The USDA’s Economic Research Service put out its latest figures for food insecurity hunger in the U.S. yesterday. From the press release:
In more than a third of those households that reported difficulty in providing enough food, at least one member did not get enough to eat at some time during the year and normal eating patterns were disrupted due to limited resources. Food insecurity was more common in large cities and rural areas, and rates were substantially higher than the national average among households with incomes near or below the Federal poverty line, households with children headed by single parents, and African-American and Hispanic households.
We are the richest country in the world, at least 6.8 million of us can’t afford to eat on a regular basis. You’ll hear a lot of talk about access to healthy food, but the fact is that the U.S. hasn’t quite figured out basic access to food of any sort for an alarming number of people. We might not see malnutrition (although it happens, including among the obese) and starvation on the same scale as other parts of the world, but that does not excuse glossing over the fact there are people in this country who cannot afford to eat.
The report is careful to note that hunger levels have stayed stagnant between 2008 and 2009:
The food security of U.S. households, when measured over the entire year, remained essentially unchanged from 2008 to 2009, with the prevalence of food insecurity at each level of severity remaining at the highest percentage observed since nationally representative food security surveys began in 1995. However, during the final 30 days covered by the 2009 survey, food insecurity in the severe range (described as very low food security) was somewhat less prevalent than during the corresponding period in 2008. (emphasis mine)
The TSA’s new airport security protocols, in which folks are either subjected to high-tech x-ray screening or patdowns, have ruffled a lot of feathers from people who have become rather convenient civil libertarians. I caught Dave Barry, the humorist, on NPR the other day joking about an embarrassing search as he waited to board a plane, and he said the TSA was stopping old ladies instead of being more sensible in targeting who to search. He may not have come out and said “profiling passengers,” but that’s certainly what he was implying.
As it is with most things, Charles Krauthammerhas no such qualms voicing those ugly thoughts.
We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety – 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling – when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.
But Adam points out that for all the implicit and explicit calls for racial profiling, it’s pretty obviously clear that it doesn’t work.
Racial profiling is no more statistically accurate than those random searches conservatives always complain about. Thousands of Muslims travel on airplanes every day, and an infinitesimal number actually turn out to be dangerous. But the argument here is pretty clear — the problem isn’t that the violation of privacy isn’t worth an unknown gain in security. It’s that the TSA should be frisking “Nigerian nutjobs” instead of grandma. Conservatives like Krauthammer aren’t angry that the TSA is infringing on individual liberty, just that it’s infringing on their individual liberty. [emphasis mine.]
It should be pointed out that for plenty of people of color in the nation’s inner cities, these kind of uncomfortable, vaguely legal searches — with the stated intent of finding people carrying guns and drugs — are essentially de rigueur. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are going about their days, who are patted down because they match some vague description of some suspect. In one four-block section of Brownsville, Brooklyn, the NYPD made 52,000 stops over a four-year period, which averaged out to about one stop for every resident in the area each year. And it’s no more efficient than the profiling Adam decries: for all that scrutiny and all those stops over four years, the police in Brownsville recovered just 25 guns, and less than 1 percent of all those people who were stopped — and questioned and patted down and humiliated as they went about their lives — were ever arrested. (All of the personal info taken during the stops, however, was entered into a citywide database.)
There’s a perverse kind of cycle at work here: if you give extra police scrutiny to certain kinds of people, you reify in the minds of a jittery public the idea that those people are in need of special attention, and so those people’s implicit criminalization is always, always justified.
A job deferred is a dream deferred. The Great Recession has set youth unemployment rates skyrocketing to unprecedented altitudes, leaving 4.4 million young people without work just as we begin our careers—a stunning share of them African Americans. There are of course immediate consequences—wrestling with college loans, overstaying our welcome at our parents’ homes, plain frustration. But we’ll also be living with the consequences for many years. In particular, it is likely to mean that the already large black-white wealth gap—a disparity that many researchers say defines economic inequity—will grow as my generation comes of age.
Black youth have the highest jobless rate among all races and ethnicities, and that rate is still rising. In the past year, while other youth jobless rates have flat-lined, blacks and Asians have continued to trend upward. And existing racial disparities have widened across the board since the recession began. As of July 2010, while white youth unemployment rate was 16.2 percent, the jobless rates for black youth was double: A whopping 33.4 percent.
