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Michigan Teens Pen Book on Muslim Women Who are Real-Life Heroes to Empower Girls

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Michigan Teens Pen Book on Muslim Women Who are Real-Life Heroes to Empower Girls

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You might think the library is the place where you'll find every type of book in the world.

But that wasn't the case for two teenagers from Michigan who couldn't find any books about Muslim women.

Sisters Zena Nasiri, 17, and Mena Nasiri, 15, started Girls of the Crescent, a nonprofit organization that increases the number of books in libraries and schools with Muslim female characters.

Now the ambitious sisters have taken their project a step further and wrote their own book that showcases amazing Muslim women from past to present.

Lack of diversity

Two years ago, Zena and Mena were given a school project to research an inspirational historical figure.

"We wanted to do the project on some Muslim women because our mom would always tell us stories about them," Mena told the Free Press. "And they were really inspirational because we could connect with them."
More: More: Nike launches new swimwear line that caters to Muslim, modest women Detroit Zen Center hopes to make Hamtramck the green roof capital of Michigan
Zena picked Fatima al-Fihri, a Muslim woman credited with establishing the world's first university. Mena picked Sabiha Gökçen, believed to be the world's first female combat pilot.

However, they realized that the school and public library didn't have any books about their heroes or any books with Muslim female main characters.

"That was the first time we realized that there was a lack of representation and diversity in the books we had access to," Mena said.

A positive response

Sometime after the project, the girls reached out to the PTA of Rochester Community Schools and asked for funding to add books with Muslim characters in the school's media center.

The response to the idea was very positive and books were placed in the libraries of most of the schools in the district.

"We got around 200 books into the Rochester Community School District," Zena said. "Eventually the whole project kind of blew up and we turned it into a nonprofit."

The sisters had to do a lot of research and find books that had Muslim female characters. They made a list on their website and arranged books by age range and genre.

"We didn't know how many were out there," Mena said.

Donations around the world

Girls of the Crescent has donated over 700 books to school libraries and public libraries around the community.

Their work has also spread to other states and even different countries. The sisters have donated books to schools in Morroco, Hong Kong, France, and England.

"We have a donation that's ready to ship to Nigeria as well so we're really excited about that," Zena said. "We hope we can continue to reach people around the country and the world."
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For most of the local donations, Zena and Mena started reaching out to see which schools and libraries were interested in donations. Then people from around the world started reaching out to them personally.

"For places around the world, it's usually people finding us on social media and they want books for their schools and their libraries and they contact us," Zena said.

A book of their own

Zena and Mena are excited to share their new project - their own book - that continues their goal of making female Muslim characters more accessible.

The book is a biography of 50 inspirational Muslim women - women going back to the Islamic Golden Age to more modern figures.

"It goes back to fourth grade when we couldn't find those books so we decided to write one of our own," Mena explained.

The book will feature women such as Raha Moharrak, who climbed Mount Everest; Ibtihaj Muhammad, who was the first woman in hijab to compete for the United States in the Olympics, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.

"And of course we have the two women we were going to do our project on - Fatima al-Fihri and Sabiha Gökçen," Mena emphasized with a smile on her face.

Their project has truly gone full circle and the girls are thrilled about having their own book in libraries across the world.

Some of their favorites

Zena and Mena and shared some of their favorite books that have inspired them in their journey.

"Both of our favorite book of all time is 'The Lines We Cross' by Randa Abdel-Fattah," Mena said. "We definitely recommend that one."
Contact Bisma Parvez at 313-222-6420 or bparvez@gannett.com Follow her on Twitter @bismapar
One of Zena's favorites is the "Ms. Marvel" series by Detroit native Saladin Ahmed.

"She's the first Muslim superhero to have her own comic book series in the Marvel Universe," Mena said. "That's a very cool step."

The sisters are looking forward to Amulet, the new superhero from Dearborn who will be joining Ms. Marvel in her comics.

Girls of the Crescent is always looking for new books with female Muslim characters. They take suggestions on their website. They encourage people to reach out to their organization to add Muslim characters to their schools and libraries.

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Michigan teens pen book on Muslim women who are real-life heroes to empower girls

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You might think the library is the place where you'll find every type of book in the world. But that wasn't the case for two teenagers from Michigan who couldn't find any books about Muslim women.

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Letter for Black Lives: South Asian American Version

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Letter for Black Lives: South Asian American Version

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Letters for Black Lives

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This is the South Asian American version of the open letter created by Letters for Black Lives, an ongoing project for people to create and translate resources on anti-Blackness for their communities in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter and Black Americans. This letter was written and edited by several people who want to have honest and respectful conversations with their ​families and communities​ about an issue important to them.
EDIT: In response to the cold-blooded police murders of innocent Black men and women, including, but not limited to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade, we have written an updated version in 2020. This version has been translated in many languages and we hope it will be a helpful starting point for both open conversations and concrete actions.

Dear family and friends,
Overwhelmingly, the police do not face any consequences But stereotypes can be misleading. We want to share another point of view with you: why we should stand with Black Americans. for ending Black lives.
We need to talk.

In school, we learned about Black leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and many others who fought racism in America during the 1950s and 60s. But their work is far from complete. Recent events show how dangerous it still is to be Black in America.

American police have already killed more than 500 people in 2016 alone. Of those, 25% have been Black, even though Black people make up only 13% of the population. In early July in Louisiana, two White police officers killed a Black man named Alton Sterling while he sold CDs outside a convenience store. The next day in Minnesota, a police officer shot and killed a Black man named Philando Castile in his car during a traffic stop.

When we see these stories in the news, it may seem like it's not our problem. That's because American culture portrays Black people as thugs and criminals. Our negative attitudes toward Black people may also be influenced by prejudice around skin color or caste that exists within our own communities.

In fact, stereotypes directly impact members of our community as well. The media shows us as foreigners with thick accents. We get called names in schools and on the streets. Airport security stops us, and some of us are profiled as terrorists because of our clothes or our religion.

Sometimes, anti-Black racism also puts us in danger. In 2015, Sureshbhai Patel came to Alabama from India to care for his grandson. He was taking a walk outside when a White neighbor called 911 to report a suspicious "skinny Black guy" on the street. The police went on to assault Mr. Patel, who spoke little English. He was left partially paralyzed, spending months in the hospital. The police officer was never convicted of any wrongdoing, even though the entire incident was captured on video.

Incidents like this occur regularly for Black Americans. And they face racism on an even more appalling level - a level built into their daily lives. This racism is all the more difficult to combat because it is embedded in the very foundations of American society and institutions.

We benefit from many of these institutions ourselves. The American government was primarily created by slaveholders, and the foundations for its economy were built on slavery. Many Black Americans are descended from slaves who experienced brutal mistreatment as their owners reaped massive profits - one of the greatest atrocities in history. Today, America continues to fail Black Americans, who face disproportionate rates of imprisonment, poverty, and drug abuse, unequal access to education, employment, and housing - and threats of violence.

But here's the secret our community was never taught: our presence in the U.S. is linked to the work of Black activists. Up until the 1960s, racist immigration laws allowed only 100 immigrants from countries like India into the U.S. per year. But during the Civil Rights Movement, Black Americans used protests and civil disobedience to help remove some of the most racist laws in the U.S. not only for themselves but for all minority communities.

But that wasn't the only major victory of Black activism. It led to lawmakers examining prejudice in many other areas, one of which was immigration policy. The new immigration law of 1965 removed the racist quotas, allowing some of us to come to the U.S. much more easily. There are 4.5 million South Asians in the U.S. today. We have been able to build a community here thanks to Black activists who helped remove major barriers for us.
If you would like to participate in the project, here's a list of ways in which you can help out.
We are thankful for how you have worked to secure better futures in this country. However, not all Americans have equal access to futures like ours. The police have murdered countless Black Americans, like Rekia Boyd, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner. But none of these police officers have been sent to prison. This shows us that the police and the courts don't value Black lives. (We may be harassed, profiled, or called names - but it's unlikely that a confrontation between an unarmed member of our community and a police officer will end with us taking a bullet.)

Can we really be allies to Black Americans? We just have to look at history. More than a century ago, Sri Lankan and Indian religious leaders visited the U.S. and spoke out in support of Black Americans. In the 1950s, Indian freedom fighters shared nonviolent civil disobedience tactics with Black civil rights activists. In the 1960s, Pakistani Professor Mirza Hamid Kizilbash challenged racial segregation in Jackson, Mississippi. Today, many of our community members are starting to support movements like Black Lives Matter. We can choose to continue this 100-year tradition.

Our culture teaches us to stand for justice. We hope that you will join us in supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Black Americans to whom we owe so much.

