PBS More white Americans acknowledge racism as a national problem The review, compiled by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in conjunction with the Northeastern University School of Journalism, concludes that a majority of Americans across racial groups think more should be done to end racism. To that end, the foundation announced Thursday that it is launching a “Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission” to discuss solutions […]
Juvenile crime is just as prevalent in suburbia Close to 150,000 kids in the US will spend time in a juvenile detention facility in any given year. Black inner city youth are almost five times more likely to be incarcerated than their white peers. But that’s not because kids in inner cities are more prone to crime, it’s because suburban communities deal with […]
WGBH Why Boston should adopt police body cameras Sunday marked the first anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager killed during a confrontation with a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The incident put a spotlight on the deaths of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement. A series of comparable tragedies surfaced in the ensuing year, raising public […]
New York Daily News Violence, beyond black & white: When looking closely at recent mass violence motivated by group hatred, a more complex picture emerges Last week’s murder of nine African Americans at a historic church in Charleston may seem like a continuation of a terrible trend — hate-motivated murder of blacks — albeit with an unusually large victim count. That would be true were we back in the civil-rights era of the 1960s, when such hate killings almost exclusively […]
Amazon, PayPal and Spotify inadvertently fund white supremacists. Here’s how. Meanwhile, many experts point out that — even if funding for racist publishers, blogs and bands dries up — those publishers, blogs and bands are unlikely to stop their work. Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University, points out that white supremacists and other fringe political groups haven’t been dissuaded even by lawsuits that cost […]
WCAI Massachusetts has an environmental justice problem While the high-profile deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police have drawn national attention, there’s a more insidious threat facing communities of color across the country – environmental pollution. In recent weeks, some environmentalists have drawn a connection, giving double meaning to slogans like “Black Lives Matter” and “I can’t […]
International Business Times For first time, US uses ‘terrorism’ to describe latest attack in western China But academics who study terrorism pointed to the changing rhetoric emanating from the White House as a positive sign for U.S.-Chinese relations. While governments ought to take care in branding activities “terrorist” given the license for violent response that such a word implicitly conveys, in this case the term would appear to apply, some suggested, […]
PBS NewsHour How to Guarantee a Job for Every American William Darity: Ninety-five percent joblessness for teen black male dropouts? That estimate, from Northeastern University’s Andrew Sum, borders on the fantastic as an indictment of the American labor market. Add to Sum’s damning statistic the finding that blacks with some college education or an associate’s degree experienced higher unemployment than whites who had dropped out of high […]
ABC News Whitey Bulger Case Hit Man Was Not a Classic Serial Killer “A serial killer typically uses sex as a vehicle for tempting to gain a sense of power and dominance and control,” said Jack Levin, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston and a co-author of the 2008 book, “Extreme Killing.” “In most cases, it includes torture,” he said. “Martorano was right in court when he […]
The Scientist “White-Blooded” Icefish, 1927 On December 1, 1927, zoologist Ditlef Rustad pulled ashore on Bouvet Island, 1,750 kilometers off the coast of Antarctica, as part of a Norwegian expedition to claim the remote, wind-whipped island as a whaling outpost. Later that month, casting nets into the frigid waters, Rustad hauled up a very strange-looking fish. It had no scales […]
US traces, tells of Whitey Bulger’s arsenal on the run Glenn Pierce, the acting director of the Institute for Security and Public Policy at Northeastern University, said that guns can easily be bought in some states from private sellers without any paper trail and that universal background checks would slow down the flow of guns to some people who should not have them. “The highly […]
White House Floats Its Ideas on Gun Control The White House threw its support behind several gun-control measures Tuesday, including requiring background checks at gun shows and for other private sales—ideas likely to face stiff opposition from most congressional Republicans and the powerful gun lobby. President Barack Obama also wants to renew the expired ban on assault weapons and consider limits on high-capacity […]