I came across this article at Inside Higher Education that completely blows my mind -- officials at Palm Beach Community College recently declined to provide health insurance benefits for domestic partners of their employees, but have now approved health insurance benefits for pets of their employees:

When trustees of Palm Beach Community College reached a tie vote in August on a proposal to offer health insurance for the domestic partners of employees, the measure failed and advocates for gay professors and other employees were disappointed. Because the college only pays for employees’ benefits, the proposal wouldn’t have cost the college a penny, but would have opened up quality insurance at a lower cost for the partners of gay and lesbian employees.

Now -- in a move that is seen as adding salt to those wounds -- the college has added a new health insurance benefit for some (unmarried) household members of employees: pet health insurance. All employees were told that they would get a 5 percent discount and group rates on a health insurance plans for their pets. A range of plans are offered, covering wellness care, vaccinations, X-rays, surgery and hospitalization (although pre-existing conditions may not be covered).

“Your pet is a member of your family — his quality of life is important to you,” says the promotional material from the veterinary insurance company. While gay rights groups in the area stressed that they are not anti-pet, they said it was insulting for the college to offer a new benefit for canines and felines who are considered family members while ignoring human life partners of their employees.

I suppose that just about sums up the state of our nation, where animals are treated more humanely than some human beings. Absolutely incredible.

As many media organizations report, the FBI has released their data on hate crimes reported in 2006 and the official statistics indicate that all hate crimes are up 8% from 2005. However, as this article at CBS News mentions, the real numbers of hate crimes committed is almost guaranteed to be much higher:

“It’s unfortunate that the numbers went up by almost 8 percent, but the truth is the FBI Hate Crimes statistics severely undercounts the number of hate crimes that we have in the United States every year,” [Heidi Beirick of the Southern Poverty Law Center] told CBS News. That’s because only 12,600 of the nation’s more than 17,000 local, county, state and federal police agencies - roughly three-quarters - participated in the hate crime reporting program in 2006.

In addition to only about two-thirds of law enforcement agencies reporting their data, as any criminologist will also tell you, another big reason why the true number of hate crimes committed is actually much higher is because only about a third of violent crimes and 40% of property crimes are ever reported to law enforcement by their victims.

Therefore, taken altogether, the real number of hate crimes actually committed (as opposed to reported to law enforcement agencies) is likely to be over 30,000 incidents a year. Overall, it’s not an encouraging picture or trend.

Some forty years after the Civil Rights Movement, we as Americans like to think that racial inequality has been and continues to decline, if not eliminated altogether. To a large extent, significant progress has been made. However, even when it comes to such a basic measurement as income, as the Associated Press/MSNBC reports, the latest data show that the gap between Whites and Blacks is actually widening:

One reason for the growing disparity: Incomes among black men have actually declined in the past three decades, when adjusted for inflation. They were offset only by gains among black women. Incomes among white men, meanwhile, were relatively stagnant, while those of white women increased more than fivefold. . . .

Parents have long hoped that their children would grow up to be more successful than they were. Hopes were especially high for black children who came of age following the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The reports found that about two-thirds of the children surveyed grew up to have higher family incomes than their parents had 30 years earlier. Grown black children were just as likely as whites to have higher incomes than their parents. However, incomes among whites increased more than those of their black counterparts.

The result: In 2004, a typical black family had an income that was only 58 percent of a typical white family’s. In 1974, median black incomes were 63 percent those of whites.

The graph above shows how incomes by race and gender have been distributed since 1974 and as noted in the article, it shows that the only group that has seen significant increases in their income since 1974 are White women.

It is sobering to see that on this basic measurement of success, Blacks are actually falling further behind Whites. At the same time, I think it’s useful to put this finding in the larger context of how wealth inequality in general is growing and getting worse in this country.

The point is, Blacks are hurting and we need to double out efforts to reduce the gap that separates them from Whites, but at the same time, their struggles are symptomatic of the larger and much more systemic illness of wealth inequality in the U.S. among all Americans.

For those who haven’t noticed, in recent months, there has been a notable increase in the number and size of raids against illegal immigrants and the businesses where they work. The Homeland Security department (home of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service) have now shifted their emphasis from stopping illegal immigrants as they cross the border to rounding them up and arresting them at their workplaces.

I can understand the need to enforce existing laws against hiring illegal immigrants, although I think there are better ways to address the larger issue of reducing illegal immigration. However, what I cannot support is how families are literally being torn apart and lives at risk as a result of such raids and mass arrests against illegal immigrants. Case in point -- as the New York Times reports -- babies being ripped from their mothers arms and separated indefinitely:

Ms. Umanzor had been at home with two of her three children, both American citizens, when the immigration agents arrived, along with a county police officer. . . As the agents searched, Ms. Umanzor breast-fed her jittery baby, she recalled in an interview after her release. . . .

