Casey Doesn't Get It: The Multiracial Advocacy

 

We have received a response from the Annie E. Casey Foundation because of our complaint (see last blog post). Either they just don’t understand, or they are deliberately excluding multiracial children.

The rather chilling response indicates that they take their data “collected by birth and death certificates at the state level.” That is the absolutely worst way to collect data on multiracial children. Most often, the parent is not asked the race of the baby at birth, and it is written on the baby’s chart by an attending nurse or doctor at the birth. Thousands of women over the years have told me they were never asked the race of their multiracial child until they started school. The fact is that in most states, race of the child is not even on the birth certificate and other times it only has the race of the parents.

What about those death certificates? A dead person cannot self-identify their race. Funeral home employees “eyeball” the person and write down a race—usually only one race.

The next Casey Foundation problem is that if they asked the right questions, they would get the right and most accurate data. In other words, they have admitted to only allowing one choice for “the five largest racial categories.” So if they don’t allow people to mark two or more, they haven’t asked question the right way to begin with. They are using inaccurate data.

The response from The Casey Foundation baffles me because they can get better data from the US Census Bureau, The American Community Survey and schools. The federal government ordered federal agencies to comply with check two or more boxes in 1997. Casey is a private foundation and they do not have to do what the federal government does, but what ever happened to doing the right thing?

Their response concludes by saying they will “explore” revisiting the categories for the 2013 publication and then they abruptly dismiss us. Oh really? There will be more to this story.

Multiracial Children Excluded from Casey Foundation

THUMBS DOWN TO CASEY FOUNDATION! The annual 2012 Kids Count Data Book by the Annie E. Casey Foundation was released today. The data in this annual report are widely-used and quoted. Most of the rankings are by race. THE CASEY FOUNDATION DID NOT USE MULTIRACIAL DATA AT ALL, EVEN THOUGH GOVERNMENT AGENCIES SUPPLY DATA ON THE MULTIRACIAL POPULATION and schools are required to allow students to check more than one race. SHAME ON THE CASEY FOUNDATION for perpetuating the invisibility of multiracial children in this country.

Annual Study Finds Child Education, Health Improving

By Sarah D. Sparks on July 25, 2012 5:36 AM

Children's health and education are showing positive signs even in the midst of a dismal economic environment, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation's annual ranking of child well-being, released this morning.

The 23rd-annual Kids Count Data Book represents an overhaul of the Baltimore-based group's historically health-dominated 10 benchmarks. This year the indicators have been expanded to "holistically measure" child well-being, incorporating 16 measures of health, education, economic well-being, and family and community support, according to Laura Speer, an associate director for advocacy reform and data at the foundation. The data from different indicators are not necessarily comparable, however, as they span different comparison years based on the most recent state and federal information available.

Researchers found education and health are on the upswing across all benchmarks, though gaps still exist between children of different racial groups, and Northeast and Midwestern states score well above states in the Deep South and Southwest.

Children with health insurance increased 2 percentage points to 92 percent, from 2008 to 2010, while child deaths dropped 16 percent between 2005 and 2009, from 32 to 27 deaths per 100,000 children. The number of babies born below healthy birth weight held steady.
Moreover, "Even in this time of economic decline, education got better," Speer said. Five percent more children—or 47 percent—attended preschool, and the percentage of 4th and 8th graders reading proficiently and the number graduating high school on time also rose.

"If I had to make one big bet, I'd ensure every child is reading proficiently by 3rd grade," said Patrick T. McCarthy, the foundation's president and CEO. "We know this is a pivot point, that up until 3rd grade children spend a lot of time learning to read, and after 3rd grade they basically are reading to learn, relying on their reading skills to do well. If a child is not reading well by the end of 3rd grade it becomes increasingly difficult for them to catch up to their peers."
He said that while there isn't a silver bullet to improve literacy, research does point to reading achievement gaps caused by differences in school readiness, general attendance, and summer learning loss. "You put those three things together and they are all things we can do something about."

Of little surprise, children's economic picture was bleaker. The study found 22 percent of children under age 18 living in poverty, up from the 19 percent in poverty in 2005, representing 2.4 million more children in families with $22,000 or less a year for a family of four. Likewise, 41 percent of children lived in homes with a high housing cost, up 4 percent since 2005. And since the economy plummeted in 2008, 27 percent more children—now one in three—has no parent with full-time, year-round employment.

