Hollywood

http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2016/05/10/3776893/hollywood-pushing-diversity-will-asian-latino-actors-left/

Race, class and academic achievement

Rich, Cox and Bloch (April 29, 2016) "Money, Race and Success: How Your School District Compares." NY Times. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-race-and-success-how-your-school-district-compares.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news 

Rich, Cox and Bloch provide an exploration of the intersection of race and class as it relates to academic achievement gap. There is an interactive feature that allows you to type in a school district to see the nexus of race and class and school achievement. This ought to give pause and motivate us all to fight for better, much better, public schools, everywhere.

"The ghost metaphor"

JENÉE DESMOND-HARRIS (New York Times, April 29, 2016; Opinion Pages) in "Racism is Real. Trump Helps Show it" talks about a powerful metaphor developed by sociologist, Tomás Jiménez, "the ghost metaphor: (quoted in para 11). This metaphor refers to the "quandry" people of color face when they experience racism and want to draw attention to it.  Jiménez says “It haunts every aspect of your life, but nobody else sees it and they don’t believe you” (para. 11). The flip side of this is privilege and also connects to the ghost metaphor--those with racial privilege do not experience the racism, don't feel a need to draw attention to it when it happens to someone else, but if they do, expect that people will believe them and are not likely to be haunted by it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/opinion/campaign-stops/the-upside-to-overt-racism.html?_r=0

Misty

 As Misty Copeland notes, prima ballerinas are not supposed to be black. Cannot wrap my head around the reality that she is the first female African American dancer to have the role of Principal Dancer at the American Ballet Theatre - 2016. Are you kidding?
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2016/04/26/misty-copeland-and-the-newness-of-the-ballerina-body/

I am posting this under Workplace because I was not sure where else to put it and work is one of the dimensions that the authors talk about in the following article. If you ever even contemplated the possibility that we live in a post-racial society, an idea, which, I suppose, began we when elected President Obama, then the graphics in this article will show just how far we are from being post-racial. I am aware of these sorts of stats and how people of color in the US have so much less access to important societal scare resources, but to see the stats displayed in this form stunned, even me. Golash-Boza points out the difference between the jobless rate and the unemployment rate. The jobless rate is a more accurate reflection of the racialized labor market. Jobless rates are higher for the Latino population and the Black population. The statistics for Native Americans are harder to come by and they are not reported as systematically as statistics for whites, Blacks, Latinos and Asians. We do know that joblessness is high among many Native American nations and poverty rates are "off the charts." Statistics for the Asian American population, if aggregated, suggest that this sub-population mirrors the white population; however, when we focus on specific sub-groups within Asia America, there is significant variation. The recent economic crisis hit people of color quite hard and exacerbated the other dimensions mentioned in this article. One solution certainly is massive jobs creation like we have never seen before and it has to have a spatial component to it so that it overcomes spatial-mismatch and we must completely revamp our educational system so that we can overcome skills-mismatch as well.

Reeves, Richard, Edward Rodrigue and Elizabeth Kneebone. (April 2016). Five Dimensional Poverty and Race in America. Brookings Research. Retrieved from http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2016/five-evils-multidimensional-poverty-race

RIP Prince. Prince and his music brought together generations, genders, races, ethnicities, sexualities, muscial perfectionist and casual listeners. And he understood.  He just understood. He reminded us at the 2015 Grammy Awards  "that it is art, our ability to sit with art and all the possibilities it helps us to imagine, that is so important to our ability to value all lives, and Black lives in particular." From Brittney Cooper (one of my favorite contemporary voices) writing for Salon:http://www.salon.com/2016/04/21/americas_prince_problem_how_black_people_and_art_became_devalued/

The war that never should have been

The War on Drugs was never intended to be fought or "won" in the way we were told by several presidential administrations. It was racist from the start and it is still racist today. The "war on drugs" is a discourse that had the effect, and maybe the intent, of continuing jim crow.

MLB baseball has not promoted the rich mix of countries, races and ethnicities represented in the game, especially the increasing number of Latino and Latin American players. The percentage of African American players, however, has decreased dramatically. If the MLB wants to remain relevant it has to figure out a way to make baseball seem more like the peoples' game--make it less like a country club game, promote Latino and Latin American players and celebrate its incredible stars.

Kang, J. C. (April 6, 2016). The Unbearable Whiteness of Baseball. New York Times Magazine. Retrived from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/magazine/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-baseball.html?ref=sports