The Curry Report

January 27, 2009

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In This Issue

Memo to Republicans: You Lost

Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers

FACTBOX: Racial Inequality in the U.S.

NBA Leads This Race

Congress Sends Fair Pay Bill to Obama

The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity

Memo to Republicans: You Lost

By George E. Curry

NNPA Columnist

I don't know who is the most ridiculous: Rush Limbaugh, who said he hopes President Obama fails, or Republican Congressional leaders, who are not saying that, but trying to make Limbaugh's wish come true. Both forget that we had an election on Nov. 4 and their side lost. Handidly.

Limbaugh, the subject of a book titled, "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot," picked his words carefully when he said he wants Obama to fail.

"My hope, and please understand me when I say this. I disagree fervently with the people on our side of the aisle who have caved and who say, 'Well, I hope he succeeds. We've got to give him a chance.' Why? They didn't give Bush a chance in 2000. Before he was inaugurated the search-and-destroy mission had begun. I'm not talking about search-and-destroy, but I've been listening to Barack Obama for a year-and-a-half. I know what his politics are. I know what his plans are, as he has stated them. I don't want them to succeed."

Limbaugh said his staff had warned against wishing the worst for Obama. But he ignored them, declaring, "I am last the last man standing." In predicting an uproar over his remarks, Limbaugh said, "I would be honored if the Drive-By Media headlined me all day long: 'Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails.' Somebody's gotta say it."

Obviously, he was that honored. The next day he tried to soften his attack, saying he was supportive of the new president but not his polices, as if one can separate the two.

"I support our president, like I have supported all presidents. I just don't support Obama's policies," Limbaugh said. "I don't support the nationalization of banks, which has happened. I don't support the nationalization of the auto companies. I don't support the nationalization of the mortgage business. I don't like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd running things. And I don't want that to continue."

Who care whether Limbaugh likes Democrats Barney Frank or Chris Dodd? The voters like them and in a democracy, that's all that matters. Get over it, Rush. You lost. A big fat idiot should be able to see that.

Limbaugh isn't the only Republican acting as though the GOP won the election in November. Trickle-down Republican policies were clearly repudiated as evidenced not only by the election of President Obama but by sizeable House and Senate victories as well.

Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell that to House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). Appearing Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," he said Republicans are opposing the Obama-backed stimulus plan because it is seen as "a lot of wasteful Washington spending, padding the bureaucracy and doing nothing to help create jobs and preserve jobs."

Don't you love it when people who spend all of their time and money getting to Washington complain about 'Washington spending?" Of course it's Washington spending; this is where our federal government is headquartered.

Even John McCain is acting as though he won. Yes, that one. I read a story just last week about how "the Mc is back," how McCain had returned to his maverick ways. He wasn't a maverick before and he's not one now. Instead, we are being serenaded with a remix of his campaign rhetoric, the same talk that saw him go down in defeat.

The rejected Republic nominee for president was on Fox TV Sunday, blabbing about how he would not have announced the closing of Guantanamo Bay without first deciding what to do with current detainees and his objections to the proposed stimulus plan.

I am beginning to wonder if Obama isn't too nice to the wrong people. He campaigned for Joseph Lieberman and was rewarded by the Connecticut senator's decision to campaign against him in the general election and speak at the Republican convention in support of McCain. What did Obama do? He gently nudged his Democratic colleagues to let "Joe the Traitor" keep his Homeland Security Committee chairmanship.

A similar pattern occurred with John McCain, one of the first people Obama reached out to while he was still president-elect. Obama has sought McCain's opinion on cabinet appointments and honored him with a candlelight dinner of the eve of inauguration. Again, Obama was rewarded with a round of criticism from McCain.

Earlier, in one of his saner moments, McCain said the public had spoken in November and voters made it clear that they want Congress to get to work and to work together across political lines. Instead, we're seeing the same old posturing by Republicans, even after Brack Obama has met them more than halfway.

The president was right when he reminded Republicans the he won the election. Now, he needs to act like it. Conservative columnist William Kristol got it right when he wrote in the New York Times, "All good things must come to an end. Jan. 30, 2009 marked the end of a conservative era."

George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the NNPA News Service, is a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. He can be reached through his Web site, www.georgecurry.com.

Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers

By Sam Dillon
� New York Times
January 23, 2009

Educators and policy makers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have said in recent days that they hope President Obama's example as a model student could inspire millions of American students, especially blacks, to higher academic performance.

Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama's nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.

"Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking," said Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the study's three authors. "We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us."

The study has not yet undergone peer review, and two academics who read it on Thursday said they would be interested to see if other researchers would be able to replicate its results.

Dr. Friedman and his fellow researchers, David M. Marx, a professor of social psychology at San Diego State University, and Sei Jin Ko, a visiting professor in management and organizations at Northwestern, have submitted their study for review to The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Dr. Friedman said.

"It's a very small sample, but certainly a provocative study," said Ronald F. Ferguson, a Harvard professor who studies the factors that have affected the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students, which shows up on nearly every standardized test. "There is a certainly a theoretical foundation and some empirical support for the proposition that Obama's election could increase the sense of competence among African-Americans, and it could reduce the anxiety associated with taking difficult test questions."

Researchers in the last decade assembled university students with identical SAT scores and administered tests to them, discovering that blacks performed significantly poorer when asked at the start to fill out a form identifying themselves by race. The researchers attributed those results to anxiety that caused them to tighten up during exams in which they risked confirming a racial stereotype.

In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year's presidential campaign.

In total, 472 Americans - 84 blacks and 388 whites - took the exam. Both white and black test-takers ranged in age from 18 to 63, and their educational attainment ranged from high school dropout to Ph.D.

On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama's nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap "statistically nonsignificant," he said.

"It's a nice piece of work," said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association, who read the study on Thursday.

But Dr. Kingsbury wondered whether the Obama effect would extend beyond the election, or prove transitory. "I'd want to see another study replicating their results before I get too excited about it," he said.

FACTBOX: Racial Inequality in the U.S.

January 18, 2009

Barack Obama, who will be sworn in on Tuesday, is the first black president in U.S. history. But stark racial inequality persists in the United States.

Following is a list of some inequalities.

* HEALTH:

-- The infant mortality rate for babies of black women is 2.4 times the rate for babies of white women, according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report in October.

-- Doctors are less likely to give black women radiation therapy after surgery to remove early-stage breast cancer than white women, according to a study by the Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in September.

-- The study was one of many to show that U.S. blacks get inferior care for cancer and other ailments compared to that given whites, although doctors have struggled to understand why.

-- Life expectancy for the white population exceeded that for the black population by 5.1 years, the figures said.

-- The maternal mortality rate was 3.3 times greater for the black population than for the white population.

* ECONOMY:

-- 6.1 percent of the overall U.S. labor force was unemployed in the third quarter of 2008, but 11.4 percent of the black labor force was out of work, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics.

-- The total median income for a white family was $64,427 in 2007. The total for a black family was $40,143, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

-- 10.6 percent of the white U.S. population in 2007 lived below the official poverty threshold of $21,000 for a family of four, compared to 24.4 percent of the black population, the data said.

-- 14.3 percent of white Americans lacked health insurance compared to 19.2 percent of black Americans, according to 2007 U.S. census data.

-- 72 percent of white Americans own their own homes, compared with 46 percent of black Americans, the data said.

* CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

-- 0.8 percent of the white male population is incarcerated as opposed to 4.6 percent of the black male population, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics.

-- 10.7 percent of the black male population aged 30-34 was incarcerated, versus 1.9 percent of the white male population of the same age, according to the same statistics.

-- 1,406 black men are incarcerated in the United States for every 100,000 people. For white men that figure is 773 for every 100,000, according to U.S. Department of Justice figures.

-- Rates for the number of women imprisoned were much lower than for males, though the rates for black women were higher than for white women.

* EDUCATION

-- Public schools in the United States are becoming more racially segregated and the trend is likely to accelerate because of a recent Supreme Court decision, according to a report by the Civil Rights Project of the University of California Los Angeles.

-- The rise in segregation threatens the quality of education received by non-white students, who make up 43 percent of the total U.S. student body, the report said.

-- Many segregated schools struggle to attract highly qualified teachers and administrators. This leads to soaring drop-out rates and students not well prepared for college.

-- The percentage of white public school students fell from 80 to 57 between 1968 and 2005 and Latino enrollment nearly quadrupled during that period.