Sincerely,

Your children

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Letters for Black Lives: South Asian American Version

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This is the South Asian American version of the open letter created by Letters for Black Lives, an ongoing project for people to create and translate resources on anti-Blackness for their communities...

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Native Americans Are Recasting Views of Indigenous Life

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Native Americans Are Recasting Views of Indigenous Life

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This story appears in the December 2018 issue ofNational Geographic magazine.

Reclaiming Our Stories

Native American photographers are pushing back against portrayals of their culture by non-natives, capturing scenes that reflect alternative views of indigenous life.

Madeline Sayet grew up on native land in southern Connecticut, where Mohegans have lived for thousands of years.

The daughter of a tribal historian and a defense lawyer, she heard tales of Chahnameed, a Mohegan trickster character. When she turned seven, her grandfather gave her Shakespeare's complete works for her birthday. "Almost as early as I had traditional native stories, I also had Shakespeare," Sayet says, recalling her earliest encounters with the bard.

Sayet was 14 when she first acted in a Shakespeare play, appearing as Iris in The Tempest. Later she was in a production of Macbeth and played Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Now, at 28, she's directing productions of everything from classics by Shakespeare and operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Claudio Monteverdi to the work of William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., an Assiniboine playwright widely viewed as a pioneer in American Indian theater. Sayet's goal: to lift native voices in theater and incorporate indigenous and Mohegan worldviews into her work. She has become one of the country's most sought-after artistic directors and has received dozens of awards and accolades. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have praised her work, which the Journal called "enchanting."

Yet Sayet, like many other Native Americans, says she often feels frustrated by efforts to erase or ignore indigenous people.

It's a common theme among the 5.6 million Native Americans in the United States. American Indians represent 573 federally recognized tribes. More than 70 percent live not on reservations but in urban areas. Many are active in civic life; this fall, more than a hundred Native Americans, a record number, ran for public office at the state and federal level. Two candidates from New Mexico, Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo, and Yvette Herrell, a Cherokee, along with Kansas' Sharice Davids, of the Ho-Chunk Nation, sought to become the first indigenous women elected to the U.S. Congress-and both Haaland and Davids won.

Even so, most of today's narratives about indigenous Americans are cast through a negative lens, focusing on health disparities, economic disadvantages, poverty, or addiction, according to the First Nations Development Institute, a nonprofit that seeks to improve the economies of native communities.

"There's a real invisibility when it comes to Indian people," says Michael Roberts, a Tlingit who leads the Colorado-based institute. "We don't show up in the media, we don't show up in textbooks, we don't show up in everyday conversation. Folks don't know Indians or anything about Indians."

Yet signs of indigenous culture-and how Native Americans have helped shape the nation's history-are everywhere. Thousands of U.S. communities, schools, parks, streets, and waterways have names derived from Native American words. Images of American Indians-some flattering, many buffoonishly racist-have been used to sell cars, motorcycles, toys, hotel rooms, tobacco, and other goods. They still adorn the uniforms of some sports teams. The images are ubiquitous; the people they represent often forgotten.

But increasingly, Sayet and other American Indians are offering a counterview of indigenous culture and what it means to live in a country where the experiences of native people are often marginalized, distorted, or excluded.

Sayet is careful about what projects she chooses to direct, rejecting proposals that lean on stereotypes.

"I've said no to a lot of versions of Last of the Mohicans," Sayet says, referring to productions of the 1826 novel by James Fenimore Cooper. The story takes place during the French and Indian War, as France and Great Britain fought for control of North American lands where indigenous people had lived for thousands of years. It's seen by many as playing into various stereotypes-including the notion that Indians who cooperated with the British were good and noble, while those who did not were bloodthirsty savages. Sayet also rejects projects that involve using "red face" so that non-native actors can play native people.

"You don't even really get to begin to tell your story until you've dealt with the fact that there's these weird things walking around as identifiers of native culture," Sayet says of some popular negative images. "Which is what makes Americans feel like they own native culture in this really twisted way."

Stories of indigenous history and culture have been around for generations, in the elegant images made on hide calendars or carved into totem poles. Non-natives, however, barely acknowledge our past or our present, ignoring our lives by focusing on dominant, negative stereotypes.

I belong to Indian country, or at the very least, I was born from it. My mother was born in Odessa, Texas, and my father was born in Oklahoma. His mother was Choctaw; his father, Kiowa. In 1975 my father and Sarah Dye, a Shawnee, became the first Native Americans to graduate from Dartmouth College's medical school. My father was the third generation of college graduates in our family. His father was a teacher, a World War II veteran, and the first Kiowa to graduate from Oklahoma State University. His father, my great-grandfather, attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School and Hampton Institute. My great-great grandfather was one of more than two dozen Kiowa prisoners of war sent to prison in St. Augustine, Florida, at the end of the Red River War of the 1870s as we and other tribes of the Great Plains fought to stop the government's push to remove us from our traditional territories.

My tribe has always been a nomadic one, from our early days in the north to a "golden age" on the plains in the 1800s, as our Pulitzer Prize-winning author N. Scott Momaday calls it.

Today we remain Kiowa: artists, scholars, historians, lawyers, writers, soldiers, doctors, teachers. The same roles we have always had, before the United States, before the horse, before, before, before.

On a cool summer night in June the London Plane restaurant in Seattle begins to fill with American Indians and others.

They wear patchwork-and-ribbon skirts, Pendleton bomber jackets, silver and turquoise jewelry, quillwork and shell earrings, bolo ties plugged with wampum, and pipe-bone bead necklaces that clink, click, and clack.

They've arrived for the $125-a-person dinner, a fund-raiser for the I-Collective, made up of indigenous cooks, activists, herbalists, and knowledge keepers.

"Nawa, akitaaru'," says Hillel Echo-Hawk, a noted cook and cohost of the gathering, welcoming the evening's diners before retreating to the clattering of pots, plates, and silverware to finish her work. Born and raised in the town of Delta Junction, her mother's hometown in the interior of Alaska, Echo-Hawk grew up in a family that actively hunted and fished.

"It was one of my favorite memories, just being in the kitchen," she says.

At 14 years old she had her first grand mal seizure. A trip to a Fairbanks neurologist revealed the bad news: Echo-Hawk would never be able to live alone, she would never be able to travel alone, and she would never be able to cook.

"I was crushed," she says. Six years later, with the right medication and with the seizures under control, Echo-Hawk left first for a brief college stint in Seattle, then for missionary work in New Zealand. She later returned to Seattle to pursue her original dream: culinary school.

Today Echo-Hawk's catering company, Birch Basket, offers traditional, precolonial meals-free of European foods such as flour, processed sugar, pork, beef, and chicken-while showcasing her deep knowledge of indigenous foods, customs, beliefs, and culinary innovations.

She is one of five chefs and assistants who've prepared a traditional meal featuring foods from Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. The first course is a pickled seaweed with cured salmon roe and smoked seaweed broth. Second course: watercress with salmonberry and cranberry gelée on a swoosh of hazelnut puree, and then, moss-steamed littlenecks.

"This next dish is a cedar-braised caribou," Echo-Hawk announces to the 50-plus guests as the fourth course makes its way to the tables.

"The caribou was donated by a family friend in Alaska and brought down by my mom, who's sitting right there." She nods in the direction of Yvonne Echo-Hawk, her beaming mother.

Within minutes, the plates are empty.

The fifth course, smoked king salmon, is followed by a sixth course, Alaska moose stew. And for dessert, huckleberry and honey sorbet with nine-leaf parsley and alderwood smoked salt.

Echo-Hawk says that non-native diners are often surprised by her cooking, primarily, she says, because they think American Indians have long had rudimentary diets.

"The three sisters [squash, corn, and beans], buffalo, and salmon," Echo-Hawk says, with a hint of sarcasm. "That's it. That's all we had. We didn't eat anything else. It's frustrating."

Echo-Hawk explodes those notions.

With every dish, she tries to explain its ingredients in a way that challenges how others see indigenous people-and that reminds diners that some of the foods on their plates may be unfamiliar because 500 years of colonialism and the decimation of Native American culture made many of those foods "disappear," she says.

Echo-Hawk acknowledges that for some diners, hearing about genocide and colonization doesn't sit well, but that understanding indigenous people's experiences in America requires learning more about certain hard truths.

"People are reluctant to use the word 'genocide,' " says Kim TallBear, an associate professor of native studies at the University of Alberta. "But if you look at the UN definition of genocide, every single federal policy toward native people can come under that."

The deliberate removal of indigenous peoples in the Americas began shortly after the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Wars, diseases brought by Europeans and others, and government efforts to kill or contain Indians combined to wipe out tens of millions of Native Americans.