She was forced to leave both Brittney and the other American daughter, Alexandra, who is 3, since the agents could not detain them. “Just thinking that I was going to leave my little girl, I began to feel sick,” Ms. Umanzor said of the baby. “I had a pain in my heart.” . . .

In jail and with her nursing abruptly halted, Ms. Umanzor’s breasts become painfully engorged. With the help of Veronica Dahlberg, director of a Hispanic women’s group in Ashtabula County, a breast pump was delivered on her third day in jail. Brittney, meanwhile, did not eat for three days, refusing to take formula from a bottle, Ms. Dahlberg said. After four days, the county released all six children to Ms. Umanzor’s sister, who managed to wean Brittney to a bottle.

On Nov. 7, after two dozen women’s health advocates and researchers sent a letter protesting Ms. Umanzor’s detention, Ms. Myers issued a memorandum instructing field officers “to exercise discretion” during arrests by releasing nursing mothers from detention unless they presented a national security or public safety risk. . . .

In their study, released this month, La Raza, a national Hispanic organization, and the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, examined three factory raids in the past year, in Greeley, Colo.; Grand Island, Neb.; and New Bedford. . . .

The study found that . . . many families hid for days or longer in their homes, sometimes retreating to basements, the study reported. Although many children showed symptoms of emotional distress, family members were reluctant to seek public assistance for them, even if the children were citizens, fearing new arrests of relatives who were illegal immigrants.

As the article also notes, federal immigration officials and opponents of illegal immigration argue that while their goal is not to victimize children, ultimately it is the fault of the parents for putting their children in these situations, based on their status as illegal immigrants.

Unfortunately, this kind of reasoning is a textbook example of what sociologists call “blaming the victim.”

Yes it is true that by virtue of the fact that they came into the U.S. without authorization that they are here illegally. But as scholars and other halfway informed observers will tell you, the reasons the vast majority of border-crossers come here is not to get rich off of welfare, but to try to earn a living by working in jobs that most Americans will not accept.

In other words, illegal immigrants come here to work. Once they are inside the U.S., data also show that the vast majority of them obey the laws and pay taxes -- sales taxes, property taxes, and even federal and state income taxes that are estimated to contribute $60 billion a year to Social Security funds. It’s also worth noting that because illegal immigrants often use fake social security numbers, income taxes get taken out but they will most likely never see any of those funds themselves.

The point is, the choices that illegal immigrants make, more often than not, actually results in net benefits to American society. And how do we as a society treat them as a result? By vilifying, demonizing, and dehumanizing them. And by literally tearing families apart and putting innocent lives at risk.

As the article notes, even the Homeland Security department has apparently come to its senses, recognized the inherent brutality and inhumanity in their actions, and reevaluated its draconian tactic of separating mothers from their young children. As a result of incidents like that described in the article, they now instruct their agents to release mothers who have young children unless they pose a direct threat to national security.

I’m not a legal scholar, but I might actually describe what happened to families like the Umanzors in the article might be classified as cruel and unusual punishment, perhaps even torture.

There must be a better way to address the problems associated with illegal immigration than to treat them like animals.

That better way is to enact comprehensive immigration reform that addresses the issue on all levels -- stricter enforcement of laws against knowingly hiring illegal workers, creating some legal arrangement to allow temporary workers to come and work in the U.S., giving law-abiding illegal immigrants the opportunity to become citizens and continue their contributions to American society, and efforts to strengthen foreign economies to reduce the push factors that drive many to leave for the U.S., to name just a few.

But to focus the brunt of our country’s resources on forcibly separating families and exacting incalculable human costs and suffering is nothing short of barbarism.

I recently got wind of some controversy surrounding Lincoln’s latest ad for their MKX luxury SUV that features Harry Connick Jr. driving through his hometown of New Orleans and talking about its rebuilding efforts. For those who haven’t seen the ad, click on the video clip below.

As expressed by a writer at Ad Age, the controversy centers on the question of whether Ford Motor Company (parent company of Lincoln) is exploiting the tragedy in New Orleans to sell cars and make some money:

[Ford] seems to have persuaded themselves somehow that they are doing something positive -- celebrating the spirit of a city, shedding light on its challenges, recognizing its heroes.

Bullshit. What they are doing is exploiting its victims to advertise luxury SUVs. It is vulgar. It is grotesque. It is disgusting.

And not even remotely surprising. With every catastrophe comes the inevitable sleazy marketing thinly disguised as sympathy, philanthropy, encouragement or public service. We’ve witnessed it in the wake of Oklahoma City, when Makita power tools took out newspaper ads ostensibly to honor the search-and-rescue volunteers but transparently to brag about donated merchandise.

After the Kosovo crisis, Philip Morris spent tens of millions of dollars to produce and air an elaborate spot recreating the refugee exodus, by way of patting itself on the back for airlifting about $150,000 worth of macaroni and cheese.

