There are many ideas and proposals out there for reducing poverty in urban areas. But as the New York Times reports, one of the most overlooked ways is reducing the higher costs of living -- sometimes called the “Ghetto Tax” -- that the urban poor have to pay compared to the middle class. These costs include car loans, auto insurance, “rent-to-own” appliances, checking-cashing interest rates, etc.:

Drivers from low-income neighborhoods of New York, Hartford, and Baltimore . . . paid $400 more on average for a year’s insurance. . . . The poor are also the main customers for appliances and furniture at “rent to own” stores, where payments are stretched out at very high interest rates; in Wisconsin, a $200 television can end up costing $700.

Those were just two examples among several cited in a report Tuesday showing that poor urban residents frequently pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year in extra costs for everyday necessities. The study said some of the disparities were due to real differences in the cost of doing business in poor areas, some to predatory financial practices and some to consumer ignorance.

The article stresses that part of the problem are predatory practices by businesses, but in addition, consumer ignorance among the poor is also a big contributing factor -- how they are not familiar with the true costs of buying from rent-to-own stores or using check-cashing services, and that there are alternatives available to them that are cheaper.

This just goes to show that poverty can be addressed in many different ways and that there is no one single solution to the problem. It makes you wonder though, why is it that we spend and devote so much time and attention to ideas on reducing poverty such as lower taxes, lowering health care costs, increasing child care, etc., but very little attention to things that relate to credit and financial practices that can be just as damaging to getting out of poverty?

Could it be that since we live in a capitalist society and economy, that anything that resembles government regulation of financial activities is immediately rejected and labeled as communism, and therefore, is automatically taboo?

As American society inevitably becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, what is the best way for colleges and universities to adapt to these demographic and cultural changes? At New Mexico Highlands University, this question is at the forefront of a storm of controversy about the university’s plan to become “the nation’s premier Hispanic-serving institution”:

[NMHU President] Aragon’s appointment in October 2004 was supposed to mark a new era at the institution, which had faced accreditation issues, funding shortfalls and declining enrollments in recent years. The decisions Aragon made during his brief tenure, however, have been marred by criticism -- much of it from white faculty members who’ve argued that their careers have been shortchanged in favor of a blind quest to promote diversity. . . .

Aragon chose not to renew the contracts or to provide tenure to two respected white professors, who have both sued the institution. The Board of Trustees has paid $250,000 to settle one of the lawsuits, according to local press reports. The American Association of University Professors censured the institution earlier this year as a result of the faculty tenure and summary dismissal issues.

The article describes that as a result of these initial developments, the university’s board placed Aragon on leave but then, Aragon’s supporters with the support of the Hispanic community in the area, were successful in getting a court injunction preventing the university from terminating his contract. Most recently, the university’s board of regents voted to end his employment and offer him a buyout.

Obviously I don’t know all the details and issues about this particular situation. However, my two cents is that -- at the risk of sounding naive -- it’s not a mutually exclusive proposition for the university to achieve its goal serving the Hispanic community and upholding academic due process and tenure-decision fairness at the same time. In other words, I think the university can do both.

Inevitably, there are growing numbers of young and talented Latino/Hispanic faculty members who the university can aggressively pursue and hire. But in the meantime, they should take care to retain existing faculty whose work in whatever fields of study contribute to the academic strengthen and excellence of the university, which in turn will ultimately help to attract more Latino students and faculty.

At the same time, the mission of the university to serve the Hispanic community can and should be paramount and in marginal tenure decisions. That is, in the same way that universities are allowed to consider race as a factor in admissions decisions, being Hispanic or at least demonstrating a clear commitment to serving Hispanic students should also be a legitimate factor in tenure decisions, or at borderline ones.

Are these two strategies of promoting diversity while retaining excellence contradictory? Absolutely not. They only require a clear set of standards and procedures that are universally applied. In the end, I think that’s what everyone is looking for.

When academics, social analysts, and the American public in general talk about sex tourism, in virtually all cases, they refer to older men traveling to un- or under-developed countries to pay and have sex with younger women and girls. But recently, the sex tourism activities of women have begun to get more attention and with it, a different set of questions is asked:

[M]any regard the relationship between beach boy and female tourist as harmless fun. The woman gets guilt-free sex while keeping a firm hold on the purse strings. Where’s the harm? . . . For others, this is exploitation pure and simple. Even where no money is exchanged, this sort of behaviour destabilises local communities and families. Ignorance and lack of concern about the abject poverty and lack of choice that characterises the men’s lives leads the women to romanticise their actions. . . .