One of the last and most notorious Indian massacres in the U.S. occurred in 1890 at Wounded Knee, in what is now South Dakota, when at least 200 Lakota were slaughtered by the Army's Seventh Cavalry. Members of the regiment were awarded medals of honor for their actions at Wounded Knee.

Beginning in 1879, indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes to be educated and assimilated in boarding schools that required students to give up indigenous culture, language, and even their names.

From 1973 to 1976, more than 3,400 indigenous women in the care of the U.S. Indian Health Service were sterilized without their consent. Many native people assert that the efforts to marginalize them into nonexistence continue. Today, with the government's support, oil companies are drilling and running pipelines that could endanger tribal water and food supplies.

"Matt, can you go back to 'Dear Mr. President' for me?" Madeline Sayet says, halting a rehearsal of Crossing Mnisose, a new play by Cherokee playwright and lawyer Mary Kathryn Nagle that focuses on the Mnisose-also known as the Missouri River-and the story of Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark, and the Dakota Access Pipeline all crossing the river.

Sayet warns actor Matt Cross to not "get ahead of where you are at in the letter. This is your letter. You wrote this letter to the president, so all of your heart is in each of these words."

In Nagle's play, a character named Travis, played by Cross, reads a letter about the impending construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline to President Barack Obama.

Set in the early 1800s and the 2010s, the play chronicles Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as they "discover" the Mnisose. The play also addresses the recent protests to protect that same river from the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which runs from North Dakota to Illinois. Several tribes say it crosses native burial grounds and threatens water quality.

Cross, a Kiowa actor, has two roles: Coyote, a Dakota tribal member in the 1800s, and Travis, a modern Dakota tribal member and possible reincarnation of Coyote, fighting to protect the river from the pipeline. Next year Crossing Mnisose will have its world premiere at Portland Center Stage in Oregon. For now the cast is rehearsing for the Arkansas New Play Festival.

"Treat it less like it's a letter you're reading and more like if you were coming up with the exact, perfect words to say to the president," Sayet suggests. "They're coming from you, right in this moment."

"Dear Mr. President," Cross says with renewed fervor. "It's been two years already since I met you during your visit to Standing Rock. When you were here, you sat and listened to what we had to say. You made us feel like we mattered."

A few hours before another rehearsal, Sayet enjoys a cup of black coffee in downtown Fayetteville, Arkansas, and speaks of the importance of storytelling.

"We all benefit from hearing more kinds of stories," Sayet says. "More kinds of stories mean we have more potential. We have a greater comprehension for what might be possible, for empathy building and learning and recognizing there are many paths. I am working to dismantle the idea that there is only one Native American narrative by asking questions and bringing people together to interrogate what stories we want to tell."

The stories and images that have plagued indigenous cultures-including America's fixation on feathered costumes and reservation life-serve a purpose, Kim TallBear says. They allow Americans to forget their role in genocide.

Those appropriations of our stories, she says, prevent a different story from taking root, one that indigenous people have been telling for centuries: Live in a good way here. Live in a good way with us. Live in a good way with all our other relatives.

"The stories that we tell not only come out of the world that we live in," TallBear says. They also "help us create, and live, in the world that we want to live in."

Tristan Ahtone is tribal affairs editor for High Country News and president of the Native American Journalists Association. This is his first feature forNational Geographic.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a group of archaeology students and professors surveyed scarred trees along the Middle Fork of the Flathead River; they actually worked along the North Fork of the river.

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Native Americans are recasting views of indigenous life

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This story appears in the December 2018 issue ofNational Geographic magazine. Reclaiming Our Stories Native American photographers are pushing back against portrayals of their culture by non-natives, capturing scenes that reflect alternative views of indigenous life. Madeline Sayet grew up on native land in southern Connecticut, where Mohegans have lived for thousands of years.

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Race and Ethnicity: How Are They Different?

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Race and Ethnicity: How Are They Different?

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National Geographic

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Race and ethnicity are two concepts related to human ancestry. Race is defined as "a category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits." The term ethnicities is more broadly defined as "large groups of people classed according to common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin or background."

"Race" is usually associated with biology and linked with physical characteristics such as skin color or hair texture. "Ethnicity" is linked with cultural expression and identification. However, both are social constructs used to categorize and characterize seemingly distinct populations.

Genetics and race

Neither race nor ethnicity is detectable in the human genome. Humans do have genetic variations, some of which were once associated with ancestry from different parts of the world. But those variations cannot be tracked to distinct biological categories. Genetic tests cannot be used to verify or determine race or ethnicity, though the tests themselves are associated with an increased belief in racial differences.

Though race has no genetic basis, the social concept of race still shapes human experiences. Racial bias fuels social exclusion, discrimination and violence against people from certain social groups. In turn, racial prejudice confers social privilege to some and social and physical disparities to others, and is widely expressed in hierarchies that privilege people with white skin over people with darker skin colors.

Categorizing race

Race and ethnicity are often regarded as the same, but the social and biological sciences consider the concepts distinct. In general, people can adopt or deny ethnic affiliations more readily than racial ones, though different ethnicities have been folded into racial categories during different periods of history.

As legal scholar Tanya K. Hernandez writes, "The social experience of being consistently viewed as distinct is what informs a racial identity, not a shared culture." People who share an ethnicity may speak the same language, come from the same country, or share a religion or other cultural belief or expression.

The politics of race

The United States government recognizes distinctions between the concept of race and ethnicity, and sorts individuals as White, Black or African American, Asian, American Indian and Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, or "other." It also recognizes two ethnicities: Hispanic or Latino and Not Hispanic or Latino. This demographic data in turn affects public policy and civil rights law.

Humans share over 99 percent of their genetic material with one another, and variation occurs more between individuals than ethnic groups. Nevertheless, the legacies of racial and ethnic constructs can be spotted in everything from housing to health. Racial and ethnic prejudices affect the distribution of wealth, power, and opportunity, and create enduring social stratifications.

Racial pride can foment racial prejudice, as in the case of white supremacists. But for members of groups marginalized because of race or ethnicity, involvement in activities that promote group pride can help lessen or offset the effects of racial discrimination and social prejudice. Though race and ethnicity are among the most divisive concepts in history, both irrevocably shape our social, personal, and cultural experiences.

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Race and ethnicity: How are they different?

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Race and ethnicity are two concepts related to human ancestry. Race is defined as "a category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits." The term ethnicities is more broadly defined as "large groups of people classed according to common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin or background."

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"Asian-American" is a Broad Term That Unites Some and Divides Others

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"Asian-American" is a Broad Term That Unites Some and Divides Others

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Newsela

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Newsela | "Asian-American" is a broad term that unites some and divides others

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Kneeling During the National Anthem: Top 3 Pros and Cons

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Kneeling During the National Anthem: Top 3 Pros and Cons

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The current debate over kneeling or sitting in protest during the national anthem was ignited by Colin Kaepernick in 2016 and has escalated to become a nationally divisive issue. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand during "The Star-Spangled Banner" on Aug. 26, 2016 to protest racial injustice and police brutality in the United States. Since that time, many other professional football players, [ 7] high school athletes, and [ 8] professional athletes in other sports [ 9] have refused to stand for the national anthem. These protests have generated controversy and sparked a public conversation about the protesters' messages and how they've chosen to deliver them.

People who support refusing to stand for the national anthem argue that athletes are justified in using their celebrity status to bring attention to important issues, and that refusing to stand for the national anthem is an appropriate and effective method of peaceful protest. People who disagree argue that football games are an inappropriate place to engage in political protest, and that not standing for the national anthem shows disrespect for the country and those who proudly support it, some with their lives.

Is Kneeling during the National Anthem an Appropriate Form of Protest?