Moreover, "Poor kids and kids of color continue to fall behind their more affluent and advantaged classmates," McCarthy said. "In 2010, American Indian and black children, both at 49 percent, were nearly twice as likely as white children to have no parent with secure employment. This is a very bad sign for those who care about opportunity for those children."
Casey researchers found several signs of improvement for families overall. Teen births continued to tick down, from 40 out of every thousand children born in 2005 to 39 births per thousand in 2009. And only 15 percent of children in 2010 lived in homes with a parent who has less than a high school diploma, 6 percent fewer than in 2005. Yet poor children increasingly live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.

"Where a child grows up can make a huge difference" McCarthy said. "A low income child growing up in a flourishing community is more likely to thrive and succeed. That same child in poverty who lives in a community with a high concentration of poverty where most of the neighbors are also poor is far more likely to get off-track in school become involved gangs and fail to gain successful employment. So, investments that focus on improving neighborhoods can help provide a foundation for children's future."

Speer agreed in a briefing with reporters on Monday: "This is especially troubling because growing up in poverty is one of the greatest threats to healthy child development and it can really affect everything from their cognitive development and their ability to learn to their social and emotional development and their overall health."

The study comes on the heels of similar new child well-being data released last week by the the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics; it also found that fewer children are the victims of violent crimes.
Source: Education Week 

The Census Form

Did you Know?

In 1840 the Census grew to more than 70 questions, including the number of "insane and idiotic" in each household.

Man sentenced in hate crime against biracial man

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. -- A Missouri man who admitted to vandalizing and burning a biracial man's home has been sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison.

Twenty-three-year-old Charles Wilhelm, of Independence, was sentenced Tuesday in federal court for conspiracy and violating the Fair Housing Act.

Prosecutors said Wilhelm conspired with David Martin and Teresa Witthar to intimidate Nathaniel Reed into moving out of his mobile home in Independence, in part because he is biracial. 

The three all admitted they entered Reed's mobile home in June 2006 and wrote racial slurs on the walls. Two days later, the mobile home was destroyed by fire.

Witthar was sentenced to more than five years in prison. Martin is scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 2.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/07/24/4655484/man-sentenced-in-hate-crime-against.html#storylink=cpy
Source:The Associated Press

Published: Tuesday, Jul. 24, 2012 

FBI Joins Probe into Threats to Interracial Family

Springfield, Missouri police have handed over to the FBI an investigation into reported threats against a biracial Springfield family.Springfield fire officials reported a fire at the family’s home July 8 did some damage to the home’s exterior.

Assistant Fire Chief Randy Villines said fire marshals have determined the blaze was intentionally set. Days later, on July 13, police responded to the house again after a 28-year-old man reported his car had been vandalized.


A tire had been punctured and scratched into the side of the vehicle, the word “Die” was preceded by the N-word, said Cpl. Matt Brown, police spokesman. A police report shows officers confiscated a knife on the scene and logged it as evidence.


FBI supervisor in Springfield, Josh Nixon, confirmed his office has been in contact with police about the reported threats and said his office would investigate allegations of civil rights violations.Multiple attempts to contact the family have failed.
Source: Springfield, MO News-Leader.com

Multiethnic Beauty Consumers on the Rise

As the ethnic makeup of the U.S. consumer continues to become more multiracial, cosmetics companies are looking to address a more nuanced audience. This past year, brands like Dior, L’Oréal Paris and Burberry Beauty have expanded their shade offerings to meet increasing demand for a spectrum of skin tones. In addition, retailers like Target Corp. have risen to the challenge, stocking their shelves with ethnically oriented indie brands once relegated to the salon channel.
Source: www.wwd.com

Multiracial Children Struggle to find Donor Matches

Multiracial Children Struggle to find Donor Matches

Seattle Children’s patients are often the most critically ill kids in the region, and some of them require life-saving transplants, such as an organ or bone marrow transplant. This is a daunting procedure for any family, but it can be even more so if that child is of mixed-race.

Multi-ethnic and multi-racial children have extremely diverse genetic makeup, so the odds of finding a donor who matches that genetic makeup lowers dramatically. With the growing community of racially and ethnically diverse people, it’s important that more people become donors so that the chance of a mixed-race child finding a match increases. At this time, the number of mixed-race donors falls far below those in need of a bone marrow transplant.


In fact, only 3 percent of the 16.5 million potential bone marrow donors in the National Marrow Donor Program’s Be The Match Registry identify themselves as mixed-race.¹ And unfortunately, this is a big problem that very few people know about. However, with the help of Japanese-Canadian documentary producer, Jeff Chiba Stearns, this could begin shifting in the very near future.

Jeff is raising awareness of this subset of patients in need of donors through his compelling documentary, Mixed Match, which highlights the lives of young mixed-race patients who are awaiting a match in order to undergo a life-saving procedure that is their only medical option.

