12139: Tracing The Black Market.

From The New York Times…

The Worth of Black Men, From Slavery to Ferguson

By Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

The paper, stained in spots, has yellowed, its black ink faded to a dull brown, but the horizontal lines printed on the page are still a fine blue. Some scribe took great care preparing this page, first dragging a piece of graphite along a straight edge to make two pairs of twin columns. Sometimes the pencil marks skip, disconnecting from the line before joining the page again. Once ordered, the table received its data: numbers rendered by hand but with a machinelike uniformity.

One column is titled “Ages — Years Old”; the other, “Valuation.” The first begins in infancy at age 1 and continues to 60, the age of infirmity for an enslaved person after a lifetime of work. In the second column, corresponding prices ascend steadily, beginning with the youngest slave, valued at $100, and climbing by increments of $25 or $50. The chart peaks at age 20 and $900. From there it descends, by the same increments, until ending with the 60-year-old slave worth only $50. This is the “Scale of Valuation of Slaves,” from the papers of Tyre Glen — a prosperous North Carolina slave trader and tobacco planter who was, paradoxically, also an abolitionist and antisecessionist.

The economist Robert Evans Jr. noted in 1962 that “the slave market performed for the antebellum South some of the functions now performed by the New York Stock Exchange, i.e., it served in the eyes of the public as a sensitive reflector of current and future business prospects.” Calculating the profitability of slaves as compared with other investments circa 1850, Evans estimated that the purchase of 1,000 20-year-old male slaves — held for 20 or 30 years and accounting for standard rates of depreciation and death — was greater than investments such as the “three- to six-month bankable paper money market in Boston,” or stock in the Northern and Southern railroads.

The lingo of the slave trade only emphasizes the importance of these black bodies to the market. In 1860, a Virginia trader valued 20-year-old slaves as “extra men” and “extra women,” worth $1,500-$1,600 and $1,325-$1,400, respectively. A second tier of high-value souls were known as “No. 1 men,” worth $1,400-$1,500, and “No. 1 women,” worth $1,275-$1,325. After depreciation by age, abuse and overwork, they were demoted to what Evans termed “once-prime.” The equation by which Evans arrived at a rate of return on slave investments indicates P as the price of slaves, k as the number of years the investor holds the slaves, H as the yearly rent for male slaves age 20 to 50, N as the number of male slaves alive at midyear and r as the internal rate of interest.

No mathematical equation exists to produce the economic model that ends with 18-year-old Michael Brown, shot multiple times with his hands in the air, his lifeless body left in the street for four hours. The numbers will inevitably be run, however, to determine the cumulative cost of damages owed to owners of property looted or destroyed in the riots engulfing Ferguson, Mo., after Brown’s death, thus fulfilling a ritual cycle enacted repeatedly over the last 100 years: injustice, outrage, appeals to peace, reprimands against violence and looting and then insurance claims.

But a path can be traced from slavery to the killing of Michael Brown. The sociologist Loïc Wacquant asserts that racialized slavery was only the first in a series of “peculiar institutions” (as went the 19th-century euphemism gilding the nation’s founding contradiction) to enforce caste and class in the United States. The most recent is the “hyperghetto” and “hyperincarceration” that presides today, wherein there’s little hope of mobility and uniformly dire possibilities. Instead of being at the center of the national economy — as were 20-year-olds in slave traders’ value scale — those who are young and black have become a distortion of the “extra man”: They are now surplus labor, discarded in advance as uneducable, unredeemable criminals or potential criminals.

#BlackLivesMatter, the hashtag slogan that emerged amid the outcry against Brown’s killing and other similar deaths, has predecessors in previous eras. The abolitionist’s plea went “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” (this was amended by Sojourner Truth to “Aren’t I a Woman?” in her challenge to early gender-equality advocates who denied the participation of black women). In the era of Jim Crow terrorism, the N.A.A.C.P. regularly suspended a flag from the window of its New York headquarters declaring, “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday.” The pointed and similarly plain slogan “I AM A MAN” was emblazoned on the posters of Memphis sanitation workers on strike in 1968 during what would be the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final campaign. (At an auction of African-American ephemera, I once saw an original of that poster, which had been altered by its owner. I AM A MAN, the poster stated. “NOT-A-BITCH,” was the scrawled annotation.)

