Missives

If you make more than $50,000 — in other words, if you inhabit the top household income quartile in the Conference Board’s monthly studies — you are likely to be really, truly, deeply optimistic. You’ve seen the stock market claw back, and dividends and corporate profits are up. The confidence number for that quartile stands at 74.0.

But if household income is stuck in the $35,000 to $49,000 quartile, your confidence isn’t so great. It sits at 53.2 percent, down a touch from last January’s 54.3 percent. And in the next quartile down, those with incomes of $25,000 to $34,999, the confidence is still more depressed, sitting at 47.2 percent. These, if statistics tell the story, largely are folks whose wages have barely budged in this recession, and whose chances of being unemployed are far greater than for those making higher incomes.

Le parti du pouvoir en Haïti, Inité, a annoncé mercredi avoir officiellement décidé de retirer la candidature de son candidat Jude Célestin à la présidence du pays, indique-t-il dans un communiqué. “Même si nous sommes certains que Jude Célestin a recueilli le nombre de voix nécessaires et qu’il est ainsi admis pour aller au deuxième tour, Inité est d’accord pour le retirer comme candidat à la présidence”, indique le texte signé des principaux dirigeants du parti. Toutefois, M. Célestin, dont la candidature a été soutenue par le président sortant René Préval, n’a pas confirmé lui-même son retrait, et sa signature n’apparaît pas sur le document. Une source proche du parti a indiqué à l’AFP, sous couvert d’anonymat, que M. Célestin refusait de se retirer de la course à la présidence et menaçait de tenir une conférence de presse pour dénoncer l’annonce de son retrait.

According to EurekAlert, researchers found that among sexually active girls and women ages 14-25, black women were 2.5 times more likely to be tested for chlamydia than white women, while Hispanic women were 9.7 times more likely. Women with public health insurance were also significantly more likely to be screened, as were women who had been diagnosed with an STD or been pregnant before (though among this last group, women of color were still the most likely to get tested). Says lead study author Sarah E. Wiehe, “This may mean that providers make judgments about a woman’s likelihood of infection based on her race or ethnicity. Yet in an asymptomatic condition like chlamydia, all sexually active young women should be screened.”

At a press conference Tuesday, the World Heritage Committee officially recognized the Gap Between Rich and Poor as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” describing the global wealth divide as the “most colossal and enduring of mankind’s creations.” “Of all the epic structures the human race has devised, none is more staggering or imposing than the Gap Between Rich and Poor,” committee chairman Henri Jean-Baptiste said. “It is a tremendous, millennia-old expanse that fills us with both wonder and humility.” “And thanks to careful maintenance through the ages, this massive relic survives intact, instilling in each new generation a sense of awe,” Jean- Baptiste added. The vast chasm of wealth, which stretches across most of the inhabited world, attracts millions of stunned observers each year, many of whom have found its immensity too overwhelming even to contemplate. By far the largest man-made structure on Earth, it is readily visible from locations as far-flung as Eastern Europe, China, Africa, and Brazil, as well as all 50 U.S. states.

Many have inferred from her much discussed new memoir that disproportionate Asian academic success can be attributed to a regimen of no sleepovers, no playdates, no quitting, no coddling, no praising mediocrity and lots of drills. The ancient Chinese secret is, in short, demand perfection and accept nothing less. Children are not so fragile that they will break under these expectations. This is the same immigrant work ethic that catapulted my parents from poverty in Guyana to the country-club class of North America. Ditto for my husband’s parents in Jamaica, and Allison’s husband’s parents in the Caribbean. Ditto, it should be said, for Allison’s grandparents, who, as Isabel Wilkerson’s brilliant book on the Great Migration showed, had their own immigrant experience moving from the South to Northern cities, where their achievements in culture and society forever changed America.

parsely:

Parse.ly (http://parsely.com), the intelligent personalization and optimization engine for content providers, raised $800,000 from Blumberg Capital, ff Asset Management, Scott Becker (formely co-founder and CTO of Invite Media), Don Hutchison (formerly principal at Netcom, Work.com), Jeffrey Greenblatt (senior principal at Ankyra Capital) and Jon Axelrod (formerly founder/CEO at MusicGremlin).

The investment will be used by Parse.ly to increase its sales efforts, hire key staff, develop partnerships and ultimately build new ways in which news and blog content can be distributed and targeted.  Already, millions of users across the web are utilizing Parse.ly technology to connect with content they love. 

It should be unnecessary to point out that, in 2011, a governor of a state with around 1.3 million African American residents who appoints a cabinet that looks like this [100% white] is doing so for a specific political purpose. That purpose is (of course) to illustrate that, like Stephen Colbert, John Kasich doesn’t “see” race. Are all 20 members of his cabinet white? Black? Purple? Green? Kasich couldn’t tell you . . because all he knows is that each and every one of them is the most qualified person he could find for the job. (Indeed one suspects those who think otherwise are themselves the “real racists.”)

I’m tempted to tip my metaphorical cap to the contemporary GOP: in anincreasingly non-white nation they’re finding a way to turn being the semi-official party of white America into a successful marketing strategy (the linked CNN poll found that white tea partiers outnumbered black ones by a 40-1 margin).

Notwithstanding the election of Barack Obama, the last 40 years have been a period of racial backlash. The three pillars of anti-racist public policy—affirmative action, school integration, and racial districting (to prevent the dilution of the black vote)—have all been eviscerated, thanks in large part to rulings of a Supreme Court packed with Republican appointees. Indeed, the comeback of the culture of poverty, albeit in new rhetorical guise, signifies a reversion to the status quo ante: to the discourses and concomitant policy agenda that existed before the black protest movement forced the nation to confront its collective guilt and responsibility for two centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow—racism that pervaded all major institutions of our society, North and South. Such momentous issues are brushed away as a new generation of sociologists delves into deliberately myopic examinations of a small sphere where culture makes some measurable difference—to prove that “culture matters.”