Kenya Conducts Controversial Census
The Kenyan government is conducting a controversial national census, where, among other questions, they ask respondents to identify their respective ethnic group, the BBC reports. This is a sore topic for many in the nation, considering last year’s horrific post-election violence that fell largely across ethnic lines. The violence left 1,000 dead. Many are concerned that politicians might use the information to their advantage. But officials insist that information about ethnic background is important for the government to know, saying to leave out such data would be “an exhibition of professional recklessness. If we do not have the official position and people come up with figures and numbers we cannot be able to dispute them,” an official from the National Bureau of Statistics told the BBC.  Information-gathering for the census will continue throughout this week.
 

Tanzanian Students to be Laid to Rest After Dorm Fire
The 12 Tanzanian students who died when a fire swept through their dorm this weekend will be laid to rest Tuesday, reports the BBC.  Since their bodies were burned beyond recognition, the girls will be buried in a mass grave. The fire occurred Saturday night when, it is believed, a candle caught a mosquito net on fire, setting the dormitory of the Idodi Secondary School ablaze. “It burned one dormitory completely and 12 students were killed. Another 20 have been injured,” a police official told Reuters. The candle was probably being used by a student to study at night, he continued. The school has no overnight electricity. Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete will attend Tuesday’s burial. Fires in recent years have killed students in neighboring nations Kenya and Uganda as well, the BBC reports.

More Blacks are leaving the northern and western big cities for the South, according to an analysis of the 2000 Census by Brookings Institution scholar William H. Frey. According to the analysis, while the Black populations of North and South Carolina are growing, cities like Chicago, New York and Los Angeles are seeing a decrease in Black residents, reports Greensboro’s News-Record.  More here.

Census Bureau Wants You
The federal government is putting up some serious bucks to make sure it doesn’t overlook people of color when it conducts its 2010 count. The Census Bureau is about to spend $250 million in an ad campaign targeting Asian, African-American and Hispanic U.S. residents living in hard-to-reach in urban areas. The agency will use most of the money for ads in traditional and social media, urging minorities to participate, The Washington Post reports. Bureau officials say they will hire some 2,000 temporary employees to help coordinate federal efforts with more than 10,000 local teams in a push to elicit more minority participation. “While the census is a federal responsibility, there must be earlier and ongoing communication and accountability to local governments and communities,” Stacey Cumberbach, New York City’s census coordinator, told the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee at a hearing Monday.

Atlanta Area Could Face Flooding
With heavy rain over the next few days, northern Georgia and the Atlanta metro area could see flooding, according to local forecasters. The threat is serious enough for officials to call for a flood watch, reports The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Full story.
 
 

Principal Singles Out Black Students to Do Better

In Texas, Black high school Principal Joseph Showell is catching some flak for singling out Black students and pushing them to do better on state assessments, reports The Dallas Morning News. Wanting to improve the school’s overall rating, Showell called 60 Black students (who had narrowly passed or failed the exam last year) in for a meeting last month and challenged them to perform better on the test. Read more.

For the first time since the devastating storm hit in 2005, leaving 80 percent of New Orleans under water, the city’s population has surpassed 300,000, according to numbers from the Census Bureau released last week.  “This reinforces what those of us who have been here working toward our recovery have known all along – that new Orleanians are strong, resilient, and committed to our city,” the mayor’s director of policy, Maggie Merrill told The Associated Press. More here.

More Black children live in two-parent homes. An increasing number of Black children are being raised in two-parent homes, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau show. In fact, according to the report, there are more African-American children being raised by two parents that at any other time in a generation. Experts aren’t quite sure what to attribute the trend to, but many speculate that it could be due to the influx of Black immigrant populations or the rise in the Black middle class and the values associated with those demographics. While the number of Black children living with two parents was 59 percent in 1970, it dipped to 42 percent 10 years later. By 1990, the number declined to 38 percent; it was a dismal 35 percent in 2004. But in 2007, the latest year for which data are available, the percentage rose to 40 percent. “It’s a positive change,” Prof. Robert J. Sampson, the chairman of Harvard’s Sociology Department, told The Associated Press. “It’s been hidden.” The question now, demographers say, is whether that recent positive trend might be undercut by current economic woes, which most negatively impact the middle class.  The Census Bureau warns, however, that an indeterminate amount of the increase could be attributed to a change in the definition of a two-parent home to include any man and woman living together, whether or no they are married or are the child’s biological parents, AP notes.

In about a generation, the United States will be a little darker — skin color that is.

Minorites will become the majority by 2042, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Minorities, now roughly one-third of the U.S. population, are expected to become the majority in 2042, with the nation projected to be 54 percent minority in 2050, the bureau said in a press release Wednesday. The bureau expects that minorities will make up 54 percent of the country’s population, the 65-and-older age group will more than double from 38.7 million to 88.5 million, making up more than 20 percent of the U.S. population, and Hispanics would account for 30 percent of the population’ the bureau said. The reason: The non-Hispanic single-race White population will lose its place as the majority by 2042 because of an expected rise in deaths in the 2030s. The Census Bureau defines minorities as everyone except for non-Hispanic, single-race Whites.