The 2017 NFL pre-season began with black players from the Seattle Seahawks, Oakland Raiders, and Philadelphia Eagles kneeling or sitting during the anthem with support of white teammates. [ 20][ 21] On Aug. 21, 2017, twelve Cleveland Browns players knelt in a prayer circle during the national anthem with at least four other players standing with hands on the kneeling players' shoulders in solidarity, the largest group of players to take a knee during the anthem to date. Jabrill Peppers, a rookie safety, said of the protest, "There's a lot of racial and social injustices in the world that are going on right now. We just decided to take a knee and pray for the people who have been affected and just pray for the world in general... We were not trying to disrespect the flag or be a distraction to the team, but as men we thought we had the right to stand up for what we believed in, and we demonstrated that." [ 21] Seth DeValve, a tight end for the Browns and the first white NFL player to kneel for the anthem, stated, "The United States is the greatest country in the world. And it is because it provides opportunities to its citizens that no other country does. The issue is that it doesn't provide equal opportunity to everybody, and I wanted to support my African-American teammates today who wanted to take a knee. We wanted to draw attention to the fact that there's things in this country that still need to change." [ 20]

Some Cleveland Browns fans expressed their dissatisfaction on the team's Facebook page. One commenter posted, "Pray before or pray after. Taking a knee during the National Anthem these days screams disrespect for our Flag, Our Country and our troops. My son and the entire armed forces deserve better than that." [ 22]

On Friday, Sep. 22, 2017, President Donald Trump stated his opposition to NFL players kneeling during the anthem: "Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say 'Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He's fired. He's fired!" [ 23] The statement set off a firestorm on both sides of the debate. Roger Goodell, NFL Commissioner, said of Trump's comments, "Divisive comments like these demonstrate an unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL, our great game and all of our players, and a failure to understand the overwhelming force for good our clubs and players represent in our communities." [ 23]

The controversy continued over the weekend as the President continued to tweet about the issue and others contributed opinions for and against kneeling during the anthem. On Sunday, Sep. 24, in London before the first NFL game played after Trump's comments, at least two dozen Baltimore Ravens and Jacksonville Jaguars players knelt during the American national anthem, while other players, coaches, and staff locked arms, including Shad Khan, who is the only Pakistani-American Muslim NFL team owner. [ 24] Throughout the day, some players, coaches, owners, and other staff kneeled or linked arms from every team except the Carolina Panthers. The Pittsburgh Steelers chose to remain in the locker room during the anthem, though offensive tackle and Army Ranger veteran Alejandro Villanueva stood at the entrance to the field alone, for which he has since apologized. [ 27] Both the Seattle Seahawks and Tennessee Titans teams stayed in their locker rooms before their game, leaving the field mostly empty during the anthem. The Seahawks stated, "As a team, we have decided we will not participate in the national anthem. We will not stand for the injustice that has plagued people of color in this country. Out of love for our country and in honor of the sacrifices made on our behalf, we unite to oppose those that would deny our most basic freedoms." [ 25]

The controversy has jumped to other sports as every player on WNBA's Indiana Fever knelt on Friday, Sep. 22 (though WNBA players have been kneeling for months); Oakland A's catcher Bruce Maxwell kneeled on Saturday becoming the first MLB player to do so; and Joel Ward, of the NHL's San Jose Sharks, said he would not rule out kneeling. USA soccer's Megan Rapinoe knelt during the anthem in 2016, prompting the US Soccer Federation to issue Policy 604-1, ordering all players to stand during the anthem. [ 28][ 29][ 30][ 31][ 35]

The country was still debating the issue well into the week, with Trump tweeting throughout, including on Sep. 26: "The NFL has all sort of rules and regulations. The only way out for them is to set a rule that you can't kneel during our National Anthem!" [ 26]

On May 23, 2018, the NFL announced that all 32 team owners agreed that all players and staff on the field shall "stand and show respect for the flag and the Anthem" or face "appropriate discipline." However, all players will no longer be required to be on the field during the anthem and may wait off field or in the locker room. [ 32][ 33] The new rules were adopted without input from the players' union. [ 33] On July 20, 2018, the NFL and the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) issued a joint statement putting the anthem policy on hold until the two organizations come to an agreement. [ 34]

During the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd, official league positions on kneeling began to change. On June 5, 2020, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell stated, "We, the National Football League, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of black people. We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all players to speak out and peacefully protest." [ 39] Before the June 7, 2020 race, NASCAR lifted the guidelines that all team members must stand during the anthem, allowing NASCAR official Kirk Price to kneel during the anthem. [ 40] On June 10, 2020, the US Soccer Federation rescinded the league's requirement that players stand during the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd. The US Soccer Federation stated, "It has become clear that this policy was wrong and detracted from the important message of Black Lives Matter." [ 35] In the wake of the 2020 killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed, 52% of Americans stated it was "OK for NFL players to kneel during the National Anthem to protest the police killing of African Americans." [ 41]
Discussion Questions
1.Should professional athletes be allowed to kneel during the national anthem in protest? Why or why not?

2. Should student athletes be allowed to kneel during the national anthem in protest? Why or why not?

3. What forms of protest are acceptable in which venues? Which are not acceptable? Explain your answers.
Take Action
1. Explore " The Purpose and Power of Protest " with the Anti-Defamation League.

2. Delve into the Albert Einstein Institution's list, " 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action."

3. Consider Marc A. Thiessen's opinion that kneeling during the anthem is a protest against America.

4. Push for the position and policies you support by writing US national senators and representatives.
Sources

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Kneeling during the National Anthem: Top 3 Pros and Cons - ProCon.org

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The current debate over kneeling or sitting in protest during the national anthem was ignited by Colin Kaepernick in 2016 and has escalated to become a nationally divisive issue. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand during "The Star-Spangled Banner" on Aug.

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The white supremacists had traveled to Charlottesville to protest the city's plan to remove a statue of General Robert E. Lee from a park there. Lee led the Confederate Army in the American Civil War, which took place from 1861 to 1865.

The Confederate States of America, or the Confederacy, was made up of 11 Southern states. These states seceded (withdrew) from the United States, also known as the Union. The Confederacy believed that states should be able to allow slavery. The Union opposed slavery. The Union and the Confederacy fought for four years before Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865.

Hundreds of statues and memorials honoring Confederate leaders exist in former Confederate states, as well as in some states in the North. People have protested them for many years, arguing that they are symbols of racism. Others believe that they reflect America's history and should remain.

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The white supremacists had traveled to Charlottesville to protest the city's plan to remove a statue of General Robert E. Lee from a park there. Lee led the Confederate Army in the American Civil War, which took place from 1861 to 1865. The Confederate States of America, or the Confederacy, was made up of 11 Southern states.

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This is Why Everyday Racial Profiling is so Dangerous

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This is Why Everyday Racial Profiling is so Dangerous

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CNN article with short videos

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This is why everyday racial profiling is so dangerous | CNN

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Racial profiling happens in ways many people don't realize. And it doesn't just hurt the victims - it harms the rest of society, too.

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6 Misconceptions About Native American People

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6 Misconceptions About Native American People

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Video

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6 Misconceptions About Native American People | Teen Vogue

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An 8-part video series

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Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money

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Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money

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NPR

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In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools are unconstitutional.

In 2018, on the 64th anniversary of that ruling, a lawsuit filed in New Jersey claimed that state's schools are some of the most segregated in the nation. That's because, the lawsuit alleged, New Jersey school district borders are drawn along municipality lines that reflect years of residential segregation.

The idea that school district borders carry years of history is the premise of a new report from the nonprofit EdBuild, which studies the ways schools are funded in the U.S.

The report starts with a number: $23 billion. According to EdBuild, that's how much more funding predominantly white school districts receive compared with districts that serve mostly students of color.

"For every student enrolled, the average nonwhite school district receives $2,226 less than a white school district," the report says.

EdBuild singles out 21 states - including California, New Jersey and New York - in which mostly white districts get more funding than districts composed primarily of students of color.

More than half of students in the U.S. go to segregated or "racially concentrated" schools, according to the report. Those are schools in which more than three-quarters of students are white, or more than three-quarters are nonwhite.

Researchers found that high-poverty districts serving mostly students of color receive about $1,600 less per student than the national average. That's while school districts that are predominately white and poor receive about $130 less.
What's causing the disparity?
As Rebecca Sibilia, founder and CEO of EdBuild, explains, a school district's resources often come down to how wealthy an area is and how much residents pay in taxes.

"We have built a school funding system that is reliant on geography, and therefore the school funding system has inherited all of the historical ills of where we have forced and incentivized people to live," she says.

Public schools are primarily funded by local and state sources - the federal government pays for less than 10 percent,on average, of K-12 education. States sometimes step in to provide extra funding for districts that need it most. But not all states have been able to keep up with that demand.
The relationship between funding and teacher strikes
In some of the states with the worst funding disparities, teachers have gone on strike in the past year. In Arizona, poor, primarily white school districts get about $19,000 per student - while high-poverty, nonwhite districts get about $8,000, according to EdBuild.

That means high-poverty districts made up of mostly students of color - about a third of the school districts in the state - receive almost $11,000 less per student than the state's high-poverty, predominantly white districts.

Sibilia also points to the #RedForEd movements in Oklahoma and Colorado. Because those states have placed limits on their taxes, she says, they simply don't have the income to step in and fund the school districts that need it most.
Why funding in Southern states looks more equal
According to EdBuild researchers, predominantly white districts are often smaller than districts with mostly students of color: The former serves an average of just over 1,500 students, and the latter over 10,000, or three times the national average.