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services/CDC; U.S. Department of Justice; U.S. Census Bureau.

(Writing by David Cutler, London Editorial Reference Unit, editing by Matthew Bigg)

NBA Leads This Race

By Bob Ryan

Columnist

� Boston Globe

January 22, 2009

This just in: The president of the United States is a man of color.

What? You knew this already? That's good. So does this mean we are all now post-racial?

Of course, we're not yet quite post-racial, and we may never become an ideally colorblind society, but if we truly want to get there, we do have a working institutional model.

Professional football (1946) and baseball (1947) integrated in the competition area first, and hockey doesn't really enter into this discussion, for rather obvious reasons, but the fact is the National Basketball Association is the most egalitarian major institution in our society. In fact, the NBA is so infused with black power that it is the only significant American institution I know of where the white man is inherently perceived to be inadequate to the task.

But put the topic of playing ability to the side for a moment. Where the NBA laps and relaps the field is in the area of authority. All this discussion about the paucity of black coaches and managers in football and base ball is so much Sanskrit to those of us who follow the NBA, where black coaches have been coming and going and coming and going and coming and going for 40-plus years.

Unless there's been a change in the last five minutes (you'd be wise to check), the NBA has nine black head coaches. Two of them replaced fired black head coaches, something that has been going on in this league since the Detroit Pistons fired Earl Lloyd and replaced him with assistant Ray Scott in 1972, when Barack Obama was 11 years old and living in Honolulu.

Entering the 2008-09 season, there had been 75 black coaching appointments in the history of the league covering 47 individuals. The list includes familiar names such as Lenny Wilkens (the all-time winningest NBA coach), Al Attles, K.C. Jones, Nate McMillan, Doc Rivers, Bernie Bickerstaff, Mo Cheeks, and, of course, Bill Russell, the man who started it all when he took over the Celtics in 1966.

It also includes such names as Gene Littles, Darrell Walker, Sidney Lowe, Butch Carter, Leonard Hamilton, and Randy Ayers. In other words, men whose names aren't quite so recognizable to the casual NBA fan.

And that's without mentioning the previous interim coaches. I've counted 12 of them, ranging in fame from Magic Johnson to Draff Young.

Black coaches are such a matter-of-fact way of life in the NBA that the Lakers and Heat are the only teams that have not yet hired one, although each has had a black interim mentor. Black coaches are so entrenched in the NBA that this spring we will celebrate the 34th anniversary of the first all-black coaching matchup in the NBA Finals (Golden State's Attles vs. Washington's Jones).

Look, the NBA has plenty for which to apologize. When Chuck Cooper, Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, and Lloyd entered the league in the 1950-51 season, it did not trigger some tsunami of talent washing into the NBA. Rosters were small and there were unofficial quotas that lasted well into the '70s. It was well understood that a black player was going to have to be substantially better to the point of being irreplaceable to beat out a white player for a job. There weren't any black journeymen sitting at the end of NBA benches.

Race was a major issue for a long, long time. It was quite a big deal when both the Celtics (Russell, Satch Sanders, Willie Naulls, Sam Jones, K.C. Jones) and 76ers (Wilt Chamberlain, Chet Walker, Luke Jackson, Hal Greer, Wally, later Wali Jones) shattered convention by starting five black players in the 1965-66 season. Everyone understood that the reason the St. Louis Hawks, located in America's "northernmost Southern city," moved to more progressive Atlanta in 1968 was race, just as everyone understood that the reason the Hawks would later trade potential star Paul Silas to Phoenix for white stiff Gary Gregor a year later was the desire to whiten the lineup a little. A few years later, there was quite a stir when the Knicks finalized the first all-black 12-man roster.

No team was more in the hurricane's eye than our own Celtics, who, after winning 16 championships, found that some people wished them to apologize for having employed such white stars as John Havlicek, Dave Cowens, Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Danny Ainge, Scott Wedman, and Bill Walton. The team that drafted the first black player, hired the NBA's first black coach (the first of five, at last count), and whose franchise icon insisted on black-white roommate pairings (I can bear personal testimony to this) found its image threatened by being regarded as too white in an increasingly black-oriented league. In retrospect, I guess this was an enormous compliment for the NBA itself.

