Another year of grim headlines about detained and deported immigrants, hate crimes, and the police being called on black people for doing everyday things like gardening or going swimming. But 2018 also held glimmers of hope — if you search hard enough — with stories about racial equality and justice. Here are a few of that we published and that are worth celebrating.
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At Wolf Point High School in rural Montana, Native American students face the same neglect Native students across the U.S. do as they navigate a school system that has failed American Indians.
The faint scars on Ruth Fourstar’s arms testify to a difficult life on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation: the physical and emotional abuse at home, the bullying at school, the self-harm that sent her rotating through mental health facilities and plunged her to a remedial program from the honor roll.
A diploma from Wolf Point High School could be a ticket out of this isolated prairie town in eastern Montana. Instead, Ms. Fourstar, 17, sees her school as a dead end.
The tutoring she was promised to get her back on track did not materialize. An agreement with the high school principal to let her apply credits earned in summer courses toward graduation fell through, Ms. Fourstar said. The special education plan that the school district developed for her, supposedly to help her catch up, instead laid out how she should be disciplined.
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1. The Deafening Silence of Colin Kaepernick
This year, hardly a week passed when Colin Kaepernick’s name did not come up. The kneeling protests against racism and social injustice he ignited at the beginning of the 2016 football season continued to resonate on and off the field even as he says very little himself. It’s easy to conclude he is being shunned, but regardless the debate and dialogue over race and sports carries on.
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A small study suggests that transgender residents face high levels of discrimination while looking for housing in North Dakota.
The nonprofit High Plains Fair Housing Council conducted the study in anticipation that legislators would consider banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in 2019. Similar proposals have failed in 2015, 2013 and 2009 legislative sessions.
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There was not a single woman who climbed poles and repaired electric lines in Missouri until Susan Blaser became a journeyman line worker with Kansas City Power and Light in 1992.
Nearly 30 years later, there still are few women line workers in Missouri and across the country, but Blaser, the lead instructor of Metropolitan Community College’s electric utility line technician program, is trying to change this by encouraging more women to consider entering the profession.
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Though the field of computer science has seen strides in the increased number of people earning degrees and in job openings across the country in recent years, the field is still lacking diverse representation of women and minorities.
Out of all of the bachelor’s degrees in computer science received in 2015, 8.4 percent were Latinx students at doctoral-granting colleges and universities, 8.5 were Latinx students at non-doctoral-granting institutions, 4.3 were Black students at doctoral-granting institutions and 8.6 were Black students at non-doctoral granting institutions, according to Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
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According to a report from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), African-American and Hispanic students earning engineering degrees remain underrepresented despite an increase seen in recent years and a growing demand for workers in the industry.
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For many students, the costs associated with studying abroad can seem insurmountable. But the Black Alumni Association of Arcadia University (BAAAU) believes that going abroad should be a right of each Arcadia student, not a privilege. Choice should be the reason students do not study abroad, and not affordability.
African-American students make up a mere 5.9 percent of students who study abroad, according to a 2016 diversity study by NAFSA: Association of International Educators. While the participation rate may be low, the success rate of African-American students who participate in international studies is not — a 2017 report, Underrepresented Students in US Study Abroad: Investigating Impacts by the Institute of International Education (IIE), noted that African-American students who studied abroad had a 31.2 percent higher graduation rate than those who did not.
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Lifetime experiences of racial and ethnic discrimination are strongly linked to food insecurity in Philadelphia, says a new series of reports released today from researchers at Drexel University’s Center for Hunger Free Communities in the Dornsife School of Public Health.
“When people think about how to solve hunger, we need to go deeper and think about the issues that are exacerbating the problem,” said the report’s lead author Mariana Chilton, Ph.D., MPH, a professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health and director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities. “We see that if mothers experience at least one form of discrimination, they are more likely to face food insecurity when compared to those who did not experience discrimination. And this happens in most facets of life in Philadelphia—at work, in school, at the doctor.”
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Institutional racism, White supremacy and anti-Black attitudes fuel underrepresentation of Black students on college and university campuses across the United States, with access a battle constantly being waged in legal courts and the court of public opinion, according to an academic who addressed the 58th annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools this week.
But there is hope because today’s students appear determined to hold institutions of higher learning to their promises to live up to their stated ideals regarding diversity and access, said Dr. Walter Allen, the Allan Murray Carter Professor of Higher Education and Distinguished Professor of Education, Sociology and African-American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“Anti-Black sentiments are major drivers in inequality, enrollment and degree completion in higher education,” Allen told the gathering’s 700 attendees from 13 nations and five continents at a plenary in an Omni Shoreham ballroom.
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