Maga Barzallo Sockemtickem, a part Native American, Caucasian and Ecuadorean

15-year-old, is one of the patients profiled in Jeff’s documentary. Maga spent seven months at Seattle Children’s Hospital in 2011 waiting and hoping for a donor match to be found.

“Waiting for a donor is a terribly trying and draining period of time for both the patient and the patient’s family,” said Dr. Douglas Hawkins who leads the Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Seattle Children’s Hospital.  “Identifying a match is something entirely out of a family’s control, and all they can do is hope for the best.”

Finally, after months of anticipation, a donor was identified as a match for Maga and she was able to undergo the bone marrow transplant necessary to save her life. In the documentary, she tells Jeff, “My genes are very unique, and to find someone that matched nine out of 10 of them … it just fascinates me.”

In order for more success stories like this to unfold, a more diverse donor registry needs to be created. This will allow for more matches and subsequently more lives saved.

Statistics

• Every year, over 30,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with life threatening blood diseases like leukemia. For many patients, a bone marrow transplant is their only chance at survival. Only 30% of patients find matching donors within their families. The remaining 70% must search for an unrelated donor.²
• The number of people who identify themselves as multiracial in the U.S. has grown from 3.9 million in 2000, the first year the census included the category, to 5.2 million in 2008.
• About 6,000 people in the U.S. are awaiting a bone marrow match.¹
• According to the World Donor Marrow Association, while two out of three Caucasians find a match, the chances of a patient from another ethnic background can be as low as one in four.³
• Despite rapid improvements in marrow registries around the world, the global registry is still disproportionately represented by the U.S., U.K. and Germany — all predominantly Caucasian countries.³
• According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 41% of the mixed-race population is under 18, meaning much of the mixed-race population is too young to donate marrow, which requires donors to be at least 18.³

Sources

1. National Marrow Donor Program
2. Mixed Marrow
3. World Marrow Donor Association
4. Seattle Children’s Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Program

Article Source: Seattle Children's Hospital-Published in Global Health, Patient Care.

Felony Hate Crime vs Playing Football?!

The source for this story is the Smoky Mountain News in North Carolina. A cross burning is a felony hate crime and has serious consequences in most place. This is wrong on so many levels. -Susan  

A Tuscola football player charged with a felony cross burning targeting a biracial classmate will remain on the team, at least for now.

Ben Greene, a rising junior and running back on the varsity football team, will have to sit out two games and do 25 hours of community service, according to school board policy. He can continue to practice and train with the team and is free to take the field again after sitting out the requisite number of games.“We are following our policy exactly,” said Haywood County Schools Superintendent Anne Garrett.

While Garrett can’t talk about specific disciplinary action taken against individual students, she could discuss in generic terms what the school board’s policy is.

In particular, school policy says that student athletes charged with a crime have to sit out 20 percent of the games in a season and do 25 hours of community service but can continue practicing and training. If it’s a student’s second offense, they have to sit out a whole season and can’t practice with their team. On the third strike, they are permanently barred from playing on any school sports team.

Garret said the school has received a few phone calls from the public expressing concern over the football player remaining on the team after news of the charges came out in the past week.
“Schools would have an obligation to take this seriously,” said Janine Murphy, assistant legal counsel for the North Carolina School Boards Association. “You might disagree with whether it is enough games or not enough games, but at least they are taking a stand that this is not acceptable conduct for someone representing our school.”

Therein lies the conundrum: was it an ignorant, albeit mean-spirited, stunt? Or did the perpetrators realize the gravity of what they were doing?

Regardless, “The unintended consequences can be very powerful and very damaging,” said Mary McGlaufin, a member of a discussion and advocacy group in Haywood County called Changemakers for Racial Understanding. “When something happens, like a cross burning, in a community, it tears the fabric of the whole community. It is a form of domestic terrorism.”
While the Civil Rights era may seem like ancient history to today’s teens, they surely would realize that cross-burning is not in the same vein as graffiti or rolling someone’s yard with toilet paper, Murphy said.

“It is clearly something that is done to intimidate,” Murphy said. “The Supreme Court has determined this is a true threat, with intent of intimidating any person or group of persons, not just trash talk.”

Bullying and harassment in school settings — and the severe and lasting emotional scarring it can inflict on victims — has been in the national spotlight in recent years. It can’t be easy for the student targeted by a weekend cross-burning to come back to school the following Monday.
“Does it take away her feeling of acceptance in the community?” Murphy posed.

That’s certainly not something that escapes Garrett. Garrett is the author of a book Bullying in American Schools. The book defines bullying as a form of violence among children, one that can begin with put-downs and teasing but has the dangerous capactiy to escalate and sets the stage for a lifetime of rule-breaking and antisocial behavior.