That size disparity matters. Sibilia says districts serving mostly students of color "rely more on the decisions that are being made at the state level, but there are fewer voices representing them. And that's where you really start to see the shift in power."

This power dynamic looks different in the South, where school district lines are often drawn along county lines, making districts larger across the board. Researchers found that funding looks more equal in states like Georgia and Alabama.

"This confirms a theory that we've had, which is that the larger the tax base - the larger the actual geography of the school districts - the more you can actually balance out the difference between a wealthy white suburb and a less wealthy rural or urban area," Sibilia says.

EdBuild researchers looked at data from a variety of sources - including the Education Department and the U.S. Census Bureau - to find school system demographics and district funding levels. They compared the funding across districts after taking cost of living into account.

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Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money

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According to a new report, predominantly white school districts receive $23 billion more than districts that serve mostly students of color in the U.S.

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from PBS

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How to Support Protests When You're Not Affected by the Issue 

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How to Support Protests When You're Not Affected by the Issue 

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Is It OK to Attend Protests for Marginalized Groups If I’m Not Affected?

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We paired with Amnesty International USA to answer.

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Educators have many responsibilities. Three have been heightened in the past year:

Stand up against hate and intimidation, so schools stay safe for learning;

Engage the facts;

Protect the right to learn.

We've always had those responsibilities; they're just more necessary now than ever.

The past year has been fraught for students, teachers and schools. We've seen a spike in incidents of hate and bias on K-12 and college campuses nationwide. It's becoming obvious that every insult overheard on the nightly news, every tweet forwarded on social media and every slur scrawled on a building can have mounting consequences for students and schools. Public figures are explicitly threatening many students' rights and communities. Students are repeating these threats and claims to one another, sometimes without fully understanding them.

And simultaneously, some educators are getting labeled "partisan" if they simply challenge hate or bullying on their own campuses-or engage students in dialogue about real, controversial issues, or just affirm that all students have the right to learn safely in school.

This reality places a burden on educators, to be sure. But no matter our "politics," standing up against hate-and for learning-is the basic work of education. And who better than us to facilitate it?

Stand Up Against Hate and Intimidation

We're in an era of escalating hate and threat toward many of the young people and communities we serve. Undocumented and refugee students have been told that the president wants them out. The federal government is sending the message that schools don't have to honor LGBT students' identities. Boys have heard that disrespecting girls is OK. We've all heard racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic talk become more commonplace, accompanied by targeted policies. These sentiments get repeated on our campuses. Hate-filled violence is on the rise.

And as educators, it's our job to denounce hate and intimidation where we work, to make sure students feel safe to learn.

The U.S. Constitution protects a range of free expression rights in schools. Freedom of speech protects us all, so we don't simply outlaw all "offensive" ideas from our schools. But we don't allow true threats of harm in schools, either, because schools must remain safe for learning. Our civil rights laws also require educators to protect public school students from harassment based on race, color, national origin, sex, religion or disability because a school has a responsibility to maintain a safe and nondiscriminatory learning environment for all students. When hostile environments impede student learning, educators must take action to end the harassment, eliminate any hostile environment and its effects, and prevent the harassment from recurring.

Put these points together, and we see that schools are places where hateful speech and action, harassment and violence are supposed to be challenged, not ignored. As educators, we are both legally and morally responsible for fostering learning environments where people aren't denigrated and threatened so that students can participate in and benefit from school.

Educators must always model what it looks like to be an upstander: to stand up in the moment to challenge hateful speech and call instead for learning and respect. And the primary antidote to hate is preventive speech: continually talking about how to respect and value other human beings every day.

The triage work of educators is to challenge hate-to ask speakers to respect and value others so all can learn. The longer-term work is to prevent hateful activity on campus. And the longest-term, most powerful work is to make our resistance to hate routine, by consistently asking whether the most ordinary words we use in schools and society distort, misunderstand, misrepresent, denigrate or devalue people.

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Educators have always had the responsibility to stand up to hate and bias-but it's more necessary now than ever.

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Dr. Seuss Books Can Be Racist, But Students Keep Reading Them 

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Dr. Seuss Books Can Be Racist, But Students Keep Reading Them 

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This week, millions of students and teachers are taking part in Read Across America, a national literacy program celebrated annually around the birthday of Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. For over 20 years, teachers and students have donned costumes - often the Cat in the Hat's iconic red and white striped hat - and devoured books like Green Eggs and Ham.

But some of Seuss' classics have been criticized for the way they portray people of color. In And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example, a character described as Chinese has two lines for eyes, carries chopsticks and a bowl of rice, and wears traditional Japanese-style shoes. In If I Ran the Zoo, two men said to be from Africa are shown shirtless, shoeless and wearing grass skirts as they carry an exotic animal. Outside of his books, the author's personal legacy has come into question, too - Seuss wrote an entire minstrel show in high school and performed as the main character in full blackface.

In light of this, the National Education Association rebranded Read Across America in 2017, backing away from Seuss' books and Seuss-themed activities. It introduced a new theme of "celebrating a nation of diverse readers." Its website now highlights works by and about people of color.

But in many schools and libraries, the week is still synonymous with all things Seuss. Classrooms are decorated in colorful red and blue fish and children dress up as their favorite iconic characters, like Thing 1 and Thing 2, dreaming of the places they'll go.

That tension between Seuss and Seuss-free classrooms is emblematic of a bigger debate playing out across the country - should we continue to teach classic books that may be problematic, or eschew them in favor of works that more positively represent people of color?

Part of the reason this debate is so complicated is the staying power of classic books. Think back to the works lining your school bookshelves.In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the N-word appears more than 200 times. But for generations, people have argued that the book is vital to understanding race relations in America in the late 1800s. And the trope of Jews as greedy and money-hungry is pretty clear in The Merchant of Venice. Yet Shakespeare is hailed for his keen understanding of human nature that continues to be relevant today.

Jaya Saxena, a writer whose work examines inclusivity in young adult literature, is in favor of revamping the canon. But she understands why teachers might continue to teach it. She says when she was in high school, her teachers used the classics to teach literary devices and styles of writing, not necessarily to prioritize certain narratives or worldviews. The Merchant of Venice, for example, is a prime example of allegory.

"The point was, here's what this book does well," Saxena says. "Maybe they weren't everybody's favorite books, but they were good examples of ... the craft of writing."

And when planning lessons from year to year, it's easier for teachers to prioritize books they're already familiar with. But when these books include offensive stereotypes, teachers have to decide whether to continue teaching them and how.

"Not engaging [with problematic texts] at all runs too great a risk of not learning or understanding where the problems lie," says Larissa Pahomov, who teaches English at a high school in Philadelphia. "I believe there is a way to look at material that is stereotypical [and] racist and identify it for what it is, and then hopefully, in doing so, neutralize its effect."

When Pahomov read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with her seniors last fall, she was careful to teach students how to read the work through a critical lens that took the author's background into account. In class discussions, she made sure to emphasize that context to her students as they examined the work.

"What resources did he draw from to write this book, and this character? What has been the Native American reaction to this book specifically? What was the reaction of the psychiatric treatment community? How do we look at it now? What's the treatment of women? There were so many angles to discussing it," she says.

Pahomov notes that because her students are teenagers, having these conversations is possible. But books geared toward younger kids? Those discussions can get a lot more complicated.

Which brings us back to Dr. Seuss.

In a study published earlier this month in Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, researchers Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stephens found that only 2 percent of the human characters in Seuss' books were people of color. And all of those characters, they say, were "depicted through racist caricatures."

Those caricatures have a potent effect, even at an early age. Research shows that even at the age of 3, children begin to form racial biases, and by the age of 7, those biases become fixed.

"One of the reasons for that is the images and experiences that they're exposed to regarding marginalized groups and people of color," Stephens says. "And so [Seuss' books] being mainstream, and being spread out all over the world, has large implications."

If kids open books and "the images they see [of themselves] are distorted, negative [or] laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society in which they are a part," Rudine Sims Bishop, a scholar of children's literature, wrote in a 1990 article.

But when they see themselves represented in a positive way, it can have a similarly powerful effect.

That's one of the reasons first-grade teacher Emily Petersen says she won't be reading Dr. Seuss with her students this week, or ever.

"If I'm looking at a 6-year-old and choosing what story [I'm] going to teach them how to read through, I'm definitely going to choose the one that affirms and celebrates identities in a new way," she says.

For other teachers who want to help students affirm their identities, the NEA is offering grants and resources to help schools highlight literary works by and about people of color.

