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Princeton University professor Cornel West once said that “the crisis in Black America is threefold…economic, political and spiritual.”  Though many leaders in the African-American community would agree with that statement, certain issues have risen to the forefront more than others. I decided to title my blog “The Other America” because people like Cornel West and NAACP leader Julian Bond believe there is a divide between mainstream America and what has been called “Black America,” and that there are issues only understandable and unique to people of color in this country.

One current hot topic is high incarceration rates of black men and what some view as discrimination within the criminal justice system. On Thursday, Dana Boone of the Iowa Independent wrote about the high incarceration rates for blacks in Iowa. Blacks compromise a little over 2 percent of the state’s population, but account for 25 percent of its prison population, according to a study by the Sentencing Project. State legislators have submitted proposals to lower the number of blacks in prison, but some policy analysts argue that Iowa–and other states—need to reevaluate its sentencing laws and determine if the punishments fit the crimes.

In Cincinnati, a riot occurred in April 2001 after a police killed an unarmed black man. Writing a guest article in the Cincinnati Beacon yesterday, Dan LaBotz says six years after the riots the city has decided to build another jail. LaBotz says that to many in Cincinnati a new jail is both the “symbol and the reality of racial discrimination.”

But perhaps the Jena 6 case is the situation that most symbolizes what many blacks believe is injustice in the criminal justice system. In a New York Times op-ed column titled “Jena, O. J. and the Jailing of Black America,” Orlando Patterson argues that what drew thousands of protestors to Jena, Louisiana was not only to show support for the six young men accused of assaulting a white classmate, but to express a “long overdue cry of outrage at the use of the prison system as a means of controlling young black men.”  But Jason Whitlock, a columnist for the Kansas City Star, disagrees. He says that Jena 6 supporters have rarely mentioned that Mychal Bell, one of the six accused, was already on probation for assault. According to Whitlock, who is African-American, Black America remains “deeply locked in denial about the path we need to travel today for true American liberation, equality and power in the new millennium. The fact that we waited to love Mychal Bell until after he’d thrown away a Division I football scholarship and nine months of his life is just as heinous as the grossly excessive attempted-murder charges that originally landed him in jail.”

The second hot topic is health disparities between African-Americans and other groups. An article in this month’s issue of Chicago Magazine discussed how black women in Chicago were more likely to die of breast cancer and other diseases than white women. This disparity also exists on a national scale. Black men are also more likely to die of certain diseases than men of other racial backgrounds. In an article in the Baltimore Sun, Susan Brink reports that researchers believe it may be racism, more so than race, which causes black men to have such high incidences of diseases like diabetes and heart disease. African-Americans are also more likely to be uninsured. Because of incidents like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which black men were denied treatment for syphilis during a clinical study, many African-Americans have some distrust of the medical establishment and seek health care less often, according to a 2003 study published in the American Journal of Public Health. African-Americans who live in lower-income urban areas are also more likely to suffer from lead poisoning and asthma. A recent article in the New York Times Magazine, reports that most of America’s power plants, refineries, and waste-transfer stations are concentrated in poorer urban areas.  U.S. environmental policy has traditionally focused on environmental solutions for wilderness, remote areas, but some politicians in Washington are calling for a policy with more of an urban focus.

The third hot topic concerns public education. In places like Chicago and New York, many black children attend underperforming schools. School choice, the ability of parents to place their children in better schools, has been one of the key facets of No Child Left behind. However, a Supreme Court ruling in June rejected assigning kids to certain schools exclusively on the basis of race.  In a post Friday on the Washington D.C. Employment Law blog, Richard Seymour argues that school assignments based on race are well-meaning but unjust: “These school districts’ student assignment plans were well-intentioned, but relied on race reflexively rather than thoughtfully. It did not appear from the decision that the factual predicates of the plans had ever gone through any rigorous analysis.” The issue of school diversity is also occurring in higher education. In 1996, California passed Proposition 209, which made it illegal for race to be a factor in government-hiring and college admissions. However, a consequence of the law is that is has dramatically reduced the number of black students at California’s public universities.

All three of these issues are hot topics. They’re the subject of ongoing debate in circles inside and outside of the African-American community and they’d be interesting to examine over the course of the quarter.