Douglass Institute of Government
The Douglass Institute of Government (DIG) is an educational " think tank " dedicated to research and policy studies on African - American culture, history, and relevant contemporary issues in support of Frederick Douglass' admonition to a young student: "Agitate, agitate, agitate".
JUNE UPDATE

DIG Lectures

List of DIG Lectures-

DIG Scholars are available to provide unique lectures. The lectures are characterized by rigorous original research, exposing audiences to perspectives from primary source materials that have been inadvertently or purposefully overlooked in traditional treatments and consequently rarely find expression or serious examination in the popular or more formal academic media. There is no fee for local area (Washington, D.C.) libraries, high schools, middle and elementary schools and correctional institutions. There is a nominal lecture fee plus an additional cost for transportation and accommodations(if needed) for universities, organizations, and government agencies.
 
 

SPRING{2008} LECTURE SERIES ON AFRICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
WINTER{2008} LECTURE SERIES ON AFRICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
FALL{2007} LECTURE SERIES ON AFRICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
SALSA of the IPS Presents:
"Demystifying the Electoral Process"
Wed, July 2, 2008 -- 6:45-8:45pm
 Institute for Policy Studies
1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20005. 
"The Social Action & Leadership School for Activists (SALSA) of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) offers affordable evening classes in Washington, DC, to make you and your organization more effective."
Questions:
Call (202)234-9382, ext. 229 or send e-mail to netfa@hotsalsa.org
  • DIG Flyers:
    • Questions For A Neo-Confederate Justice
    An Exposé of Legal Darwinism and Neo-Redemptionist Federalism
    by Asa Gordon
    "Is there some way to be a conservative without being a Confederate?" ... Justice Clarence Thomas
    		Green Party Vice Presidential nominee Pat LaMarche announced in her acceptance speech that David Cobb's presidential campaign will support Asa Gordon's promotion of voting rights under Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment:
    Click image to go to www.electors.us and play video clip.
    By popular demand, direct link to article is now available!
    The WORLD&I
    CURRENT ISSUES
    COMMENTARY
      A Color-blind Supreme Court?
    by Asa Gordon
    In Gutter v Bollinger, the Supreme Court ruled to approve the University of Michigan law school's affirmative action approach to enrolling a "critical mass" of blacks, Latinos,and Native Americans. Could Associate Justice Clarence Thomas learn something from abolitionist Frederick Douglass?
    International Law and US Constitutional Democracy
    September 18, 5 pm
    Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA): Brown Center, Falvey Hall
    1301 W. Mount Royal Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217
    		 As part of the second annual observance of Constitution Day at MICA, this panel will feature long-time Guild member and Executive Director of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute Ann Fagan Ginger, Asa Gordon of the Douglass Institute for Government, and Jamil Dakwar of the ACLU's Human Rights Program.
    Fahrenheit 11/2
    The Election debacle of 2000 & 2004
    A Prime Time DVD Documentary & Commentary
    by Asa Gordon
    Now Playing at The Lamond-Riggs Public Library
    Tues. Sept. 21 - 6:30pm - Free Admission
    Fahrenheit 3/20
    The Bush Administration's
    New American Century of
    neo-Darwinian Manifest Destiny
    A Prime Time DVD Documentary & Commentary
    by Asa Gordon
    Now Playing at The Lamond-Riggs Public Library
    Tues. Sept. 28 - 6:30pm - Free Admission

    LATINO MANIFESTO WEBSITE
    A Critique of the Race debate in the U.S. Latino Community
    by Christopher Rodriguez
    [DIG Board of Directors:Afro-Latino Studies]

    DIG has planned several projects in support of the African-American Civil War Memorial. This memorial is dedicated to the 209,148 African-Americans who served with the union forces in the Civil War. The design of the memorial features two curved stone walls, the inner one, three- feet high and the outer one, six-feet high, and a bronze statue depicting black service men and their loved ones as the men fight for freedom. On both sides of the two semicircular wars stainless steel plaques are mounted bearing the names of all 209,148 officers and men of 166 regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops. The dedication of the site for the memorial was made in September of 1996. The site, at the intersection of 10th and U streets and Vermont Avenue in the District of Columbia, was made available by the National Park Service. The memorial was formally dedicated on July 18th, 1998
    Sons & Daughters