The playwright [of the upcoming London play Sugar Mummies], Tanika Gupta, traveled to Jamaica to research the subject first-hand, and says she was shocked to find how female tourists objectify the black male body. “A lot of women talk about how ‘big’ black men are and how they can go all night. It becomes such a myth that even the men now use it. There is this terrible mutual delusion going on. And you do find yourself thinking, ‘We’re not a million miles from slavery.’”

So the question becomes, is there a double standard in which sex tourism on the part of men is immediately condemned as inherently exploitative, patriarchal, even imperialistic and subjected to full criminal prosecution, while that on the part of women is often overlooked, dismissed, and even justified as “harmless fun” or “helping the local economy?”

Actually, this question also comes up when we look at the apparent rash of incidents in recent years in which female teachers have been caught having sex with their young male students. While it’s true that the women teachers are also prosecuted as sex offenders, there’s little denying that the general public often sees their indiscretions as somehow less harmful than when male teachers have sex with their young female students.

So in the case of female sex tourism, should we consider it as harmful as male sex tourism? Ultimately, I think that while the “objective” activities between male and female sex tourism are often similar or even identical, the historical and cultural context can be very different. In other words, whether we like it or not, there is an historical dynamic of sexism and patriarchy that exists in male sex tourism that does not exist among the female version.

I am not saying that female sex tourism should be considered absolutely harmless. My point is that we cannot consider the two type to be identical because the social consequences of male sex tourism, whether we like it or not, are often much more harmful because they reinforce a gender hierarchy that is infused with power imbalances and outright male domination.

But is female sex tourism that much better? Does it also promote a contemporary “slavery” image of non-White men catering to the desires of rich White (or at least westernized) women? I’m not sure what the final answer here is, but my point is that if we were talking about male sex tourism, the answer to that question would be much more immediate and emphatic.

Did you catch David Letterman’s Top Ten List the other day? Here are his Top Ten Answers to the Question “How Hot Is It?”

10. “It’s so hot, Kim Jong Il has been stockpiling Italian ices”

9. “It’s so hot, Star Jones has enjoyed getting the cold shoulder from Barbara Walters”

8. “It’s so hot, Kobe Bryant is only nailing girls who work at Dairy Queen”

7. “It’s so hot, Regis is hosting a new show called ‘America’s Got Heat Stroke’”

6. “It’s so hot, President Bush told the sun to ‘Stop doing this sh**’”

5. “It’s so hot, the terror alert level was raised to ’sweaty’”

4. “It’s so hot, the writer passed out before he could finish this joke”

3. “It’s so hot, Osama Bin Laden was spotted in front of the air conditioners at P.C. Richard”

2. “It’s so hot, a disoriented Bill Clinton has been hitting on Hillary”

1. “It’s so hot, Barry Bonds is injecting Slurpees in his ass”

Sometimes we hear about Whites’ attitudes towards groups of color, but what do groups of color think about other racial/ethnic minority groups? Unfortunately, a new study finds that Latinos tend to hold very negative views of Blacks that comes from stereotypical images from their home country, but that Blacks did not reciprocate the same negatives views of Latinos:

Latino immigrants often hold negative views of African-Americans, which they most likely brought with them from their more-segregated Latin American countries, a new Duke University study shows. The study also found that sharing neighborhoods with Blacks reinforced Latino’s negatives views, and reinforces their feelings that they have “more in common with Whites” -- although Whites did not feel the same connection towards the Latinos. . . .

This study reiterated a similar conclusion reached a decade earlier out of Houston, which found that U.S.-born and foreign-born Latinos expressed a more negative view of African-Americans than Blacks expressed of Latinos. In both studies, it’s interesting to note, Blacks did not reciprocate the negative feelings.

However, Duke’s study found that the more educated the Hispanic respondent, and the more social contact they had with Blacks, the less likely they were to harbor negative stereotypes.

All in all, the fact that Latinos overwhelmingly hold negative views of Blacks is a rather sad, but not completely surprising, finding. The article notes that the authors of the study and other researchers point to very biased and stereotypical media images and portrayals of Blacks in the American media as the primary source of these negative views.

It’s also pretty sad to see that two groups of color who should be uniting with each other to fight against the institutional discrimination that they both face are instead, separated (or at least on one side) by prejudice and an apparent desire to be “as White as possible.” At least there is the glimmer of hope that with more education and close contact, such stereotypes can be overcome.

It seems that as capitalism and American culture spreads around the world, many of its cultural and racial stereotypes come along as well.

As video game playing increases in popularity and becomes more integrated into the American media mainstream, it’s inevitable that sociologists and the public in general pay more attention to it. In addition to debates about whether violent video games make players more violent in real life, racial/ethnic issues are also present. In the past, I’ve written about efforts to change the stereotypical ways in which Blacks are portrayed in video games.

