Minorities

Hillary Rodham Clinton is right. She has the broader and whiter political coalition, so she should, by all rights, be the Democratic presidential nominee.

After all, in other realms of the political process, we routinely refer to "black districts" or "Latino districts" and speak of the necessity of those jurisdictions to be represented by black or Latino elected officials. Well, then, because the American population is 66% white, maybe the United States is a de facto white district that should be… more

Last week's Pennsylvania primary demonstrated that Barack Obama is not unbeatable. This might sound a strange way to put it. Hasn't it always been true that Obama is beatable?

Well, consider an alternate reality in which Obama had won Pennsylvania. His people certainly thought long and deeply about this alternate reality -- why else spend a staggering $12 million on one state's primary? Hillary Clinton would have dropped out. Obama would have shown that he can win white working-class votes in… more

Ending birthright citizenship is a placebo, not a solution to illegal immigration.

The debate over immigration is fundamentally about who we are as a nation,who we are not, and who we want to be.

It is thus no surprise that those most afraid of who we are becoming have moved to redraw the rules of inclusion by proposing to do away with birthright citizenship. Such a move is not only legally dubious, it is a threat to American prosperity.

Americans have little confidence that assimilation is happening today as it once did. According to a 2006 Pew Research Center poll, 44 percent of Americans believe that today's immigrants are not as willing to assimilate as those who came during the early 1900s. Their confidence is not likely to grow with the release of a new Pew Hispanic Center report, which shows that by 2050 nearly 1 in 5 people in the United States will be foreign-born. Nativists, such as… more

...About 56 percent of all wage and salary employees ages 21 to 64 had an employer or union-sponsored pension or retirement plan last year, according to a report released this month by the Employee Benefit Research Institute in Washington, D.C. Overall, about 53 percent of full-time, full-year workers participate in such plans, but the Institute's analysis of 2007 U.S. Census data found non-native Hispanics were less likely to participate than whites, blacks or non-immigrant Hispanics.

Matthew Gnabasik, managing director of… more

The 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal once observed that mankind is suspended between two infinities -- the infinitely large and the infinitely small. And so it is with two figures in the news: Al Gore wishes to speak for the planet, while Bill Cosby wishes to speak to the human heart.

And it’s revealing, given the liberal biases of our culture, that one man gets so much attention and the other man, so little.

Gore, former vice president-turned-pundit-movie star, has chosen, as… more

Just over a year ago, during a high-school assembly in Jena, Louisiana, a black student asked the school’s white principal if it would be all right to sit under an oak tree outside, an oasis of shade known as the “white tree,” because only Caucasian students congregated there. The principal said that the young man could sit where he liked. Later, the student and some African-American friends walked over to the oak and chatted with some white schoolmates. The next… more

Last Tuesday’s release of what is known as the "Nation’s Report Card" for math and reading is likely to reignite talk of the so-called racial achievement gap. Despite some good news, the report, published by the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, shows that Latinos, like blacks, haven’t made progress in catching up to the test scores of whites.

But the dour assessment of Latino educational achievement has nothing to do with a racial gap. We can’t use the same… more

Tomás Jiménez is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. His research and teaching focus on immigration, assimilation, social mobility, and identity. In 2005, he was the American Sociological Association Congressional Fellow in the office of Rep. Michael Honda (D-CA), where he served as a legislative aide for immigration, veterans’… more

Renowned metrosexual megastar David Beckham is earning some street cred. When the $250-million man first arrived in Los Angeles last month, he seemed too famous and too fragile to deign to take the pitch at Carson's Home Depot Center.

But that was then; this is now. On Wednesday, he suffered a knee injury when he didn't flinch from a rough collision. The week before, in the "super clasico" matchup between Los Angeles' two teams -- Beckham's Galaxy and Chivas USA --… more