    United States Colored Troops
    *Sons & Daughters United States Colored Troops
    Richmond Liberation Day-USCT-Memorial Celebration-2000

    Monday, May 22, 2000
    Presents
    FOUNDERS DAY OF
    U.S. COLORED TROOPS
    American Civil War
    The 1st USCT Founders Day event at the National Archives
    was broadcast nationally on June 1st and repeated on June 3rd, 1999
    C-SPAN.org has the Videotape
    African-American Troops in the Civil War
    on sale at their online store.
    Holocaust and racist revisionism join in the hysterical media assault on LIBERATORS. Truth proves to be the first casualty in the revisionist war that was declared by critics of the WWII documentary film on Black soldiers. The attacks have consigned the film to an historical purgatory.

    "LIBERATORS" UNDER FIRE
    {A Documentary Wounded by Friendly Fire} 
    "When war is declared, truth is the first casualty" -Arthur Ponsonby 
    THE DOCUMENTARY

    DATE: Wen. March 11th, 1998
    TIME: 7pm
    PLACE: BLACK FILM CENTER ARCHIVE (BFC/A)

    THE LECTURE
    DATE: Thur. March 12th, 1998
    TIME: 7pm
    PLACE: BLACK FILM CENTER ARCHIVE (BFC/A)

    Atkins Living Learning Center
    Indiana, University
    Bloomington, Indiana 47405
    (812) 855-0276
    BLACK CAMERA

     
     
    You will already have perceived that I am not of that school of thinkers which teaches us to let bygones be bygones; to let the dead past bury its dead, ... In my view there are no bygones in the world, and the past is not dead and cannot die. The evil as well as the good that men do lives after them. ... Death has no power to change moral qualities, ...What was bad before the war, and during the war, has not been made good since the war. ... Fellow citizens: I am not indifferent to the claims of a generous forgetfulness, but whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery; between those who fought to save the republic and those who fought to destroy it.
    -Frederick Douglass, "Decoration Day," Rochester, 1883
    The League of the South, agitated by DIG's production of "The Douglass Institute of Government Anti-neo-Confederate Civil War Propaganda Information Packet", has been provoked by its documented truth to assail DIG's Exe. Director along with the NAACP in its publication of the "Southern Patriot" (Vol.6, Num.6, Nov.-Dec. 1999), under the headline "Enemy Activity."
    47 "Faithful" Presidential Electors Who Can Make History 
    "This is the most amazing proposition that has ever been brought forward by a non-lawyer and it will, and if it is accurate it could change the whole outcome of the voting process in the United States, and we will take that under consideration ... we, we eagerly embrace your suggestion." 
                 _ Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Dec. 8th, 2004, Congressional Hearings on Ohio Voting Irregularities.
     
    Asa Gordon and Lawrence Douglass Jamison of DIG filed a Civil Action (12/29/2000) in the United States District Court for The District of Columbia that petitioned the Court to apply the sanction in section two of the Fourteen Amendment.
         ALL COURT CHALLENGES TO THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS  PROCEEDED WITH THE DELIBERATE COMPLICITY OF THE US COURTS , THE MAJOR MEDIA, AND ALL LAWYERS INVOLVED ON BOTH SIDES TO KEEP THE PUBLIC TOTALLY IGNORANT OF THE PROVISIONS AND VOTER REMEDY UNDER THE SECOND SECTION OF THE 14TH AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION. LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE ORGANIZATIONS HAVE STUDIOUSLY AVOIDED THIS CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTION AND HAS CLEARLY PLACED  THE FUTURE OF TWO PARTY FUNDING AHEAD OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS OF ALL AMERICAN VOTERS
    CRS Report for Congress highlights DIG
    Presidential Election of 2000 Lawsuit
    (Order Code 95-896 GOV)

    The Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on "The Voting Rights Act of 1965, As Amended: Its History and Current Issues"; prepared for members and committees of Congress, highlights the Lawsuit challenge to the Presidential Election of 2000 by Washington's Douglass Institute of Government (DIG) over all the lawsuits filed by the NAACP and other civil rights organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), "challenging voting policies and practices in some states electoral processes." 

    DIG's civil action has so far received no major media coverage and does not appear in any of the purported legal scholarly publications or books that provide "expert" analysis over the legal issues raised in the 2000 presidential election. 

    Furthermore, in addressing the question "Are additional penalties needed to discourage future violations of the VRA [Voting Rights Act]?"; the CRS report only examines the arguments raised in DIG's civil action over the 2000 presidential elections.

