Many black seniors not getting flu shots. African-American nursing home residents are less likely to get flu shots than whites, even within the same facility, according to a new study. Researchers looked at hundreds of thousands of patient records from more than 14,000 nursing homes each year between the 2006-07 and 2008-09 flu seasons. The overall vaccination rate in the latest year is 82.75 percent, which is short of the 90 percent goal set by Medicare and Medicaid. For blacks the rate was 77.75 percent, compared to the rate for whites that was 83.46 percent. “One reason you would potentially see a difference is that blacks and whites are by and large served by different nursing homes and there’s lots of evidence to suggest that blacks are served in nursing homes that are not as good,” says Vincent Mor, professor of health services policy and practice at Brown University. Full story at Futurity.
More research news from top universities. Photo credit: Fotolia. How Baseball Explains Modern Racism. America’s pastime reveals a larger lesson about conditioned behavior in an institutionally racist society. Researchers found that home-plate umpires call disproportionately more strikes for pitchers in their same ethnic group. Despite recent odes to “post-racial” sensibilities, persistent racial wage and unemployment gaps show that prejudice is alive and well in America.
Nonetheless, that truism is often angrily denied or willfully ignored in our society, in part, because prejudice is so much more difficult to recognize on a day-to-day basis. As opposed to the Jim Crow era of white hoods and lynch mobs, 21st century American bigotry is now more often an unseen crime of the subtle and the reflexive–and the crime scene tends to be the shadowy nuances of hiring decisions, performance evaluations and plausible deniability. Thankfully, though, we now have baseball to help shine a light on the problem so that everyone can see it for what it really is. Same thing for high-profile moments. More Black Men Now in Prison System Than Were Enslaved. March 31, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. This article first appeared on LA Progressive. “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation.
Alexander, currently a law professor at Ohio State, had been brought in to discuss her year-old bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness . Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don’t explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America’s prison system, according to Alexander, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun after attending Stanford Law. “What do we expect them to do?” So it’s like America’s current war addiction. Upward Mobility for Blacks: Obama's Jobs Program Is Not Enough.
Thinkstock In his jobs speech earlier this month, President Barack Obama spoke eloquently of a time when Americans felt that hard work invariably paid off. We "believed in a country where everyone gets a fair shake and does their fair share. " I'm not convinced that most black Americans ever really felt that way. Many of us instead were convinced that the deck was stacked against us, that no matter how hard we worked, we would never get a fair shake. But even in the midst of our deepest despair, we were hopeful for our children.
We believed that, whatever we had to go through, life would be better for those who followed. A major new study has dashed a bucket of cold water on that dream. The news for blacks is especially bad, particularly for black men. This is not the first time that Pew has raised the alarm about downward mobility. Both studies wrestle with the question of why blacks are so vulnerable. Many African Americans apparently are not very concerned about the trends. Launch of Black Voices for Internet Freedom. In September 2011, the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative hosted an event with Free Press to advocate Internet freedom. Media reform representatives from the Black and Latino communities participated in the event, and over two hundred people watched online, in the call to keep the Internet open and free from discrimination. Internet freedom and diversity are critical, as Joseph Torres, the author of the book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media asserted: “We need Black voices and Latino voices for Internet freedom to make sure their voices are heard and not dismissed by the Federal Communications Commission, Congress or the Obama Administration.”
Following Mr. Torres’ speech, panelists discussed the importance of Internet freedom and network neutrality to communities of color. As Rev. Video highlights from the discussion can be viewed above, while video and audio recordings of the full event are available at right. Untitled. Six Cities Where Black People Are Living in a Depression. Update @ 11:50a: You can see similarly dramatic numbers for Latino populations in several metro areas.
There are Depression-level jobless rates among Latinos in the Providence, R.I., area; the Hartford, Conn., area; Frenso, Calif.; and Las Vegas. As with African Americans, you have to get to the 35th metro area on EPI’s list of hardest hit Latino populations to find a jobless rate on par with the national crisis. See the cities and their rates here. After a week in which the building popular anger about economic inequality led the news, today the latest job numbers are out. They’re being called “better than expected,” a familiar refrain when there’s an uptick in job creation. But the week-to-week and month-to-month ups and downs aren’t really the point anymore. It’s the trend line that matters, and that’s downward. EPI’s Algernon Austin looked at the 30 cities with the highest black jobless rates in 2010, comparing them to the rates in 2007 and to the overall jobless rates. 1.