But the forces that have kept Dr. Seuss on the bookshelf for decades are strong. Often, schools plan their Read Across America events months in advance. Costumes, books and activities from previous years are ready to go. It can be difficult for teachers to deviate from these plans, especially when they have celebrated in the same way year after year after year. And with over 650 million of his books in circulation worldwide, just like his infamous cat, it looks like Dr. Seuss will keep coming back.

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Dr. Seuss Books Can Be Racist, But Students Keep Reading Them

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A recent study found that Dr. Seuss books can be pretty racist. It's highlighted a growing debate: Should schools teach classic books that may be problematic or trade them for socially conscious ones?

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Black Boys Viewed as Older, Less Innocent Than Whites, Research Finds

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Black Boys Viewed as Older, Less Innocent Than Whites, Research Finds

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WASHINGTON - Black boys as young as 10 may not be viewed in the same light of childhood innocence as their white peers, but are instead more likely to be mistaken as older, be perceived as guilty and face police violence if accused of a crime, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

"Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection. Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent," said author Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles. The study was published online in APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology®.

Researchers tested 176 police officers, mostly white males, average age 37, in large urban areas, to determine their levels of two distinct types of bias - prejudice and unconscious dehumanization of black people by comparing them to apes. To test for prejudice, researchers had officers complete a widely used psychological questionnaire with statements such as "It is likely that blacks will bring violence to neighborhoods when they move in." To determine officers' dehumanization of blacks, the researchers gave them a psychological task in which they paired blacks and whites with large cats, such as lions, or with apes. Researchers reviewed police officers' personnel records to determine use of force while on duty and found that those who dehumanized blacks were more likely to have used force against a black child in custody than officers who did not dehumanize blacks. The study described use of force as takedown or wrist lock; kicking or punching; striking with a blunt object; using a police dog, restraints or hobbling; or using tear gas, electric shock or killing. Only dehumanization and not police officers' prejudice against blacks - conscious or not - was linked to violent encounters with black children in custody, according to the study.

The authors noted that police officers' unconscious dehumanization of blacks could have been the result of negative interactions with black children, rather than the cause of using force with black children. "We found evidence that overestimating age and culpability based on racial differences was linked to dehumanizing stereotypes, but future research should try to clarify the relationship between dehumanization and racial disparities in police use of force," Goff said.

The study also involved 264 mostly white, female undergraduate students from large public U.S. universities. In one experiment, students rated the innocence of people ranging from infants to 25-year-olds who were black, white or an unidentified race. The students judged children up to 9 years old as equally innocent regardless of race, but considered black children significantly less innocent than other children in every age group beginning at age 10, the researchers found.

The students were also shown photographs alongside descriptions of various crimes and asked to assess the age and innocence of white, black or Latino boys ages 10 to 17. The students overestimated the age of blacks by an average of 4.5 years and found them more culpable than whites or Latinos, particularly when the boys were matched with serious crimes, the study found. Researchers used questionnaires to assess the participants' prejudice and dehumanization of blacks. They found that participants who implicitly associated blacks with apes thought the black children were older and less innocent.

In another experiment, students first viewed either a photo of an ape or a large cat and then rated black and white youngsters in terms of perceived innocence and need for protection as children. Those who looked at the ape photo gave black children lower ratings and estimated that black children were significantly older than their actual ages, particularly if the child had been accused of a felony rather than a misdemeanor.

"The evidence shows that perceptions of the essential nature of children can be affected by race, and for black children, this can mean they lose the protection afforded by assumed childhood innocence well before they become adults," said co-author Matthew Jackson, PhD, also of UCLA. "With the average age overestimation for black boys exceeding four-and-a-half years, in some cases, black children may be viewed as adults when they are just 13 years old."

Article: "The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published online Feb. 24, 2014; Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, and Matthew Christian Jackson, PhD; University of California, Los Angeles; Brooke Allison, PhD, and Lewis Di Leone, PhD, National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Boston; Carmen Marie Culotta, PhD, Pennsylvania State University; and Natalie Ann DiTomasso, JD, University of Pennsylvania.

Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, can be contacted by phone at (310) 206-8614 (preferred) or by email. If Goff is unavailable, contact Matthew Christian Jackson, PhD, by phone at (814) 574-9781 or by email.

The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States. APA's membership includes more than 134,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives.

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Black boys viewed as older, less innocent than Whites, research finds

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Black boys as young as 10 may not be viewed in the same light of childhood innocence as their white peers, but are instead more likely to be mistaken as older, be perceived as guilty and face police violence if accused of a crime.

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The changing face of Congress in 6 charts 

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The changing face of Congress in 6 charts 

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from PEW Research

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The 118th Congress achieved a variety of demographic milestones when its members took office in January. Generation Z is now represented in the national legislature, while Vermont sent a female lawmaker to Capitol Hill for the first time. Still, Congress remains out of step with the broader U.S. population by several demographic measures.

Here are eight charts that show how the profile of Congress has changed over time, using historical data from CQ Roll Call, the Congressional Research Service and other sources.

The 118th Congress is the most racially and ethnically diverse in history. Overall, 133 lawmakers identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian American, American Indian, Alaska Native or multiracial. Together, these lawmakers make up a quarter of Congress, including 28% of the House of Representatives and 12% of the Senate. By comparison, when the 79th Congress took office in 1945, non-White lawmakers represented just 1% of the House and Senate combined.

Despite this growing racial and ethnic diversity, Congress remains less diverse than the nation as a whole. Non-Hispanic White Americans account for 75% of voting members in the new Congress, considerably more than their 59% share of the U.S. population.

The number of women in Congress is at an all-time high. A little more than a century after Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to Congress, there are 153 women in the national legislature, accounting for 28% of all members. (This includes six nonvoting House members who represent the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, four of whom are women.)

A record 128 women are currently serving in the House, making up 29% of the chamber's membership. That figure includes 22 newly elected congresswomen, including Becca Balint, a Vermont Democrat who became the first woman and first openly LGBTQ person elected to Congress from the state. With Balint's election, all 50 states have now had female representation in U.S. Congress at some point.

In the Senate, 25 women are currently serving, tying the record number of seats they held in the 116th Congress. The Senate gained just one new female member:
Republican Katie Britt, who became the first elected woman senator from Alabama. Just as in the previous Congress, four states - Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire and Washington - have all-female Senate delegations.

The House has seen slow but steady growth in the number of women members since the 1920s, when women gained the right to vote. Growth in the Senate has been slower. The Senate did not have more than three women serving at any point until the 102nd Congress, which began in 1991.

The share of women in Congress remains far below their share in the country as a whole (28% vs. 51%).

Thirteen voting members of Congress identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual - the highest number in history. This includes two senators and 11 members of the House of Representatives. There have not been any openly transgender members to date.

The number of lawmakers in this group has more than tripled over the last decade. In the 112th Congress of 2011-12, just four members - all representatives - identified as gay or lesbian, and none as bisexual.

The 13 lesbian, gay and bisexual members of Congress accounted for about 2% of the 534 voting lawmakers as of Jan. 3, 2023. By comparison, LGB Americans make up 6.5% of the U.S. adult population overall, according to a 2021 Gallup survey.

The share of Millennials and Gen Xers in Congress has grown slightly in recent years. In the current Congress, 12% of House members, or 52 lawmakers, are Millennials (a generation ranging in age from 27 to 42 in 2023). This share is up from 1% at the start of the 115th Congress in 2017. And 166 members of the House (38%) are part of Generation X - ages 43 to 58 in 2023 - up from 27% in the 115th Congress.

The Senate now has three Millennial members, up from one - the first ever to be elected - in the last Congress. There are 23 Gen X senators, up from 16 in the 115th Congress.

While younger generations have increased their representation in Congress, older generations still account for the largest share of lawmakers across both chambers. Baby Boomers (who are between the ages of 59 and 77 this year) make up 45% of the House's voting membership, in addition to 66 of the 100 senators.

The ranks of the Silent Generation (those ages 78 to 95 in 2023) have decreased in Congress in recent years. Across both legislative chambers, 5% of lawmakers, or 29 members, are part of the Silent Generation, down from 14%, or 61 members, in the 115th Congress at the start of 2017.

The share of immigrants in Congress has ticked up but remains well below historical highs. There are 18 foreign-born lawmakers in the 118th Congress, including 17 in the House and one in the Senate: Mazie Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat who was born in Japan.

These lawmakers account for 3% of voting members, slightly higher than the share in other recent Congresses, but below the shares in much earlier Congresses. In the 50th Congress of 1887-89, for example, 8% of members were born abroad. The current share of foreign-born lawmakers in Congress is also far below the foreign-born share of the entire U.S. population, which was 13.6% as of 2021.