    The CRS reported that DIG "[C]hallenged the constitutionality of Florida's presidential electors. According to DIG, the disparate impact on African American voters in not having their votes counted in the presidential election violated their due process rights and the right to equal protection under the law-rights that Sections 1 and 2 of the 14th Amendment protect. DIG  asserted that redress is provided in Section 2 of the 14" Amendment. That is, the slate  of Florida's presidential erectors should have been reduced in proportion to the  protected class of disfranchised voters' population of the state."

    The DC Statehood Green Party will host Asa Gordon Exe. Dir. of  DIG and DCSGP Str. Cmte. member at Large to present a series of lectures on "The Green Party's Role in Democratizing  the Electoral College:  (The Constitutional Mandate For Electoral Reform)", Oct.2; Nov.6; Dec. 4  prior to the opening sessions of its Monthly General Assembly Meetings held the first Thursday of each month at 7pm UDC, Rm. 202, Bldg.39.

    The Douglass Institute of Government (DIG) has instituted a systematic program of civil actions to educate the public to their full constitutional rights and bring into effect the reconstruction era constitutional provisions' de jure mandate for electoral reform by proportional representation.

    NUMBERS That Count-

    "Numbers That Count: The Statistics of White Supremacy"
    "The practical construction of American life is a convention against us. Human law may know no distinction among men in respect of rights, but human practice may. Examples are painfully abundant "
    - [Frederick Douglass (1883)]

     
    Study Ties Political Leanings to Hidden Biases
    ...
    The field of social psychology has long been focused on how social environments affect the way people behave. But social psychologists are people, too, and as the United States has become increasingly politically polarized, they have grown increasingly interested in examining what drives these sharp divides: red states vs. blue states; pro-Iraq war vs. anti-Iraq war; pro-same-sex marriage vs. anti-same-sex marriage. And they have begun to study political behavior using such specialized tools as sophisticated psychological tests and brain scans.
    ...Another study presented at the conference, which was in Palm Springs, Calif., explored relationships between racial bias and political affiliation by analyzing self-reported beliefs, voting patterns and the results of psychological tests that measure implicit attitudes -- subtle stereotypes people hold about various groups.
     That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did.
    ...The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces -- evidence of implicit bias. But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush.
    ..."If anyone in Washington is skeptical about these findings, they are in denial," he said. "We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting. Republicans are supported by whites with prejudice against blacks. If people say, 'This takes me aback,' they are ignoring a huge volume of research."
    Misperceptions
    Cloud Whites' View of Blacks

      Whether out of hostility, indifference or simple lack of knowledge, large numbers of white Americans incorrectly believe that blacks are as well off as whites in terms of their jobs, incomes, schooling and health care, according to a national survey by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University.
    ...These misperceptions have consequences, the survey suggests. Among whites, the pervasiveness of incorrect views seems to explain, at least in part, white resistance to even the least intrusive types of affirmative action. And more broadly, these mistaken beliefs represent formidable obstacles to any government effort to equalize the social and economic standing of the races.
    ..."The results suggest there is the overwhelming sense among most whites that this is 2001 -- we could not possibly be saddled with segregation and discrimination and therefore things can't possibly be as bad as black Americans say they are," said political scientist Keith Reeves of Swarthmore College, an expert on racial attitudes and a consultant on the survey project.

      These results also defy conventional wisdom. They indicate that many whites do not broadly view blacks as particularly disadvantaged or beset by problems that demand immediate attention. Instead, these whites believe exactly the opposite -- that African Americans already have achieved economic and social parity. For these broadly misinformed whites, equality between the races is a reality.
    ...Another way to look at the extent of these misperceptions is to see what proportion of whites holds at least one false belief about black circumstances. When analyzed together, seven in 10 whites hold at least one of these misperceptions, and a majority -- 56 percent -- held two or more. 
    ... part of the answer, Reeves said, is that it simply is convenient for some whites to claim that blacks and whites are equal. Such beliefs eliminate the need for whites to take action on problems that disproportionally face the black community. "There remains an unwillingness to acknowledge reality and an unwillingness to move forward on the difficult question of race," he said.