As an Asian American myself, I am certainly sensitive to cultural exploitation -- as I’ve written about before on my Asian-Nation site, in many cases where elements of traditional Asian culture are used to sell non-Asian products, almost always the traditional cultural meaning gets lost and the element almost always ends up being used as a caricature with little cultural meaning left.

But in other situations, it’s harder to draw the line between sincerity and exploitation. In the case of the Lincoln SUV/New Orleans commercial, my initial reaction was that generally, I did not find it exploitative. It certainly could have become quite exploitative if Lincoln had just shown their SUV driving around New Orleans without any mention or context of what the city has been through.

But in this case, Lincoln used a well-known resident of New Orleans (Harry Connick Jr.) and (I assume) pretty much let him speak freely and honestly about what the city is going through trying to rebuild. Sure, there were some “glamor” shots of its SUV, but I did not find them to be gratuitous or excessive. If anything, I found Visa’s commercial set in New Orleans to be much more blatantly opportunistic.

However, I am not African American nor a resident of New Orleans, so in the end, my personal opinion carries less weight than that of someone who was, and is, directly affected by the devastation that New Orleans endured.

With that in mind, the ultimate judgment about whether this Lincoln commercial is exploitative really belongs to those who are there in the city itself and who have been directly affected by its struggles. We need to hear more from them.

One of the fundamental tenets of the Internet is that it gives marginalized groups and people the opportunity to express themselves more easily and freely than traditional media. As The Boston Globe reports, that promise is increasingly becoming fulfilled by bloggers of color (thanks to AngryAsianMan.com for pointing out the article):

These intellectual challenges to mainstream and other viewpoints are some of the opinions Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander-American, and black bloggers are exposing on a growing number of sites focused on social, political, and cultural issues. The sometimes facetiously named blogs range from Angry Asian Man to The Angry Black Woman.

Readers can find Latino viewpoints at Guanabee, The Unapologetic Mexican, or Latino Pundit. Those interested in information from an Asian angle head to Ultrabrown, Zuky, or Sepia Mutiny. Sites created by blacks include The Field Negro, Too Sense, and Resist Racism. But often these bloggers discard the handcuffs of their ethnic origins to tackle subjects affecting a range of racial or ethnic groups.

These sites - many of which launched in the past year, although a few are older - have become places where people of color gather to refine ideas or form thoughts about race relations, racial inequities, and the role pop culture has in exacerbating stereotypes. The writers often bring attention to subjects not yet covered by mainstream media.

Overall, the Boston Globe article portrays bloggers of color very positively. At the same time, I could not help but notice the quote (cited above), “these bloggers discard the handcuffs of their ethnic origins to tackle subjects affecting a range of racial or ethnic groups” (emphasis added).

I’m not really sure what the article’s author means by that statement. Is she implying that covering an issue that predominantly or most immediately affects one particular racial or ethnic group in a particular story is counterproductive and ultimately divisive? Does she mean that it’s not useful to point out specific issues, experiences, or characteristics of a particular racial/ethnic group?

I certainly hope that these are not the implications she intended because that only plays into the whole “colorblind” myth of American society -- that everyone is all the same and should be treated according to a “standard” manner or set of rules.

In fact, I would guess that most if not all of these bloggers portrayed in the article would probably agree that while there are certainly many commonalities that different racial/ethnic groups share, there are many things that make each group unique.

Further, pointing out these unique characteristics ultimately benefits us by educating us and expanding our knowledge of others, rather than dividing or separating us. Let’s not fall into that colorblind (some would even say White supremacist) way of thinking.

As we all know, race, race relations, and racial discrimination are all very complicated and controversial issues. Up until about 50 years ago, the overall consensus (particularly among “average” Americans) was that different racial groups were biologically and genetically very different from each other. Further, most people believed that these genetic differences also included intelligence -- i.e., some racial groups were genetically more intelligent than other groups.

Since that time however, as we began to learn more about the actual science of genetics, we as a society gradually came to a new consensus -- that from a biological or physiological point of view, the idea that there are genetically distinct racial groups actually has no scientific validity at all.

That is, we now know that over 99% of any given person’s genes are identical to that of any other person on earth and that there are no distinct “racial” groups as we know them -- there are just too many variations and exceptions to each “rule” about which person belongs in which racial group. In other words, the idea of “racial groups” is socially constructed, not scientifically-based.

However, new, emerging research is starting to challenge some of these consensus beliefs. As the New York Times reports, recent studies based on the latest advances in human genome mapping suggest that there might be something to the idea that genetic differences may exist between different racial groups after all:

Scientists, for instance, have recently identified small changes in DNA that account for the pale skin of Europeans, the tendency of Asians to sweat less and West Africans’ resistance to certain diseases. . . .Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.

Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal. . . .

