Census Report Undercounts Blacks
Bridges - Ethnic Media Digest
New California Media, News Digest, Compiled and Edited by Pueng Vongs, Posted: Feb 14, 2003
“Bridges” is a weekly report on news and views from the ethnic press and communities.
- Census Report Undercounts Blacks
- Why African American Babies Have the World's Highest Infant Mortality Rate
- Korean Dry Cleaners Fight Ban on Solvent Nationwide
- Indian Americans Get Poor Bill of Health
- For Some, Sidewalk Vending a Family-Friendly Strategy
- Dueling Chinese Horoscopes for Bush and Hussein
Census Report Undercounts Blacks
The National Newspapers Publishers Association, a black newswire, is disputing reports touting that the U.S. Latino population has eclipsed the black population. Editors say figures wrongly included the large segment of black Latinos in the Latino category.
According to the report, the census counts 37 million Latinos and 36.2 million blacks. The AP, however, included people on the census form who checked only “black” to provide a racial breakdown. Yet, for Latinos, it counted anyone of any race who said they were Hispanic, which included 1.7 million who were both black and Hispanic, writes Hazel Trice Edney. So, if those claiming to be both Hispanic and black were counted as black, African-Americans would still hold a slight, though tenuous, edge.
Although many news organizations, including the AP, explained the difference in their stories, headlines were often misleading. The one in the New York Times declared “Hispanics Now Largest Minority, Census Shows.”
Additionally, many Latinos do not think of “Latino” as an identity, the report continues. “For some, they’d rather think of themselves as Mexicans or Chicanos,” says William H. Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan. This is important because as some politicians try to court the Latino vote over the black vote they will discover that there is no monolithic Latino vote, according to the report.
Why African American Babies Have the World's Highest Infant Mortality Rate
African American women have long had higher rates than whites of low-birth weight and preterm babies, the leading causes of infant mortality or death in the first year of life. And a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that one particular disparity–the gap in black-white baby deaths–has not just persisted but actually grown in recent years despite federal efforts to eliminate the difference, reports Oakland quarterly ColorLines. As the journal authors noted, that long-standing inequality is not readily explained by a mother’s age, education or income.
Historically, African-American moms have had consistently poorer birth outcomes, including more low birth weight babies and infant mortality. In 2000, the rate of infant death for blacks stood at 13.6 per 1,000 live births–double the rate for the general population, and almost triple the rate for whites, writes Ziba Kashef. (Even the group with the next highest infant mortality rate–Hawaiians with a 9 per 1,000 baby death rate–fare far better than blacks.)
The usual explanations for the disparity–income, education, late prenatal care–don’t come close to identifying the cause. For example, according to researchers, college- and graduate-school educated black mothers have a higher infant mortality rate than white moms who didn’t finish high school and black women who get prenatal care in the first trimester have double the infant mortality rate of white mothers with first-trimester care.
To provide clues to the disparity, medical experts are now examining other stresses on the mother that could impact a child’s developing immune system in the womb. These include many factors, including physically demanding jobs and a lack of control in the workplace, single parenthood, and financial worries–all problems experienced disproportionately by women of color. Discrimination is also a documented source of harmful stress. One study found that women who gave birth to very low birth weight babies were more likely to have experienced racial discrimination than women who had normal weight babies.
The answer may lie in programs such as the Black Infant Health Program (BIH) in San Diego, which helps women in areas from everything from applying for health insurance to marital and work problems has seen a small but demonstrable increase in the birth weight and viability of black newborns.
Korean Dry Cleaners Fight Ban on Solvent Nationwide
Fearing a ban on the dry cleaning solvent “perc,” will spread nationwide, representatives from Korean-owned dry cleaning shops across the country vowed to fight the ban, reports the L.A.-based daily Korea Times. The ban was approved by the Southern California Air Quality Management District amid great protest from local Korean dry cleaners in December.
The Federation of Korean Dry Cleaners Associations, which claims 15,000 members in 31 cities at its annual convention in Phoenix on Jan.24, adopted plans to carry on a campaign against the ban on perc. The group plans to lobby government agencies that manage air quality; gather signatures to oppose unfair regulations; independently undertake research on perc’s impact on air quality; and actively network through the federation website--www.fkda.org.