But who is addressed by these claims — left as the impression of a wax seal or unfurled on a flag; carried as placards on bodies or appended to 140-character shards of thought? All address a great unnamed They: the system, the state or, more hopefully, the people and the democracy. (In 1900, the anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells-Barnett, in her preface to “Mob Rule in New Orleans” exhorted, “We do not believe that the American people who have encouraged such scenes by their indifference will read unmoved these accounts of brutality, injustice and oppression.”) We are speaking to one another, ourselves against the possibility of our own forgetfulness; we are addressing future histories. The artist Dread Scott recently plastered a series of fake “wanted” posters around Harlem challenging, among other things, the civil rights violations of New York’s much-criticized stop-and-frisk police tactic. Featuring generic police sketches of the young black and Latino men disproportionately targeted by the practice, the posters offered another take on the value of these lives, stating “the suspect is wanted by his family, friends, and neighbors.”

Today the chorus of voices declaring #BlackLivesMatter also speaks to the militarized police forces gathered to contain revolt, mourning and rage. They speak to the courts who will later hear arguments of defense: The gun was used by accident instead of a Taser (as in the killing of Oscar Grant III in Oakland, Calif.); the victim was in possession of weaponized concrete (as in the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla.); the possibly imperiled young woman at the front door in the dead of night was a menace in need of immediate extermination (as in the case of Renisha McBride in Dearborn Heights, Mich.). Two trials were required to bring justice for Jordan Davis, murdered in Jacksonville, Fla., because his “thug music” was too loud. For John Crawford III, killed in the pet-food aisle of a Beavercreek, Ohio, Walmart, there will be no hearing, for a grand jury has decided not to indict the officers responsible. In very many other similar instances, the vigilante or “justified” or “officer-involved” homicides do not receive media attention. According to a report issued by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, at least one black person is the victim of “extrajudicial killing” every 28 hours in the United States.

How do we make sense of all these killings? By the logic of Tyre Glen’s chart, then the deaths of all these extra men and extra women, and once-prime men and once-prime women are entirely sensible. The scholar Sabine Broeck suggests we understand slavery not as “safely entombed … deplorable events in the past,” but as enslavism — “the legacies of which are ongoing.” The bloody inversion of a bloody history arrives at these black lives dispatched with ease. The last few years have seen scores of memorials, re-enactments, monuments and editorials coinciding with the sesquicentennial of various events of the Civil War. But it is these deaths — the killings in Ferguson and Beavercreek and beyond — that commemorate the unfinished, perhaps unending, struggle to assert black humanity in a country built on its denial.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is the author of “Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America.”

11648: Black Dads Data.

From The Los Angeles Times…

Survey finds dads defy stereotypes about black fatherhood

By most measures, report says, black fathers are at least as involved with their kids as other men in similar living situations.

By Emily Alpert Reyes

Defying enduring stereotypes about black fatherhood, a federal survey of American parents shows that by most measures, black fathers who live with their children are just as involved as other dads who live with their kids — or more so.

For instance, among fathers who lived with young children, 70% of black dads said they bathed, diapered or dressed those kids every day, compared with 60% of white fathers and 45% of Latino fathers, according to a report released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics.

Nearly 35% of black fathers who lived with their young children said they read to them daily, compared with 30% of white dads and 22% of Latino dads. The report was based on a federal survey that included more than 3,900 fathers between 2006 and 2010 — a trove of data seen as the gold standard for studying fatherhood in the United States. In many cases, the differences between black fathers and those of other races were not statistically significant, researchers said.

The findings echo earlier studies that counter simple stereotypes characterizing black fathers as missing in action. When it comes to fathers who live with their kids, “blacks look a lot like everyone else,” said Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center who has previously studied the topic. And in light of the negative stereotypes about black fathers, “that is a story in itself.”

In Watts, Bryan August-Jones battles the stereotype daily. Every weekday, he wakes his three sons before sunrise, gets them dressed, then ferries them to the baby sitter and to school. On weekends, he takes them bicycling or to Red Lobster, which his youngest son — “a little fancy guy” — prefers over McDonald’s.

His Latina mother-in-law and her family think black men cannot be good fathers, but “I prove them wrong all the time,” August-Jones said.

Worry about black fathers has been tied to a persistent fact: Black dads are especially likely to live apart from one or more of their children — and fathers of all races tend to be less involved in the day-to-day lives of their kids when they live elsewhere.

Yet the report also revealed that among American fathers living apart from their children, black dads were at least as involved as other dads not living with their kids, or more so, according to most measures. Among fathers living apart from older children, more than half of black fathers said that several times a week or more, they talked to their kids about their day — a higher percentage than among white or Latino dads living separately from older children, the report showed.

In Bellflower, Jason Franklin phones his young daughters daily during the week. The girls stay with him on weekends. Franklin remembers that when his own parents parted, his father sometimes skipped visits “out of spite.” He vowed not to do the same thing to his children when he and their mother split up.