Many things drive that alarming statistic. There’s the fact that African Americans as a whole are feeling the brunt of the recession more severely than other demographics. And then there’s the long list of other inequities that black youth face and that, in turn, make employment more difficult even in a good market: the high drop out rates and the uniquely aggressive policing of black neighborhoods, to name two. More After the jump.
Liberals have always had a hard time dealing with fatherhood and family programs designed for low-income families. On the one hand, some of the arguments behind the creation of programs for low-income families that demonstrate healthy relationships and encourage fathers to be emotionally involved in their children’s lives is a good thing on its face: promoting the idea that fathers are important beyond the child support they can provide is as good for a women’s rights and progressive agenda as anything else. But on the other hand, these programs have always provided a Trojan horse for conservatives who want to promote marriage and traditional gender roles, as President Bush did during his administration. Bush used a decade-old push to better enforce child support —- and provide fathers the social services they needed to be able to pay it in order — t0 moralize on marriage and funnel funding to church-based programs he approved of.
But in President Obama, progressive groups found a president who could include such programs under a broad anti-poverty umbrella in a way that makes sense, as I wrote about last week over at the Prospect. Obama’s rhetoric shows he supports fatherhood programs without moralizing on marriage, and his policy goals include the kind of practical support that progressives can get behind:
However, for many women’s rights groups, there is a fine line between programs that provide social services to fathers and those that promote conservative, marriage-based solutions. Bush-administration-era fatherhood and marriage programs denigrate single motherhood, because they seem to say women are inadequate parents. Moreover, there are finite resources for low-income families, and fatherhood-focused programs risk robbing low-income women and children of welfare services, which are already inadequately funded.
Until recently, progressive groups that promote fatherhood initiatives have co-existed in an uneasy peace with women’s rights groups. But the two have found common ground. “If we’re looking at low-income families, those families do include men,” Jacquelyn Boggess, co-director of the Center for Family Policy and Practice, said at an October event sponsored by the Center for American Progress aimed at bridging the gap between anti-poverty advocates and women’s rights groups. “They may not show up on documents or papers or forms, or in houses … but they do exist; they’re part of families. And there are ways that we need to support them being part of families, and encourage it.”
The problem with this bill, as with many of the past two years and many more going forward, is how much damage conservatives can do to and with it. That’s why some groups are hesitant to reopen big progressive policy agenda items, like the Childhood Nutrition Act, TANF, and many more than promote government spending; anti-government rhetoric from the right risks ruining those programs, and so the best option just might be to let them coast ahead as is, even if their current state is not ideal.
Diddy is apparently having some respiratory problems:
“Damn it hurts in a whole other way when someone you felt and I mean really felt was your Friend, Betrays you. It hurts when Breathe.”
Faith Evans can probably relate.
Seems like he’s suffering from a severe case of, ahem, bitchassness. But if Jay Electronica keeps putting out songs at this clip – two songs in two days – then it’s tough to be all that sympathetic.
A tissue for your sorrows, Diddy.
And now, a sweet 16 of links, y’all:
1. Ginni Thomas, the conservative activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is resigning from Liberty Central, the conservative group she founded last year. (Avon Snarksdale)
2. At ColorLines, Michelle Chengoes in on the White House’s hypocrisy on war and child soldiers. Why are we handing out waivers to countries who arm children to fight wars? Oh, because it’s okay if they’re fighting terrorists … another reason why waging abstracts wars leave a clear way out impossible. What is clear as day are the casualties – our children here and abroad. (Naima)
3. The man who’s helped thousands of college students cheat their way through school comes clean to The Chronicle of Higher Education. “You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students’ writing. I have seen the word ‘desperate’ misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate.” (Blackink)
4. After seven years of house arrest, Aung Sang Suu Kyi is released in Burma…again. The Christian Science Monitor is skeptical and given what happened in Depayin, for good reason. (Naima)
5. The eternal conflict between gentrification and affordable housing results in some ugly consequences in one block of DC. (Nicole)
11. Walgreens is expanding their fresh food offerings in food deserts in Chicago. (Nicole)
12. Ruby Bridges was the first black student to attend William Frantz Public School in New Orleans. She was immortalized in the famous Norman Rockwell painting, The Problem We All Live With.Fifty years hence, she’s a teacher at that same school, which is still recovering from Katrina. (Avon Snarksdal
13. Michigan has just passed a pretty cool “cottage foods” law. Want to make some money on the side selling your famous banana bread? Now you don’t have to be in a commercial kitchen to do it. (Nicole)
14. Facebook is getting into the email business. Zuckerberg plans to append @facebook.com to our preferred alias of choice. (Naima)
15. Kobe Bryant, labor leader? Yes. He plans to join teammate Derek Fisher as one of the league’s leading voices in collective bargaining negotiations. (Blackink)
16. The New York Timestries to quantify the value of a star quarterback to his college football program. It’s safe to say that for players like Cam Newton of Auburn, $200,000 is a bargain. (Blackink)
Via Lisa at Sociological Images, UC Irvine professor Jennifer Lee mulls over the increasingly complex conversations on race in the U.S. being spurred by the immigration of Asians and Latin@s, away from the black/white binary. She says the new continuum is black/nonblack, as opposed to white/nonwhite.