But the NBA's embrace of color doesn't stop with players and coaches. At present, there are four blacks calling the organizational shots as either general managers or vice presidents of operations, or whatever. In addition, Elgin Baylor, in charge of the Clippers' personnel affairs since 1986, was let go earlier this season. But who should be surprised? Wayne Embry was given control of the Bucks in 1971.

The only major professional sports league with black ownership? The NBA, of course (Charlotte Bobcats).

Referees? Plenty of those have come and gone, including some of the best (Hugh Evans, Danny Crawford) and, yup, some of the worst (as with their white counterparts, far too many candidates to enumerate). And that is what's so important to note about the NBA.

There have been plenty of failed black head coaches, and isn't that the point? All anyone, black, white, Asian, whatever, can ask for is a fair chance. There's no inherent barrier in the NBA, and there's no condescension, either. It's produce or get out, which is as it should be.

The NBA is the land of administrative fairness and opportunity, and on the playing front, the days are long gone when a black man must be twice as good as a white man to secure a job. There are countless examples of black journeymen, men who bounce from team to team as glorified Kelly Girls.

Ever hear of Kevin Ollie? Since entering the league in 1997, the former University of Connecticut star has played for 11 teams, one of them (Philadelphia) three times and another (Orlando) twice. It is a journey that would have been unimaginable for someone such as Cleo Hill, a great black player of the late '50s and through the '60s who could not get a job in the league even though he was, by all anecdotal evidence, one of the top 10 guards alive. It's not unlike telling people in Honolulu 36 years ago that in their midst was a mixed-race 11-year-old who would grow up to be president.

But no less significant is the coaching r�sum� of a Bernie Bickerstaff, who was no big basketball star, no household name, but who, after being introduced to the professional basketball world by a mentor named K.C. Jones, would find himself coaching four NBA teams and running another one.

It's an only-in-the-NBA saga.

Barack Obama has to know all this. I'm not saying he has made basketball his sport of choice for this reason, but I don't know that he hasn't.

Congress Sends Fair Pay Bill to Obama

By Jim Abrams
(c) The Associated Press
January 27, 2009

WASHINGTON -- Congress sent the White House Tuesday what is expected to be the first legislation that President Barack Obama signs into law, a bill that makes it easier for women and others to sue for pay discrimination, even if the discrimination has prevailed for years, even decades.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama would sign the bill, a top priority for labor and women's rights groups, Thursday during a public ceremony in the East Room.

The bill is a response to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that said a person must file a claim of discrimination within 180 days of a company's initial decision to pay a worker less than it pays another worker doing the same job. Under the bill, every new discriminatory paycheck would extend the statute of limitations for another 180 days.

The measure, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after receiving a congratulatory phone call from Obama, is "a bold step to move away from that parsimonious interpretation" of the Supreme Court.

The plaintiff in the case, Lilly Ledbetter, argued that she did not become aware of the pay discrepancy until near the end of her 19-year career at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant in Gadsden, Ala.

The Bush White House and Senate Republicans blocked the legislation in the last session of Congress, but Obama strongly supports it and the Democratic-controlled Congress moved it to the top of the agenda for the new session that opened this month.

The House on Tuesday passed it on a 250-177 vote.

"What a difference a new Congress and a president make," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., sponsor of the bill and chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.

Obama invited Ledbetter, for whom the bill is named, to accompany him on his train trip to the inauguration ceremony in Washington. After the Senate vote last week, the 70-year-old retiree said Obama "has assured me that he would see me in the White House when they sign the bill."

"By swiftly passing this legislation, Congress sets a new tone for employment rights," said ACLU legislative counsel Deborah J. Vagins. "The Ledbetter legislation restores a clear, bright-line rule for determining the timeliness of claims."

Having succeeded with the Ledbetter bill, labor rights advocates can turn to tougher issues, including a controversial measure, expected to come up later this year, that would take away a company's right to demand a secret ballot when workers are deciding whether to join a union.

The Ledbetter bill focuses on pay and other workplace discrimination against women: The Census Bureau last year estimated that women still only receive about 78 cents for every dollar that men get for doing equivalent jobs. But the measure, which amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964, also applies to discrimination based on factors such as race, religion, national origin, disability or age.