“Even if I don’t see them every day, my role as a father doesn’t change,” Franklin said.

Nearly half of black fathers living apart from their young children said they played with them at least several times a week, 42% said they fed or ate with them that frequently, and 41% said they bathed, diapered or helped dress them as often — rates on par with or higher than those of other men living apart from their kids.

“People think they don’t care, but we know they do,” said Joseph Jones, president of the Center for Urban Families, a Baltimore advocacy group that works with African American fathers. “We see how dads are fighting against the odds to be engaged in the lives of their children.”

The report leaves it unclear if black fathers, on the whole, are more involved than other dads. Although the survey showed that black fathers not living at home are as involved with their children as fathers of other races in similar situations, the higher percentage of black dads absent from the home could drag down the average involvement for all black fathers, other researchers pointed out.

Earlier research has shown that after parents break up, fathers become less involved as time passes. Mothers may curb the time they allow an ex to spend with their children. Fathers sometimes struggle to stay as involved if they form another family.

However, Laura Tach and fellow researchers also found that black fathers were more likely than white or Latino dads to stay close to their children after having more kids with a new partner. Because it isn’t as rare for black fathers to live away from the home, their communities might have stronger expectations that fathers will stay involved outside the “package deal” of a wife and kids, explained Tach, a professor of policy analysis at Cornell University.

“Some men think when they lose a marriage, they lose the relationship with the kids,” said Marquette University sociology professor Roberta L. Coles. “For black men that doesn’t seem to be as true.”

Osborne Lopez, a black man with Belizean roots, said there was never any question he would stay connected to his kids after his divorce.

Almost every weekday, Lopez picks up his son and daughter from school and catches up with them over dinner or a snack. On weekends, they stay over and bond over his scrambled eggs or homemade chili, see the latest Disney movie or head to the beach. Years ago, he decided to leave the Air Force to avoid missing “those pivotal moments” in their young lives.

As a black father, “I don’t want to be part of the stereotype,” he said

10917: Segregation And Lung Cancer.

From The New York Times…

Segregation Linked in Study With Lung Cancer Deaths

By Sabrina Tavernise

African-Americans who live in highly segregated counties are considerably more likely to die from lung cancer than those in counties that are less segregated, a new study has found.

The study was the first to look at segregation as a factor in lung cancer mortality. Its authors said they could not fully explain why it worsens the odds of survival for African-Americans, but hypothesized that blacks in more segregated areas may be less likely to have health insurance or access to health care and specialty doctors. It is also possible that lower levels of education mean they are less likely to seek care early, when medical treatment could make a big difference. Racial bias in the health care system might also be a factor.

“If you want to learn about someone’s health, follow him home,” said Dr. Awori J. Hayanga, a heart and lung surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who was the lead author of the study.

The study, published in JAMA Surgery on Wednesday, divided all counties in the country into three levels of segregation: high, medium and low. It found that lung cancer mortality rates, a ratio of deaths to a population, were about 20 percent higher for blacks who lived in the most segregated counties, than for blacks living in the least segregated counties.

Lung cancer is the top cause of preventable death in the United States. Blacks have the highest incidence of it and are also more likely to die from it. For every million black males, 860 will die from lung cancer, compared with 620 among every million white males. The rates were calculated over the period of the study, from 2003 to 2007.

The study drew on federal mortality data from that period, and segregation data from about a third of United States counties that had African-American populations large enough to measure. About 28 percent of Americans live in counties with low segregation, 40 percent in counties with moderate segregation and 32 percent in counties with high segregation.

The gap in outcomes persisted even after accounting for differences in smoking rates and socio-economic status, Dr. Hayanga said.

For whites, high levels of segregation had the opposite effect, a finding that surprised the authors. Whites who lived in highly segregated counties had about 6 percent lower mortality rates from lung cancer than those who lived in the least segregated counties, though researchers pointed out that the difference was slight enough that it was not clear whether it was meaningful.

Dr. David Chang, director of outcomes research at the University of California San Diego Department of Surgery, who wrote an accompanying editorial, said he hoped that the study would focus attention on the environmental factors involved in the stark disparities in health outcomes in the United States because they lend themselves to change through policy. Medical researchers tend to focus on factors that are harder to change, like the genetics and the behaviors of individuals.

“We don’t need drugs or genetic explanations to fix a lot of the health care problems we have,” he said.

8801: O Canada!

Red Urban won at The Bessies—Canada’s award show honoring TV and online spots—with this Fortnight Lingerie commercial featuring interracial naughtiness.