The most recent controversy is in regard to Sony’s advertisement in the Netherlands that portrays a White woman holding the jaw of a Black woman in a menacing manner (picture below). Some have called the ad racist while others have said that it is just a marketing image designed to publicize the option of buying Sony’s PSP console in either a black or white color:

Black groups in the USA are up in arms over the latest Sony billboard advertisements for a white PSP. A new billboard advert for Sony’s white PSP has caused consternation across the US videogaming community. The ad shows a white model dressed entirely in white threateningly grasping the face of a black model.

Next to them are the words, “PlayStation Portable. White is coming". Sites such as Kotaku, Joystiq and Digital Battle have questioned whether the ads are racist. So far the debate has split comments sections with some condemning Sony and equal numbers defending the ads as a harmless personification of the handheld console’s two available colours.

Clearly, whatever the justifications, the intention is to be provocative. According to Joystiq, the adverts have been created by TBWA an agency that speciliases in ‘disruptive’ marketing.

Apparently bowing to the public outcry, Sony has just announced that it is pulling the ad. Nonetheless, the question remains, where do we draw the line between advertising that is designed to be provocative and draw publicity one way or another, versus images that conjure up a racist history of prejudice, discrimination, and stereotypes?

Obviously this debate will not be settled any time soon, but my two cents is that companies are free to use whatever images or advertising they want in order to generate some publicity and attention for their product but they should then be prepared to accept whatever consequences arise from the images they use and the outrage that it engenders.

In other words, if Sony used these particular images unaware of its potential cultural connections to White domination over Blacks, then it deserves to be called an aloof, out-of-touch, and culturally ignorant company. If it used these images knowing that some/many would consider it racist, then it deserves to be called opportunistic, arrogant, and irresponsible.

Finally, Sony needs to accept that if they were going to stick with their ad, then they need to accept the consequences of whatever boycotts and other collective action arise from their activities. Thankfully, Sony chose to pull the ad rather than let the outcry escalate. That’s probably the best move Sony has made in this whole episode.

For various reasons, Conservatives tend to have an advantage when it comes to getting the American public to believe their idealogical propaganda. Perhaps this will help to swing things more to the Liberal side: Top 5 Myths About the U.S. by a poster at CraigsList. Here are some excerpts:

Myth 1: The US was founded on Christian principles. TRUTH: This is incorrect. The Constitution never once mentions a deity, because the Founding Fathers wanted to keep their new country “religion-neutral.” Our Founding Fathers were an eclectic collection of Atheists, Deists, Christians, Freemasons and Agnostics.

George Washington, the Father of our country, and John Adams (Second President of the USA) CLEARLY stated in the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli: “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion.” . . . James Madison, original mastermind of our Constitution, was an Atheist to the core who loved skewering Christianity.

In 1785 he wrote, “What have been [Christianity’s] fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”

Thomas Jefferson, who sat down and authored The Declaration of Independence, rarely missed an opportunity to laugh at Christianity. In a letter to John Adams in 1823, he wrote: “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus…will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

Other myths that the article debunks are that Conservatives are patriotic while Liberals are un-American, that the U.S. media has a liberal bias, that the U.S. leads the world in virtually all socioeconomic indicators and therefore doesn’t need any improvement, and that the U.S. loves to help other countries.

Something tells me that while helpful, this article will be just another shot in the culture wars -- the propaganda war between Conservatives and Liberals will continue to rage fiercely. However, I still maintain that if there is anything as a preponderance of factual truth -- as opposed to ideological rhetoric -- it favors the Liberals. If only we could harness its power as well as the Conservatives.

Despite military denials, the Southern Poverty and Law Center reports that in trying to makeup for lower numbers of recruits enlisting, the military has relaxed standards to the point that they’re beginning to see large numbers of racist skinheads and neo-Nazis in their ranks:

Large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the armed forces. Department of Defense investigators estimate thousands of soldiers in the Army alone are involved in extremist or gang activity. “We’ve got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad,” said one investigator. “That’s a problem.”

Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen urged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to adopt a zero-tolerance policy regarding racist extremism among members of the U.S. military. . . . Military extremists present an elevated threat both to their fellow soldiers and the general public. Today’s white supremacists become tomorrow’s domestic terrorists.

With development such as this, is it any wonder why we keep hearing about unprovoked incidents of abuse, torture, and murder committed by some U.S. troops against Iraqi civilians?

What a nice thought to know that the U.S. is training the hateful to turn their hate into violence.