Supporters argued that the 5-4 Supreme Court decision throwing out Ledbetter's claim was unrealistic for most work environments in which employees are unaware of, or even barred from talking about, the salaries of their co-workers.

They said it rewards companies that manage to keep wage discrimination secret for more than six months.

Opponents contended that the legislation would gut the statute of limitations, encourage lawsuits and be a boon to trial lawyers. They also argued that employees could wait to file claims in hopes of reaping larger damage awards.

"Enriching trial lawyers is simply the wrong way to ensure a fairer, more just workplace," said Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon of California, top Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee.

But backers pointed out that the bill does not change current law limiting back pay for claimants to two years, so there would be no incentive to wait to file a claim.

The House first passed the bill on Jan. 9, just days after convening the new session of Congress. The Senate approved it last week by 61-36, with all 16 female senators, including four Republicans, voting for it.

The House had to vote again because it originally coupled the bill with another labor measure making it easier to receive damage awards for discrimination. The Senate separated the two, putting off the second bill, which faced more opposition, for later in the year.

The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity

By Tara Parker-Pope

� New York Times

January 27, 2009

Have American teenagers gone wild?

Parents have worried for generations about changing moral values and risky behavior among young people, and the latest news seems particularly worrisome.

It came from the National Center for Health Statistics, which reported this month that births to 15- to 19-year-olds had risen for the first time in more than a decade.

And that is not the only alarm being sounded. The talk show host Tyra Banks declared a teen sex crisis last fall after her show surveyed girls about sexual behavior. A few years ago, Oprah Winfrey warned parents of a teenage oral-sex epidemic.

The news is troubling, but it's also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today's teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.

Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.

A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys.

"There's no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than they ever were," said Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. "But when you look at the data, that's not the case."

One reason people misconstrue teenage sexual behavior is that the system of dating and relationships has changed significantly. In the first half of the 20th century, dating was planned and structured - and a date might or might not lead to a physical relationship. In recent decades, that pattern has largely been replaced by casual gatherings of teenagers.

In that setting, teenagers often say they "fool around," and in a reversal of the old pattern, such an encounter may or may not lead to regular dating. The shift began around the late 1960s, said Dr. Bogle, who explored the trend in her book "Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus" (N.Y.U. Press, 2008).

The latest rise in teenage pregnancy rates is cause for concern. But it very likely reflects changing patterns in contraceptive use rather than a major change in sexual behavior. The reality is that the rate of teenage childbearing has fallen steeply since the late 1950s. The declines aren't explained by the increasing availability of abortions: teenage abortion rates have also dropped.

"There is a group of kids who engage in sexual behavior, but it's not really significantly different than previous generations," said Maria Kefalas, an associate professor of sociology at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia and co-author of "Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage" (University of California Press, 2005). "This creeping up of teen pregnancy is not because so many more kids are having sex, but most likely because more kids aren't using contraception."

As for that supposed epidemic of oral sex, especially among younger teenagers: national statistics on the behavior have only recently been collected, and they are not as alarming as some reports would have you believe. About 16 percent of teenagers say they have had oral sex but haven't yet had intercourse. Researchers say children's more relaxed attitude about oral sex probably reflects a similar change among adults since the 1950s. In addition, some teenagers may view oral sex as "safer," since unplanned pregnancy is not an issue.

Health researchers say parents who fret about teenage sex often fail to focus on the important lessons they can learn from the kids who aren't having sex. Teenagers with more parental supervision, who come from two-parent households and who are doing well in school are more likely to delay sex until their late teens or beyond.

"For teens, sex requires time and lack of supervision," Dr. Kefalas said. "What's really important for us to pay attention to, as researchers and as parents, are the characteristics of the kids who become pregnant and those who get sexually transmitted diseases.

"This whole moral panic thing misses the point, because research suggests kids who don't use contraception tend to be kids who are feeling lost and disconnected and not doing well."

Although the data is clear, health researchers say it is often hard to convince adults that most teenagers have healthy attitudes about sex.

"I give presentations nationwide where I'm showing people that the virginity rate in college is higher than you think and the number of partners is lower than you think and hooking up more often than not does not mean intercourse," Dr. Bogle said. "But so many people think we're morally in trouble, in a downward spiral and teens are out of control. It's very difficult to convince people otherwise."