As the result of the recent ban, Korean drycleaners in Southern California, which make up 70 percent of the area’s 2,200 shops, are expected to suffer a loss of $300 million to comply with the new regulations, according to an association representative.
Indian Americans Get Poor Bill of Health
Indian-Americans are getting a poor bill of health according to Little India (Jan. 2003), a magazine based out of Philadelphia. Indian-American men have the highest rates of Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) and die of the disease at a younger age than males of any other race in America. Indian American women’s CAD rate is three times higher than that of American women and the highest among all other immigrant women. In India, only one in 40 women get breast cancer, but in the United States one out of every eight Indian women will get the disease. Ironically, Indian-Americans probably have the highest percentage of doctors of any community.
Though half of the Indians in the United States are vegetarian, Indians seem genetically predisposed to CAD. Indians tend to have low levels of good cholesterol and high levels of bad cholesterol and triglycerides. Several studies suggest that the high diabetes rate among Indians is a contributing risk factor as well. A global comparative study found a diabetes rate of 14-20 percent among migrant Indian Americans.
Information on health issues affecting South Asians has been hard to come by since they are invariably lumped with other Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Now all the diverse available data on South Asians is being gathered together in A Brown Paper: The Health of South Asians in the United States, published by the South Asian Public Health Association. Studies are underway to see what factors caused by immigration e.g. changes in diet, lifestyle, stress add to the risk. For those South Asians wishing to take a more active role in their heart health, Dr. Purushotham Kotha of San Diego, has initiated the Ricadia Study Project (Risk Intervention in Coronary Artery Disease In Asian-Indians).
For Some, Sidewalk Vending a Family-Friendly Strategy
The sidewalk vendors can be seen in most Latino neighborhoods, hawking roses or lilies, Andean sweaters or sliced mangos powdered with red chili. Latino immigrants nationwide depend on the ancient economic survival strategy of street sales, either as a supplement or an alternative to low-wage work.
But a new study to be released next month finds deeper reasons for why recent immigrants turn to peddling food or wares on sidewalks. Lorena Muñoz, a researcher at the University of Southern California, argues that, at least for women street vendors, the motivation is not the trade’s profitability, but the ability to work at all hours and supervise their children while at work.
Muñoz’s study, “Creating Informal Landscapes: Latina Street Vendors in Los Angeles,” said that the number of street vendors in Los Angeles increased, from about 3,000 in the 1980s to some 10,000 by the late 1990s. An abstract of the study was published on the website of the Association of American Geographers ahead of a March 5 meeting, where the study will be presented.
In another look at the lives of Latino street vendors, the San Francisco bilingual weekly newspaper El Reportero found that street vendors had to go through plenty of red tape, since they required three permits, two from the state and one from the city. As a result, many vendors are technically illegal sellers, and must evade scrutiny by police. The Feb. 13 report, by Jeremy Harness, found that a specialized police unit was in charge of verifying vendors’ compliance, and that unauthorized peddlers sometimes were fined.
Beginning last year, the paper said, a group of shop owners who believed they were losing customers to street vendors in the heavily Latino Mission District began asking police to enforce a municipal law requiring the vendors to operate a certain distance away from stores.
Dueling Chinese Horoscopes for Bush and Hussein
George W. Bush was born in the year of the Dog in 1946 and Saddam Hussein in the year of the Ox, 1937. The Year of the Ram is predicted to be a terrible year for both leaders, with the same star of ill fortune shining on both their houses, according to Lang, a Vietnamese language magazine in Sacramento.
The magazine consulted the Chinese horoscope on the outcome of the new U.S.-Iraq conflict and said both leaders were uncommonly stubborn.
Bush’s life sign is fire and the horoscope paints him as stubborn, single-minded and strong-willed, perhaps too strong for his own good. Hussein has water as his life sign and fire and water naturally don't get along. The magazine predicted that both will run into danger and deep trouble this year, the Year of the Ram, and that the outcome will not be good for either.
For Bush, the month of June will be decisive one, where a great danger lurks, the magazine said. For Hussein, if he learns to be less aggressive and more flexible he would survive the war. The Spring will be Huseein’s most dangerous time.
Andrew Lam, Kapson Lee and Sandip Roy contributed to this report.
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