race and gender played major parts in this framing of public assistance: the image [...]

by Latoya Peterson, published at Jezebel.com

On Monday, Madonna broke ground on a new school project in Malawi; today, she takes to the Huffington Post to ask for donations. Her megawatt star power helped engage media attention – but are high profile celebrities actually hurting progress?
In the new issue of Arise, reporter Hannah Pool examines the [...]

by Guest Contributor Jamelle, originally published at PostBourgie
Ta-Nehisi Coates:
There’s a part in The Audacity Of Hope, where writing about race, Obama notes that, rightly or wrongly, a significant swath of white people are exhausted, and repeatedly scolding them (even if you’re right) is unlikely to alter the poverty stats. What we need, Obama argued, is [...]

by Guest Contributor G.D., originally published at PostBourgie

Up until last fall, I lived in Bed-Stuy, and the only supermarket near me was so far away that I would just do my food-shopping on the way back from my gym — which happens to be in a completely different neighborhood.  The bodegas on either end of [...]

by Guest Contributor Catherine Traywick, originally published at Hyphen

One of the first things a (good) transnational activist learns is the practical meaning of solidarity — which, as the latest issue of New York Times Magazine illustrates, is a concept not easily grasped by even the worldliest and most committed of advocates. This week’s installment of [...]

by Special Correspondent Wendi Muse
Continued from “Bela or Bust: Part 1: On Gender” . . .
Author’s note: My apologies for the delay between part one and part two! I have recently moved back to the United States and in between re-adjusting and job hunting, I had not had the chance or the mental clarity to sit [...]

by Latoya Peterson
In this month’s Marie Claire, Cameron Diaz is gracing the cover and bringing a message. The popular starlet has embraced the environment as her new motivation, and is doing a low budget movie/documentary about the state of our fair planet.
The reporter follows Diaz to her old neighborhood in Long Beach, California, noting [...]

by Guest Contributor Tanglad, originally published at Tanglad
Let me get this out of the way first. This is not a movie review. It is a review of movie reviews about Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay. Spoilers follow, though the title pretty much tells you what you’re gonna get.

Last weekend, Filipino director Brillante Mendoza won the best director [...]

Excerpted by Latoya Peterson

We can’t help but feel that if Heidi and Seal had decided to throw a “Chola” or “AZN” or “Gangsta”-themed party, the outcry would be greater, as was the case when mostly Anglo Tulane students threw a party based on Mexican stereotypes. And while we’ve been known to poke fun at the [...]