Though few of the bits of human genetic code that vary between individuals have yet to be tied to physical or behavioral traits, scientists have found that roughly 10 percent of them are more common in certain continental groups and can be used to distinguish people of different races. They say that studying the differences, which arose during the tens of thousands of years that human populations evolved on separate continents after their ancestors dispersed from humanity’s birthplace in East Africa, is crucial to mapping the genetic basis for disease.

But many geneticists, wary of fueling discrimination and worried that speaking openly about race could endanger support for their research, are loath to discuss the social implications of their findings. Still, some acknowledge that as their data and methods are extended to nonmedical traits, the field is at what one leading researcher recently called “a very delicate time, and a dangerous time.”

New American Media has another article that summarizes many of the latest research findings on race and genetics. Meanwhile, this particular NY Times article goes on to describe that, according to many scientists who are at the leading edge of this kind of genetic research, it is pretty much inevitable that many people (particularly nonscientists) will try to extend these emerging genetic differences into the conclusion that different racial groups are genetic more or less intelligent than others.

At the same time, these scientists are quick to point out that even if genetic differences in intelligence exist, the influence of institutional and socioeconomic factors are still much more important in explaining social inequalities between racial groups. As Dr. David Altshuler puts it, “[L]iving in America, it is so clear that the economic and social and educational differences have so much more influence than genes. People just somehow fixate on genetics, even if the influence is very small.”

In other words, at this point, the overriding message from scientists is that genetics still does not validate or legitimate prejudice or discrimination against different races.

But where does that leave liberals like me? As also noted in the NY Times article, many liberals largely dismiss these genetic findings and instead argue that, as noted above, even if such genetic differences exist, social and economic factors have a much more significant effect on achievement in society.

On the other hand, other liberals argue that we should use such genetic findings to tailor programs specifically to the needs of particular racial group involved in an effort to compensate for any inherent disadvantages.

To be honest, I’m not sure which side of the argument I agree with more at this point. For now, I will take a “wait and see” approach and see what other findings come up. A the same time, there is one thing that I do know for sure -- regardless of the scientific details, extremist ideologues and racial supremacists will use and spin such findings however they want to suit their own agenda.

That point is for certain -- we should expect the debate and controversy to get worse before it gets better.

Did you know that November is American Indian & Alaskan Native Heritage Month? Speaking from my experience as an Asian American, we share much in common with our Native American Indian and Alaskan brothers and sisters, not just in terms of social and cultural solidarity, but because we share common Asian ancestors as well. To celebrate their heritage, the U.S. Census Bureau has a brief summary of the heritage month and a fact sheet with some interesting statistics:

The first American Indian Day was celebrated in May 1916 in New York. Red Fox James, a Blackfeet Indian, rode horseback from state to state, getting endorsements from 24 state governments, to have a day to honor American Indians. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed a joint congressional resolution designating November 1990 as “National American Indian Heritage Month.”

4.5 million
As of July 1, 2006, the estimated population of American Indians and Alaska Natives, including those of more than one race. They made up 1.5 percent of the total population.

688,500
The American Indian and Alaska Native population in California as of July 1, 2006, the highest total of any state in the nation. California was followed by Oklahoma (397,000) and Arizona (331,200).

9
Number of states where American Indians and Alaska Natives were the largest race or ethnic minority group in 2006. These states are Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming.

301,800
The nation’s Cherokee alone population. Cherokee is one of the nation’s largest tribal groups, along with Navajo (alone), which has a population of 296,100.

$26.9 billion
Receipts for American Indian- and Alaska Native-owned businesses in 2002. These businesses numbered 201,387.

$33,762
The median income of households where the householder reported being American Indian and Alaska Native and no other race.

27%
The poverty rate of people who reported they were American Indian and Alaska Native and no other race. There is a wide variation in the demographic characteristics of American Indians and Alaska Natives. For instance, members of the Chippewa (alone) tribal group had a median household income of $36,481, while for Navajos (alone), median household income totaled $27,815.

For more information and links to Native American Indians, visit the Library of Congress’s comprehensive site.

If you want to compare the general socioeconomic characteristics, such as those listed above, with those from the other major racial groups, you can visit my article on Socioeconomic Statistics and Demographics. Unfortunately, the numbers indicate that in many ways, Native American Indians are the worst-off of all the major racial groups.

As most historians and sociologists will tell you, while there are still many individual cases of destructive behavior among some Native American Indians, much of that can be traced directly back the systematic exclusion and institutional inequality that they have experienced ever since Christopher Columbus first set foot in North America.

Because of their relatively small size, it’s common for the overwhelming majority of Americans of all races and backgrounds to overlook their experiences and issues these days. However, I hope we as Asian Americans recognize that while we may have historical and socioeconomic differences with Native American Indians, as numerically small minority groups, it is in our best interests to stick up for each other so that our collective voices can be louder.