Vogue Magazine–Two Stories

Is Fashion Racist? (from Vogue’s style.com)

Italian Vogue Publishes All-Black Issue from Richard Prince’s Journal-Isms

‘Geek Girl’ Keeps Firefox Safe and Secure

From blackvoices.com.

Small Steps

Well, I guess any approach is better than none.  This article, entitled, “Will ‘marry your baby daddy’ idea catch on in DC?” is from the District Chronicles.

Oil Discovered in Ghana

Good news or a curse? From Emerging Minds Magazine, the citizens state, “we have gold and the majority are poor, we have timber and the majority are poor, we have cocoa and the majority are poor, and indeed almost all the natural resources one could [t]hink of and we are still languishing in economic hardships . . .”

Diversity in Entertainment: Why is TV So White?

This special report from, of all sources, Entertainment Weekly, hits home about the upcoming television season in preparation for the official NAACP protest.

New Civil Rights Digital Library

The University of Georgia’s new Civil Rights Digital Library provides organized access to the resources of nearly 100 digital collections to provide a single source for online civil rights research.

The excellent interface allows browsing (Events, People, Places, Topics, Collections) and searching of the collections. There are articles, photographs, legal and government documents, moving images, posters, broadsides and other sources (see the complete list of media types).  The collections of the Thurgood Marshall Law Library at the University of Maryland, the Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas, Yale Law School, and the Virginia Center for Digital History Information at U.Va. are just a few of those included (click here to see more).

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates

Howard University graduate Ta-Nehisi Coates has a gift.

If you read only one article today, read “This is How We Lost to the White Man:” The Audacity of Bill Cosby’s Conservatism,” Mr. Coates’ web-only article at the theatlantic.com.

Then buy and read his new book, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood.  One Amazon reviewer, Stacia Brown, captured my own feelings about the author’s style: “[N]early every page contains a sentence so lush or confessional you can’t help but envy its construction . . . The Beautiful Struggle is like an urban Pilgrim’s Progress, a hip-hop infused allegory about how to survive Baltimorean boyhood, about how to overcome academic mediocrity, about how to stop acting as your own eclipse and finding some way–any way–to shine.”

Doctors Miss Cultural Needs, Study Says

The New York Times reports that stark racial disparities are found in medical treatment of patients, even when treated by the same doctors.

The referenced article, “Physician Performance and Racial Disparities in Diabetes Mellitus Care” in the June 9, 2008, issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, concludes that  “Racial differences in DM outcomes are primarily related to patients’ characteristics and within-physician effects, wherein individual physicians achieve less favorable outcomes among their black patients than their white patients. Efforts to eliminate these disparities, including race-stratified performance reports and programs to enhance care for minority patients, should be addressed to all physicians.”

The issue also includes the editorial, “Improving Care Quality and Reducing Disparities: Physicians’ Roles.”

Report: Black, poor children face higer toxic air risks

PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing economic and social equity by Lifting Up What Works®, has published a new report entitled, “Breathing Easy from Home to School: Fighting the Environmental Triggers of Childhood Asthma.”

According to FinalCall.com, the report states that the “[r]ates for emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and death among children due to asthma are substantially higher in Black children in comparison to White children. Thirteen percent of all children suffering from asthma are Black compared to 8% White. Puerto Ricans lead the nation at 19%.”

Conflict Between Alice Walker and Daughter Rebecca

I was saddened to see the post at Salon.com about an article Rebecca Walker had written in London’s Daily Mail criticizing her mother Alice.