“Such violence has become one of the most serious problems in America today, and both bullies and their victims need help,” according to the publisher’s synopsis of Garrett’s book, which came out in 2003.

The Changemakers for Racial Understanding, a group that has been meeting for a year to discuss strategies for dismantling racism, hopes to work with the school system.“Certainly from the administration there is a desire to make sure there is a zero tolerance. We as a group want to be a back up that says we as a community support that,” McGlaufin said. If a student is convicted of a felony, other policies would kick in. But for now, the school board is beholden to follow the policy on its books, Garrett said.

“There is a big difference between charged and being convicted,” Garrett said.
The Haywood County School Board policy doesn’t take into account the severity of the crime a student is charged with. Under the current policy, a student athlete charged with underage drinking theoretically would have the same punishment as a student charged with murder.
Garrett said that is something the school board may chose to revisit and reconsider going forward.

The policy currently on the books was revised in the fall of 2011 and matches that recommended by the N.C. High School Athletics Association and the N.C. Association of School Boards, Garrett said Previously, Tuscola and Pisgah high schools weren’t handling infractions by student athletes consistently. Repercussions could even vary from coach to coach, who may have decided on a case-by-case basis whether to make a particular student run 10 miles or sit out a couple of games depending on what they did.

“We wanted the two high schools to be consistent,” Garrett said of the policy revision in 2011. “We are grateful we had a board that was proactive in looking at it.”

Schools ultimately have a lot of latitude in deciding whether to kick student athletes off a team. Playing sports is a privilege, not an entitlement. Students have to have minimum GPAs and attendance records, for example. Principals do have discretion to bar a student from playing for their conduct.

“Generally the rule for athletes is you represent the school, and therefore, you are held to a higher standard as a representative of the school,” said Murphy. “You can’t anticipate every possible misbehavior, so you have to have some leeway to deal with specific incidents.”

News for Multiracial Kids! Multiracial Advocacy

PROJECT RACE KIDS FOR MULTIRACIAL CHILDREN AGES 8 TO 12 HAS LAUNCHED! You can view the video of our great party at:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TiFxqUtesE&feature=youtube_gdata  

Multiracial by the numbers? The Multiracial Advocacy

Multiracial by the Numbers?

Every Friday, C-Span runs a segment called “America by the Numbers.” It’s a way for government agencies to show the public that their statisticians are hard at work, bringing us the latest, truest, most reliable data.

I watched the July 13 segment. How interesting!  Two government people (a health statistics agency director and a “senior scholar”) discussed a new report on Children’s Well-Being, the result of 22 federal agencies’ work. Wow. Oh, wait a minute.

They were explaining a new study on Children’s Well-Being. But something was very wrong. Whenever they showed a slide or talked about a children’s health issue, every race appeared accounted for EXCEPT multiracial children. How could that be? They used Census data, which accounted for “two or more race people,” yet somehow they lost us. These are some of the things they talked about while citing and used racial statistics:

• Teen Birth Rate
• Obesity in Children
• Issues of General Disparity in Health and Health Statistics
• Smoking
• Second Hand Smoke
• Low Birth Rates
• Emotional and Behavioral problems
• Achievement gaps
• Health Insurance and on and on….

Important issues! I still could not believe that they collected the data but then dropped multiracial people OUT, so I went to the website to read the actual report. I wish I had not done that. The introduction was written by Katherine Wallman, Chief Statistician, Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Wallman never did get the “multiracial thing.” My young son, Ryan, and I had a meeting with Wallman in the early 1990s. When we walked into her office, she said, “Hi! My son has one parent who is Jewish and one who is Catholic and we celebrate Hanukah and Christmas, so we understand!” Oh boy. She sent one of her aides to get “packs for Ryan.”   

We tried to make her understand that race is not the same thing as religion. Forms in the United States do not ask people to report their religion, and certainly not to make a choice between their mother and their father. She could not get it, but an aide came back with two packages of M&M’s with the White House imprint. When Ryan and I got into the elevator to leave, he turned to me and said, “Mom, it looks like all we came away with is some M&M’s.” He was right. He was 10-years-old.

I looked at the report online and sure enough, they had gathered multiracial data, but then dropped it on every statistical report. They even had a chart of deaths with all races accounted for, but not our group. A government statistician might declare from that information that multiracial people don’t die! Sorry, but we have to be realistic.

I expect that they will say that the multiracial numbers were insignificant, but they are actually higher than American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander populations that DO appear in the data!

There is no doubt that health disparities exist. There is no doubt that multiracial children exist. There is no doubt that multiracial children have been totally disregarded in studies of well-being among all racial and ethnic groups.

Aren’t you mad enough to take action yet?!