Supreme Court to hear media mogul Byron Allen’s $20B racial discrimination case against Comcast
Byron Allen, founder/CEO of Entertainment Studios, will have his $20 billion racial discrimination lawsuit against cable giant Comcast heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Entertainment Studios asserts Comcast’s refusal to award licenses for its channels amounts to a violation of section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act. The argument is that the decision to deny licensing to the African American owned entity is a clear example of racial discrimination.
In a statement, Allen said he is confident the company will prevail in the nation’s highest court, having won a decision by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to proceed to the SCOTUS. “We’re on the right side of history,” said Allen. –Source: thegrio.com
New Report: 23 percent of young Black women now identify as bisexual
A new report examining the increase in the number of women who identify as bisexual revealed 23% of Black women in the 18 to 34 age range identify themselves that way—a proportion that’s nearly three times higher than it was a decade ago.
The bi-annual General Social Survey, which charts the complexities of social change in the United States from race to drug use, found bisexual identifying women accounted for virtually all of the growth among those who say they’re lesbian, gay or bisexual.
More than 1 in 18 identified as bisexual, according to the survey. One decade ago, only 1 in 65 did. When race is added, approximately 18% of young Black women identified as lesbian or bisexual in the 2016 study.
By 2018, more than 25% of young Black women identified as lesbian or bisexual. Though the data shows a shift is occurring in sexual identity, it doesn’t explain why it’s happening.
One hypothesis points to a shortage of men, particularly Black men who are incarcerated at a disproportionately higher rate in the U.S. It’s possible that because Black women are, as a group, more likely to live in areas with smaller “pools of marriageable men,” they’re more open to bisexuality.
–Source: Tristan Bridges, University of California, Santa Barbara; and Mignon r. Moore, Barnard College/thegrio.com
How racist housing contracts stole $4B in wealth from Black families
Black Chicagoans lost between $3 and $4 billion in wealth as a result of predatory housing contracts of the 1950s and 60s, according to a new report.
The analysis, published by the Samuel DuBois Cook Center for Social Equity at Duke University, comes on the heels of a renewed debate over reparations sparked by the Democratic presidential primary race.
The analysis also provides another important data point for scholars and advocates seeking to document, assess, and address the massive Black-white wealth gap through reparations or other means.
Housing has historically been viewed as one of the primary avenues American families use to build and pass wealth. Yet for Black families, segregation and discrimination often put homeownership out of reach or made homeownership less lucrative than it is for white families.
For decades Federal Housing Administration (FHA)-backed mortgages were largely unavailable to Black buyers, due to the FHA practice of redlining, which systematically identifies Black neighborhoods as too high-risk to qualify for low rates.
This practice pushed Black families out of the mainstream mortgage market and into predatory land contracts like the ones documented in the report. In such a contract, Black buyers didn’t own the homes, thus could not build equity, nor have any property rights afforded to homeowners.
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