    The survey provides evidence for this view. Misinformed whites were far less likely to view black problems as being serious, or to favor government action to correct persistent social and economic disparities.
    The Myth And Math of Affirmative Action
               Calculating the Cost of Affirmative Action
      Affirmative action is widely thought to be unfair because it benefits minority applicants at the expense of more deserving whites. Yet this perception tends to inflate the cost beyond its real proportions. While it is true that affirmative action gives minority applicants a significant boost in selective admissions, it is not true that most white applicants would fare better if elite schools eliminated the practice. Understanding why is crucial to separating fact from fiction in the national debate over affirmative action.   ...These figures show that rejected white applicants have every reason not to blame their misfortune on affirmative action. In selective admissions, the competition is so intense that even without affirmative action, the overwhelming majorityof rejected white applicants still wouldn't get in.
    AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR BLACKS
    at HWCUs is OUT

    Court Strikes Down Georgia Admissions Policy
    Federal Appeals Panel Finds University's Race-Based 'Point' System Unconstitutional
    A federal appeals court panel yesterday struck down a University of Georgia admissions policy that it said unconstitutionally enhanced the chances of some blacks and other racial minorities of gaining admission to the school.

    REVERSE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR WHITES
    at HBCUs is IN

    As Affirmative Action for blacks to reverse the legacy of white supremacy is reversed under the specious charge of reverse racism at Historically White Colleges and Universities(HWCUs), reverse Affirmative Action for whites moves white supremacy forward under perverse diversity programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities(HBCUs).

    Miss. Desegregation Suit Settled for $500 Million Mississippi Settlement Ends Lengthy Battle
    The historically black institutions have had a difficult time attracting nonblack students to campuses that were once segregated by law. The three schools spent millions over a decade on diversity programs, including scholarships for whites and other nonblack students. ... But many of the proposed remedies did not sit well with some black Mississippians. Among them was imposition of uniform admissions criteria for all state universities as well as the  creation of special financial incentives to attract white students to historically black campuses. 
    Distorting The Affirmative Action Debate
    .Among the worst canards is the allegation that these are "preference" programs. Hardly. ... The largest "preference program" does not involve affirmative action, but so-called "legacy" programs that give a preference to college applicants if their parents attended the same university. ... . A U.S. Department of Education study found that the alumni children admitted to Harvard had SAT scores that averaged 35 points lower than those of students with non-alumni parents. Another Study found that far more Whites have entered the gates of the 10 most elite American academic institutions through "alumni preference" than the combined numbers of all the Blacks and Latinos entering through affirmative action. 
    School "Choice" and Other White Lies
    Whites-Only Scholarships ....
    There have been a number of lawsuits and policies at both the state and federal level designed to limit minority access to college (especially graduate school) and expand access for Whites. Special outreach measures like affirmative action have been under attack in several lawsuits. ... By contrast, Whites are suing for race conscious admissions to gain unprecedented access to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) so that they have expanded options for college education-especially at the graduate level. For example, Alabama State University is currently operating under an integration order that requires that they set aside nearly 40% of their academic grants budget for scholarships to Whites. The state augments the university's $229,000 contribution with public funds bringing the "Whites only" scholarship fund to a million dollars a year. There are few eligibility requirements. A student must be White and have earned at least a C average. African Americans vying for admission to the university must earn almost a full point higher to even merit consideration. In fact, as a C average is just slightly above the minimum required to pass a class, White scholarships are the only academic scholarships for entry at the university level with such low requirements.
    How Affirmative Action Helped George W.
    The President might ask himself, "Wait a minute. How did I get into Yale?"

    George W. Bush is all for diversity ... but he doesn't care for the way they do it at the University of Michigan...If our President had the slightest sense of irony, he might have paused to ask himself, "Wait a minute. How did I get into Yale?" It wasn't because of any academic achievement: ... They may not have had an explicit point system at Yale in 1964, but Bush clearly got in because of affirmative action. ... George W. Bush, in fact, may be the most spectacular affirmative-action success story of all time. 
    So Now Bush Cares?By Eugene Robinson/WP
    I have to assume that President Bush's sudden concern for my life expectancy, and that of my homies, is just breathtaking political cynicism, nothing more. He isn't sincere. If he were, it would mean a road-to-Damascus transformation as profound as his earlier conversion from jejune, fun-loving frat boy to sober, responsible man of God. 
    ...What this would mean, if Bush were serious, is that he now accepts race as an objective, quantifiable factor in American life. Not only that: It would also mean that to measure the impact of race he is using not "opportunity" -- the Republican mantra -- but "outcome," which is doctrinal heresy. 

