ANN ARBOR — “Ban the Box” legislation seeks to open doors to employment for people with criminal records by barring employers from asking about records on employment applications. More than 20 states and over 100 municipalities have passed such laws in recent years, some of which govern private employers. (more…)
UMD-led study is first to link racism-related factors and cellular age
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – A new University of Maryland-led study reveals that racism may impact aging at the cellular level. Researchers found signs of accelerated aging in African American men who reported high levels of racial discrimination and who had internalized anti-Black attitudes. Findings from the study, which is the first to link racism-related factors and biological aging, are published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Racial disparities in health are well-documented, with African Americans having shorter life expectancy, and a greater likelihood of suffering from aging-related illnesses at younger ages compared to whites. Accelerated aging at the biological level may be one mechanism linking racism and disease risk. (more…)
Health programs should focus on men’s strengths to help them thrive amid societal stressors
COLUMBIA, Mo. –Black men, especially those living in low-income, urban areas, face many societal stressors, including racial discrimination, incarceration and poverty. In addition, these men have poorer health outcomes. Now, a University of Missouri faculty member has studied these men’s efforts to negotiate social environments that are not designed to help them attain good health and success. (more…)
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Skin color plays a role in deciding whether to execute military criminals, according to a new study by a Michigan State University law professor who found minorities in the military are twice as likely as whites to be sentenced to death.
Catherine Grosso, associate professor at the MSU College of Law, and the late David Baldus, the Joseph B. Tye Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, studied military prosecutions in all potentially death-eligible murders from 1984 to 2005. (more…)
*Data essential for creating fair policies*
While only 20 per cent of Canada’s police forces have an explicit policy against reporting the race of victims and accused persons, criminologists from the University of Toronto and Nipissing show that the majority of police departments do not report race in practice.
The study, by Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology, and Paul Millar, an associate professor at Nipissing University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, is entitled Whitewashing Criminal Justice in Canada: Preventing Research through Data Suppression and appears in the current issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society. (more…)
Harvard graduate Kevin Lewis (left) and UCLA sociologist Andreas Wimmer are co-authors of a new Facebook study on how college students form friendships. Image credit: Luis Gomez
Race may not be as important as previously thought in determining who buddies up with whom, suggests a new UCLA–Harvard University study of American college students on the social networking site Facebook.
“Sociologists have long maintained that race is the strongest predictor of whether two Americans will socialize,” said Andreas Wimmer, the study’s lead author and a sociologist at UCLA. “But we’ve found that birds of a feather don’t always flock together. Whom you get to know in your everyday life, where you live, and your country of origin or social class can provide stronger grounds for forging friendships than a shared racial background.”
“We’ve been able to show that just because two people of the same racial background are hanging out together, it’s not necessarily because they share the same racial background,” said co-author Kevin Lewis, a Harvard graduate student in sociology. (more…)