There’s no doubt that the United States will become a more ethnically diverse country, but that’s a far cry from saying that the United States will become a “browner” country. If the past is any indication, white America is here for the long haul; new immigrants and their children will claim the identity, and in all likelihood, we’ll add “Martinez” and “Park” to the long list of traditionally “white” names.
The profile is unfortunately behind a paywall, but it paints LaVette as a charismatic, somewhat capricious lady with a really complicated relationship to her fame — or lack thereof. Motown, Stax and the like didn’t know what to do with her voice, and she resents the fact that she never blew up, even as she’s sort of glad it never happened. (She also sort of hates music.)
“I’ve never been this tired in my life. My show is such that I don’t get much sympathy — they look at me and say, ‘She doesn’t look that old and she doesn’t seem that tired’ —- but, when you see me holding the microphone stand, I’m holding it for balance. If I was younger and tired, I’d just be tired. When I’m tired now, I feel like death. I really thought I could just adapt to this struggle, but I’m a grandmother. How do you think your grandmother would do if someone shoed up and said, ‘Let’s go on the road with the Robert Plant.’ I really don’t have a lot of talents.” She went on,” I can cook, and I can fuck, and I can sing. And I’m proud of all of them.”
Via Pam Spaulding, we catch John McCain, who was on Meet the Press and up to his usual weasel-iness on “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” For months, McCain was calling for the results of a Pentagon study on the law before deciding whether to take any action on repealing it. Now that the study says that most servicemembers would have no problem with its repeal, McCain is basically calling for a new study.
On this issue, at least — one on which the White House has the political winds at its back — the Obama presidency has been effectively indistinguishable from a McCain presidency. Sigh.
If you remember back to the ‘08 campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama were both touting the importance of creating “green-collar” jobs as a kind of economic and environmental silver bullet. These jobs in wind and solar energy would help wean America off of fossil fuels and foreign oil, would put retrain skilled laborers and put them back to work, and as an added bonus, they couldn’t be shipped overseas. (Van Jones even argued that those jobs could make a dent in the intractable unemployment rates for black men in inner cities.)
If you get a chance, you should really holler at my blogmate Monica’s very good long-form piece over at the American Prospect on how that promise is going unrealized. The Obama administration has given money to community colleges across the country to train these new green workers, who get certified only to find that there aren’t any jobs awaiting them. Why? Because as long as there’s foot-dragging on major climate legislation that creates some kind of incentive for folks to move away from cheap, dirty fossil fuels, there’s never going to be enough demand for companies that, for example, build wind farms and need “green-color” technicians for their upkeep. (If climate legislation had any chance before, it’s almost certainly dead now thanks to the newly emboldened Republicans in Congress.)
Kristina Rizga at Mother Joneswrites about a new report that concludes that middle class black boys still perform worse than their white counterparts, and that “race still matters,” even for the nonpoor. According to the study:
[...]black boys face more obstacles to graduating high school than any other subgroup, from living in a household without a male guardian, to more frequent encounters with overzealous cops, to higher dropout rates and more suspensions.