    'Legacy' practice under fire
    Affirmative-action supporters attack edge to alumni kids 
    "Because legacy preferences favor the demographics of a prior generation, you'd exacerbate the underrepresentation of minorities," Turner said. "You put a drag on your ability to allow social change to take place."
    Whites Swim in Racial Preference

      Ask a fish what water is and you'll get no answer. ... Fish take it for granted....So too with this thing we hear so much about, "racial preference." ... While many whites seem to think the notion originated with affirmative action programs, intended to expand opportunities for historically marginalized people of color, racial preference has actually had a long and very white history. ...
      President Bush, himself a lifelong recipient of affirmative action - the kind set aside for the mediocre rich - recently proclaimed that the school's policies were examples of unfair racial preference. Yet in doing so he not only showed a profound ignorance of the Michigan policy, but made clear the inability of yet another white person to grasp the magnitude of white privilege still in operation.
    WELFAREFORacisM
    Welfare Reform in Black & White
    From Welfare to Workfare for Rural Whites
    From Welfare to PrisonFare for Urban Blacks

    Approaching Welfare Time Limits
       At year's end, thousands of poor families across America will be dropped from the welfare rolls as they approach the five-year lifetime limit for welfare assistance set by the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. ...  Since 1994, the nation's welfare rolls have dropped more than 50 percent, prompting many to declare welfare reform an unmitigated success. ... studies have shown Whites have been leaving welfare for work faster than African Americans and Hispanics. ...  A study by the Kellogg-Scholar Practitioner Program followed Whites, Blacks and Hispanics in Florida who left welfare for work at the same time and found there were significant racial disparities in income levels between the groups, with the income of Blacks falling significantly behind both Hispanics and Whites by the end of the period under study. ...  At a recent forum on race and welfare reform ... assembled experts discussed factors contributing to the persistent racial disparities in outcomes among welfare recipients. The session focused on a number of studies highlighting how African Americans are more likely to encounter discriminatory treatment while attempted to move from welfare to work.

    Building a Boom Behind Bars
    Prison Construction Boom Transforms Small Towns
    Towns such as Malone are the latest link in the chain of factors that influence criminal justice policies, experts say. Here in New York, advocates for reforming what they call disproportionately harsh sentencing laws said their efforts are being thwarted by some lawmakers whose small-town constituents don't want to stop the flow of inmates.
    ...Reform of mandatory sentencing statutes has been impeded by "the vested interests that Republican state senators have in keeping the spigot flowing and keeping the prisoners flowing into the system," said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, which co-sponsored a report released earlier this year on prison placement and spending in New York.
    ...Call it salvation through incarceration--a prison-based development strategy that small towns all over America are pursuing, and changing economically and culturally because of it.

    No Slowdown In Prison Boom For Blacks
       There's much to cheer about in the recent Justice Department report that shows the first slowdown in nearly three decades in the number of people imprisoned More politicians, and law enforcement officials, it seems, have finally realized that warehousing thousands of people in American prisons is no panacea for the nation's crime and drug ills. In states such as California and New York, courts are much more willing to send people to drug treatment programs rather than prison.
       The bad news is the new window of public enlightenment on crime and punishment remains tightly closed for Blacks. They now make up nearly half of the more than 2 million persons behind bars. According to the Justice Department report, 10 percent of all Black males between ages 25 and 29 are in federal and state prisons. The rate is three times greater than that for Latino males, and 10 times higher than for White males. ...  The habitual reasons given for criminalizing practically an entire generation of young Blacks is that they are poor, crime-prone, and lack family values.
    Losing land
    • Acres of farmland owned by African Americans in 1910, in millions: 15
    •  Acres owned today: 1.1
    •  Percent by which African Americans have lost land faster than whites: 150%
    • Acres of riverfront property in Richmond, VA, that were supposed to be turned over to slaves in 1856, but were instead taken by the white estate executor: 264
    • Value of the land today, now the exclusively white Willow Oaks country club, in millions: $2.94
    • Percent of Southern courthouses containing land records which were burned down since the Civil War, often deliberately to destroy evidence of illegal takings of black land: 33%
    TORN FROM THE LAND