While the number of foreign-born lawmakers in the current Congress is small, more members have at least one parent who was born in another country. Together, immigrants and children of immigrants account for at least 15% of the new Congress, a slightly higher share than in the last Congress (14%).

Far fewer members of Congress now have personal military experience than in the past. In the current Congress, 97 members have served in the military at some point in their lives - among the lowest numbers since at least World War II, according to Military Times. There are almost three times as many Republican veterans in the 118th Congress as Democratic veterans (72 vs. 25). Roughly similar shares of current representatives (18.4%) and senators (17%) have served in the military.

Since the second half of the 20th century, there has been a dramatic decrease in members of Congress with military experience. Between 1965 and 1975, at least 70% of lawmakers in each legislative chamber had military experience. The share of members with military experience peaked at 75% in 1967 for the House and at 81% in 1975 for the Senate.

While relatively few members of Congress today have military experience, an even smaller share of Americans do. In 2021, about 6% of U.S. adults were veterans, according to the U.S. Census Bureau - down from 18% in 1980, not long after the end of the military draft era.

Nearly all lawmakers in Congress have a college degree. In the 118th Congress, 94% of House members and all but one senator have a bachelor's degree or more education.

In the House, nearly two-thirds of representatives (64%) have a graduate degree. Five representatives (1%) have an associate degree but no bachelor's. Another 22 members (5%) do not have a degree. This group includes one member who has a professional certification: Democrat Cori Bush of Missouri has a registered nursing diploma.

Among current senators, 78 have at least one graduate degree. Republican Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma is the lone senator without a bachelor's degree. He holds an associate degree from the Oklahoma State University of Technology. Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, earned a doctorate in medicine from Duke University Medical School but does not hold a bachelor's.

The educational attainment of members of Congress far outpaces that of the U.S. adult population. In 2021, around four-in-ten American adults ages 25 and older (38%) had a bachelor's degree or more education, according to the Census Bureau.

Christians remain the largest religious group in Congress, but their ranks have declined slightly over time. A large majority of current lawmakers in Congress - 469 members - identify as Christian, but that is the lowest total since 2009, when Pew Research Center began analyzing this trend. There were at least 470 Christian lawmakers in each of the last eight Congresses, and the number exceeded 500 in 1970.

Still, Christians' share in Congress is greater than their proportion of the broader American public. Nearly nine-in-ten congressional members (88%) are Christian as of Jan. 3, 2023, compared with 63% of U.S. adults overall.

By contrast, religiously unaffiliated adults' share on Capitol Hill is far below their share of the overall U.S. population: While 29% of Americans say they are atheist, agnostic or "nothing in particular," just one lawmaker - independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona - identifies as religiously unaffiliated. (Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman of California describes himself as humanist, and 20 lawmakers' religious affiliations are categorized as unknown. Most of those 20 declined to state a religious affiliation when they were asked by CQ Roll Call, which served as the primary data source for the Center's analysis.)
Note: This is an update to a post originally published on Feb. 2, 2017.
Read more about the 118th Congress' demographics:

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The changing face of Congress in 8 charts

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The 118th Congress achieved a variety of demographic milestones when its members took office, though it still remains out of step with the U.S. population.

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From BBC

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By Chelsea Bailey BBC News, Washington

One thing Americans find hard to talk about

February was Black History Month in the US, a time typically set aside to recognise African Americans and their contributions to the country.

This year's commemoration ended with insults and accusations of racism on the floor of Congress, at a televised hearing broadcast into millions of homes. But that exchange, between a Democrat and Republican, was hardly an isolated incident.

The month began with calls for Virginia's governor to resign after a photo emerged of him in blackface. And it ended with President Donald Trump - who himself has been accused of racism - saying Academy Award winner Spike Lee was being racist after the film director urged Americans to "do the right thing" and choose love over hate by helping to thwart Mr Trump's re-election hopes.

The flood of racially-charged headlines underlined a feeling shared by many - that 400 years after the first slaves were brought to the US, Americans still struggle to have meaningful conversations about race.

"We can't even have a productive conversation if people aren't open to looking in the mirror," said Ibram Kendi, director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University.

"Denial is essentially the heartbeat of racism in this country and every time you are not open to what you could be doing in the moment, you are living and breathing racism itself."

African Americans in New Orleans on the state of race relations

He says the first step to dismantling racism in the US is recognising that we can all shift between being racist and anti-racist.

"When someone is charged with doing something that's racist, instead of getting upset and lashing out, they should consider the evidence."

Conversations about race typically devolve into arguments because Americans have come to view the word "racist" a permanent label and not a description of an action, says Mr Kendi.

He now advocates for redefining the word "racist" as a reflection of both our beliefs and behaviours and not merely as an insult.

"A racist supports, by their action or inaction, policies that reproduce racial inequality. An anti-racist supports, with their actions, policies that reduce or eliminate racial inequality," says Mr Kendi.

"What you're doing and what you're saying is an expression of who you are in that moment."

Much of this discussion was sparked by the argument on the floor of the House of Representatives, which began when after Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic freshman, accused the Republican veteran congressman Mark Meadows of racism and using a black woman as a "prop".

Mr Meadows had asked Lynne Patton, a long-time employee of the Trump Organization, to attend the Michael Cohen hearing to refute accusations that President Trump was racist.

Speaking for Ms Patton, Mr Meadows said "as the daughter of a man born in Birmingham, Alabama, there is no way she would work for a man who is racist".

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When Ms Tlaib said that simply having a friend or employee who's a minority does not prohibit someone from being racist, the hearing quickly dissolved into a very heated row.

Social psychologist Daniel Effron, who studies morality and race, said there's a reason people often resort to the "black friend" defence when charged with racism.

Mr Effron said his research shows that whenever a person is accused of racism or their moral identity is challenged, they instinctively search for any example to bolster their "non-racist credentials", which can be a low bar.

"When people are motivated to find evidence that they're not prejudiced, they're more likely to think having a black friend is really strong evidence," he said.

Getty Images

Spike Lee never mentioned President Trump by name in his speech but it was interpreted as a message to vote him out

"We make a mountain of morality out of a molehill of virtue."

But even people with good intentions can face criticism when it comes to discussing race in America, as the director of the Oscar-winning movie Green Book discovered.

Set against the backdrop of the segregated South in the 1960s, the film follows the unlikely friendship between a black classical and jazz musician and his white chauffeur.

Critics accused the film of whitewashing history and furthering the "white saviour" trope in Hollywood.

More on race in the US

Racism in the US: Is there a single step that can bring equality?

Author and anti-racism activist Tim Wise said he thinks we need to reframe the way we teach race in America, shifting the emphasis away from an individual's actions and looking at the system as a whole.

"When we think about the way Americans teach racism historically, it is a story about individuals who did or did not own slaves, individuals who did or did not own segregated businesses. It's a lot harder to see systems of inequality," he said, adding that this can absolve people from reflecting on their own actions.

Mr Wise explores his own struggles with reconciling white privilege and racism in his autobiography White Like Me and has made a career out of navigating difficult conversations about racism.

He said he thinks Americans have been conditioned to believe certain racial stereotypes and unlearning those prejudices begins with recognising they exist in the first place. Until then, he said, we will continue to have circular arguments about race without making progress toward dismantling racism.

"It would be ridiculous to say, 'I don't have a racist bone in my body'... you grew up in America," he says.

"It's about saying, 'Look, I'm going to be humble enough to admit my weaknesses. Not because I want you to beat me up and not because I want to beat myself up, but because I know that I'm capable of better.'"

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A series of very public arguments over race blighted Black History Month and reminded us of an undisputed fact.

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An Interview with the Founders of Black Lives Matter

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An Interview with the Founders of Black Lives Matter

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TED Talk

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Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi

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An interview with the founders of Black Lives Matter

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Born out of a social media post, the Black Lives Matter movement has sparked discussion about race and inequality across the world. In this spirited conversation with Mia Birdsong, the movement’s three founders share what they’ve learned about leadership and what provides them with hope and inspiration in the face of painful realities. Their advice on how to participate in ensuring freedom for everybody: join something, start something and “sharpen each other, so that we all can rise.”

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You may know what race you are, but how would you prove it if someone disagreed with you? The fact is, race is a social and political construct that has evolved in fascinating and often confusing ways over the centuries.

Race is a social construct

With the 1776 edition of his book, On the Natural Variety of Mankind, German scientist Johan Friedrich Blumenbach is credited with creating one of the first race-based classifications. He decided on five categories: "Caucasian, the white race; Mongolian, the yellow race; Malayan, the brown race, Ethiopian, the black race, and American, the red race." Each race was ranked, and he put "Caucasian" at the top. This seemingly arbitrary ranking was the impetus for centuries of discrimination and inequality.