The study’s authors suggest that targeted efforts are the solution: Task forces, White House conferences, and after school programs all directed at black males. But Rizga is skeptical that we’ll see anything more than the already popular education reform programs — things like more funding for charter schools and merit pay for teachers — and writes, “We definitely won’t see are new federal programs that anyone could brand as affirmative action.”
The issue I have with the suggestions is that while they would address the more immediate threats to young black men, they miss something that seems pretty obvious to me. Middle-class black people exist in much closer proximity to poor black people than middle-class whites do to poor whites. And I’m not just talking about physical proximity — although it’s pretty common to see mixed income all-black neighborhoods — but also emotional proximity. Middle-class blacks are often first- or second-generation college graduates, and they’re maybe just a generation or two out of the South, or the inner city. That means that a middle-class black person likely has less wealth than a white person of similar income; it means that she has many close relatives who are working class; it means that she has immediate family members who have been through the criminal justice system and who are now unable to find jobs to support themselves or their families.
All of these systemic issues have a destabilizing effect on middle-class black families that won’t be erased by after-school programs and White House conferences on black males.
And relatedly: Howard University, my alma mater, just touted on Twitter that it’s listed as a ‘bargain college’ by CNN. That’s all very well and good. And at just over $18K a year, it certainly is a bargain in comparison to schools of similar size, rank and resources. (Four of the 12 schools on the list are HBCUs.) But is it really a bargain for the students who attend? I’d argue no. Anecdotally, while I graduated debt-free due to the generosity of a relative, I have many friends who are paying hundreds of dollars a month in student loans, and will be for years to come. This suggests to me that if a large proportion of Howard’s students come from working- and middle-class backgrounds where family wealth is nonexistent, then it doesn’t matter if the price of matriculating there is cheaper than at schools whose students can afford to pay out-of-pocket.
Late pass me on this, but Adam Serwerresponded to my post on how Batman bears some of the blame for all the bodies the Joker has caught.
The right answer is that Batman is already an outlaw, but his extralegal behavior is premised on preserving and strengthening what legitimate authority exists in Gotham so that a better and more responsible society can ultimately be built. Batman exists because of the extraordinary circumstances in which Gotham finds itself — a city so tainted by corruption that the local government is incapable of acting in the most rudimentary public interest.
So it isn’t actually Batman’s role to kill his enemies — even those as crazed and sadistic as The Joker. That would undermine the larger project, the restoration of Gotham. Batman’s endgame isn’t a Gotham without crime — it’s a Gotham where the problems can be handled by public institutions rather than costumed vigilantes, where Jim Gordon isn’t an anomaly. That can’t be built on vigilante murder, particularly since doing so would make Batman a target of the very institutions he’s trying to save. The moment Batman decides to kill the joker is the moment Gordon decides he’s going to stop pretending he has no idea what Bruce Wayne really does at night.
To the extent that The Joker is still alive, that’s Gotham’s failure. Batman has captured him time and time again, only for the state to choose the lenience of a stay in Arkham Asylum over trial and state-sanctioned execution. The Joker, after all, isn’t really insane in the sense that he’s not responsible for his actions — it’s not like he kills because he doesn’t know right from wrong. He kills because he thinks it’s funny.
This seems like an overly generous reading of Batman’s objectives with respect to Gotham’s law enforcement. It’s a stretch to say that Batman’s adventures serve to provide Gotham’s legal institutions with more room to function; if anything, the police department is increasingly reliant on Batman, since his tactics invite the presence of the kind of bad guys that are way outta the GCPD’s weight class.
Even if you buy Adam’s argument, it doesn’t seem to me that a police outfit willing to overlook Bruce Wayne’s myriad extralegal, rights-violating exploits — and I think we can all agree that all that high-tech eavesdropping, jumping through people’s skylights and flying experimental fighter planes through the middle of a major city is some undeniably criminal shit — would suddenly see the stealthy elimination of an unstoppable sociopathic mass murderer who cannot be effectively imprisoned as a bridge too far.
I’m certainly not arguing that Batman start murking every supervillain in Gotham (the Riddler and the Penguin, por ejemplo, are more schemers than cold-blooded killers) but the Joker is clearly an outlier. Since there’s no legal avenue that can be taken to neutralize him — he can’t be executed because he’s insane — stopping the Joker requires stepping outside the law, which Batman does all the time, with no repercussions.
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