      For generations, African Americans have passed on stories of how "they stole our land." This week, the Associated Press released an exhaustive investigation of how swindling, theft and murder deprived countless African-Americans of land. The AP interviewed more than 1,000 people and examined tens of thousands of land records in 13 Southern and border states. In those cases alone, 406 black landowners lost more than 24,000 acres of farm and timber land. Today, virtually all of this property, valued at tens of millions of dollars, is owned by whites or by corporations. Thousands of other similar charges could not be verified because the land records were destroyed, often deliberately. (Associated Press, 12/2-6)
    http://wire.ap.org/APnews/?SITE=WASPO&FRONTID=HOME
     
    Land-grabs often a motive for lynchings

      Racial violence in America is a familiar story, but the importance of land as a motive for lynchings and white mob attacks on blacks has been widely overlooked. And the resulting land losses suffered by black families have gone largely unreported.
    (The Clarion-Ledger [Jackson, MS], 12/3)
    http://www.clarionledger.com/news/0112/03/m04.html
    REAL LIFE/Affirmative Action for Whites/The houses that racism built
             It goes back to the postwar suburbs and the government policies and subsidies that made them possible-and guaranteed they'd be segregated.... A set of New Deal programs led by the Federal Housing Administration allowed millions of average white Americans to own a home for the first time. ...Between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed $120 billion of home loans; more than 98 percent went to whites. ...

    Racism doesn't just come dressed in white sheets or voiced by skinheads, but also lies in institutions that, like the FHA, have quietly and often invisibly channeled America's wealth, power, and status disproportionately to white people, giving us a head start in life. As Ohio State University law professor John A. Powell observes: "The slick thing about whiteness is that whites are getting the spoils of a racist system without themselves
    being personally racist."

    Job Growth Is Greatest Since Recession Ended
    "I think we've finally shifted from jobless recovery to sustained expansion," Cheney said. "Today's employment report is just one month's report, but it's the one we've been waiting for, providing unambiguous good news about the labor market."

    As the overall jobless rate fell to 6 percent from 6.1 percent, unemployment fell last month for every demographic group except black or African Americans, whose rate rose to 11.5 percent from 11.3 percent. Except for last June, when it was 11.8 percent, that is the highest rate since 1994.

    U.S. Incomes Fell, Poverty Rose in 2002 

      U.S. household incomes declined for the third year in a row, and nearly 1.7 million people in the country fell into
     poverty as the economy recovered sluggishly from the 2001 recession, the U.S. Census Bureau reported   yesterday. 
      ... 
      The poverty changes in 2002 were noticeably concentrated. Poverty rates were virtually unchanged for
      self-identified whites, Latinos and Asians, but the portion of African Americans in poverty rose to 24.1 percent
      from 22.7 percent.

    The Hard Road to a Paycheck

    [T]he employment rate for African American men is at 59.9 percent ... The employment rate for white men in September, for example, was 70.3 percent. The rate for Hispanic men was 75, and for Asian American men it was 70.1.
    ...
    [D]espite the economy's ongoing recovery, 59.9 was the lowest rate for a September for African American men since 1983 -- all of which is why Jared Bernstein, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute who has analyzed the employment gap among minority groups, says, "The recovery has been harder on blacks than on anybody else."
    THE DATA IS IN!- Opposition / abandonment of Affirmative Action in University / College admissions is a proven prescription for the neo-redemption and permanence of white supremacy for the next millennium.
    " Prejudice, always blind to what it never wishes to see,
    and quick to perceive all it wishes "
    Frederick Douglass, 1860.
    This page will hi-light Polls, Surveys and Statistical studies that offer insights
    into our ATTITUDES AND ANXIETIES ABOUT RACE.
    The NorthStar Network
    The NorthStar Legacy
    "The NorthStar Network takes its name from the abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, published by Frederick Douglass, the 19th Century orator, writer and former slave. We inherit the legacy of The North Star as a treasured heirloom that has been entrusted to a new generation of Black Americans."
    Why NorthStar?
    "Our mission is to provide news and information from a perspective that is relevant to the experiences of Black people in the United States. We pledge to adhere to the highest standards of journalism, taking particular care to be objective, fair in our editorial position and open to diverse points of view."
    `
    The African-American Mosaic
    A Library of Congress
    Resource Guide for the Study of
    Black History and Culture


    • Temple of Democracy:"This homepage is an informational resource for those who are fighting against the Neo-Confederate movement and, thus, for our American democratic republic."