The US Census proves race is subjective

The evolution of race in the US Census illustrates just how hard it is to categorize people in a way that is inclusive and accurate. For example, in 1929, people who were of Mexican birth or ancestry in the United States were considered white. In 1930, they were considered non-white. In 1942, they were switched back to white. These dates are interesting because they align directly with the shifting political and economic agendas of the time.

Racial categories are not backed by science

Dorothy Roberts, the author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century explains that when the medical community links race to health outcomes, it's really just using race as a proxy for other factors such as where your ancestors came from, access to healthcare, and socioeconomic status. Sickle-cell anemia is a prime example of this. Commonly linked to race, this adaption is actually a product of environments where Malaria is prevalent, including some parts of Europe and Asia, in addition to Africa.

Although race isn't real, racism certainly is

The racial categories to which we're assigned, based on how we look to others or how we identify ourselves, can determine real-life experiences, inspire hate, drive political outcomes, and make the difference between life and death. But these important consequences are a result of a relatively new idea that was based on shaky reasoning and shady motivations.
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First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

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You may know what race you are, but how would you prove it if somebody disagreed with you? Jenée Desmond Harris explains.

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video from ESPN

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Kwame Alexander: Take a Knee - ESPN Video

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The Newbery Medal winning poet delivers a new piece for The Undefeated

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The Data Proves that School Segregation is Getting Worse 

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The Data Proves that School Segregation is Getting Worse 

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The predominant narrative among education activists is that school segregation has gotten worse in the past several decades. It's an argument backed by data - one I've stressed in my own work. And earlier this year, a New York Times op-ed also made this argument and cited that same data.

But there's now a handful of pundits pushing back on this notion, like the National Review's Robert VerBruggen. In response to the Times piece, he wrote that changing demographics makes the data misleading - and that ultimately, "we're not going in reverse" when it comes to segregation. Prominent journalists, like New York magazine's Jonathan Chait and my colleague Matt Yglesias, shared VerBruggen's post on Twitter.

The National Review piece isn't coming out of the blue. The idea that changing demographics - the US becoming less white - makes it harder to integrate schools is something that has picked up steam in recent years. In Connecticut, Gov. Dannel Malloy has pushed for more leniency in standards set by a court-ordered desegregation case.

So how could two sides look at the data and come to two different conclusions about school segregation trends?

On the surface, this is an argument about how we measure school segregation trends. But ultimately, it's a disagreement over how we should be thinking about school segregation.

Is school segregation not actually getting worse? It depends on how you measure it.

The core disagreement comes down to federal government data that was highlighted by the UCLA Civil Rights Project on the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Boar d of Education, the Supreme Court case that ruled segregated schools were unconstitutional.

The data shows that black students in the South are less likely to attend a school that is majority white than about 50 years ago:

National Review's VerBruggen sees this chart and argues that a smaller portion of black students are attending majority-white schools because the US is just less white than it was 40 or 50 years ago:

Both arguments are the products of some messy data work.

On one hand, if we're measuring segregation by how many children attend majority-white schools, then it's worth acknowledging that white people are now a smaller percentage of the US population. This is something I've admittedly left out of my work when presenting this data.

On the other hand, VerBruggen uses this flaw to argue that school segregation actually isn't getting worse - even though it's virtually impossible to make this argument from this data alone. VerBruggen does cite a study by Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon and USC sociologist Ann Owens that says school segregation hasn't changed that much in the past few decades. But Reardon and Owens specifically write that there are two ways they measure segregation:

1. Exposure or isolation, which looks at whether students attend schools with a high or low proportion of a given racial group

2. Unevenness, which measures how evenly distributed students of a given racial group are

Reardon and Owens write, "The debate about whether the last two decades can be characterized as a period of resegregation largely hinges on whether one uses exposure or unevenness measures of segregation."

The VerBruggen argument adopts the "unevenness" frame: School segregation hasn't gotten worse because students are just as unevenly distributed now as they were in the 1980s.

Reardon and Owens give this example:

... Consider a school district in which 90% of students are black. If all schools in the district had enrollments that were 90% black, we would have low unevenness but high black isolation (or, equivalently, low black-white exposure) because the average black student would attend a predominantly black school. Conversely, in a school district with very few black students, isolation might be low even if students were very unevenly distributed by race.

But if you care about more equity in education, this is an odd argument. It's essentially saying: Hey, we haven't made school segregation worse - and it's because of Asian and Hispanic immigrants.

This leads to the reason why people who care about equity balance it with the other measure: isolation.

A reason to measure racial isolation, not just unevenness

Let's just state this for the record: Racial segregation in schools was caused by white America's policies that kept schools and neighborhoods white-only. For black families, this meant their country engineered for them a second-class experience - one that put them in poor, segregated ghettos and poor, segregated schools.

And that's not getting better. Black children are now more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods than they were 50 years ago.

This is important because a large body of research shows that growing up in heavily segregated, poor neighborhoods affects everything from your education level, your future earnings, and your happiness to your health and, ultimately, your life span.

But in many of these areas, where you live determines where you go to school. So when we see students who are racially isolated, it's describing both underlying residential segregation and how little school districts do to ameliorate that segregation.

As it turns out, things have been getting worse since the 1980s when we look at segregation using this isolation frame:

As Reardon and Owens point out, indices of exposure show black-white segregation have actually gotten worse since the 1970s:

This has caused a growing number of our schools to be predominantly black or Hispanic with a higher concentration of students in poverty:

This isn't even considering the growing charter school movement. An increasing number of charter schools are high-poverty and are predominantly black or Hispanic. Meanwhile, a growing number of charter schools are also low-poverty and predominantly white and Asian:

So, yes, there is a portion of America that is getting more diverse. And overall, the "unevenness" measure of segregation shows we're racially distributing students about as well as we were a few decades ago.

But we are also increasingly isolating the most vulnerable students in America. Things haven't been steady; they are getting worse.

Focusing on what's holding steady pushes a misleading narrative

VerBruggen is pushing back against a narrative that most experts agree with, which says that America went through a period of desegregation from the 1950s through the 1980s but then backslid in the decades since. VerBruggen is arguing that as immigration policies have diversified America in recent decades, our schools diversified as well.

But research by Cornell sociologist Daniel Lichter shows that segregation between white families and nonwhite families has actually changed very little since the 1980s. In fact, while segregation within cities has gotten slightly better, segregation between municipalities has gotten worse.

In other words, there is probably less segregation within the neighborhoods of your town. But there is probably more segregation in comparing your town and a neighboring one.

So if broader segregation has increased, it might be reflected in our schools, as school attendance zones are often drawn based on where you live.

This is partially what has entrenched the heavily segregated school attendance zones in virtually every American city:

But school boards can draw school attendance boundaries to lessen that segregation - to send kids to less racially segregated schools. We don't have to send kids to the nearest school, especially because it ends up recreating the underlying residential segregation:

But most school districts don't do anything to ameliorate this situation. We continue to recreate the residential segregation. (Here's an interactive that lets you look up your own district.)

In addition, research from Southern Methodist University's Meredith Richards shows that when neighborhoods don't experience much demographic change, they tend to draw school attendance zones that resegregate. Also, when neighborhoods experience a lot of demographic change, they defensively draw attendance zones that further segregate:

So let's rehash here:

We are increasingly isolating poor black and Hispanic children in segregated schools, both public and charter.

Residential segregation between cities is getting worse, and the Supreme Court in the 1974 case Milliken v. Bradley said surrounding cities could not be forced into school integration plans.

Meanwhile, segregation within cities is about the same as in the 1980s. It's still extremely high.

School districts are doing very little to ameliorate that segregation.

And when neighborhoods don't change or drastically change, school districts actually tend to make even more segregative attendance zones.

Yes, we can find metrics that show school segregation isn't getting worse; we can find metrics that show our schools are not any more segregated now than they were 30 years ago. These metrics are important, and they describe significant ways our schools are changing.

And, to be fair, VerBruggen writes in his piece that "this doesn't mean that this country's racial problems are over or that there's nothing we can do to spur further integration."

But using those metrics to paint a picture in which school segregation isn't getting worse misses the point of why we talk about school segregation. The American education system has vestiges of engineered inequities, and those inequities have created unequal opportunities for a huge chunk of black Americans. When we query the data using this framework, the answer is clear: We are going in reverse.

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The data proves that school segregation is getting worse

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This is ultimately a disagreement over how we talk about school segregation.