RACE MATTERS - Rise of Racial Hate Groups

"As racial hate groups rise, strategies to shut them down" PBS NewsHour 3/25/2016

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SUMMARY:  What motivates hate groups and domestic terrorists?  With the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist movements making a resurgence, special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault talks to Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center about solutions to stop the hate and encourage tolerance.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups have gained more attention in the news recently, but as special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault explains, the national undercurrent of racism may be even more pervasive.

It's part of our yearlong exploration of solutions to the problems of race in America.

These are boots that are intended so that, when you stomp on someone, the swastika will be left.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT (NewsHour):  Heidi Beirich is leader of The Intelligence Project here at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit anti-terror organization.

She shows us memorabilia revealing some Ku Klux Klan history, boots with swastikas and boots with red laces, indicating Klan members who've physically harmed someone, and other racist paraphernalia.  In 2014, there were some 784 active hate groups.  Beirich brings us up to date.

The Ku Klux Klan has declined over the years, in part due to lawsuits that you people here at the Southern Poverty Law Center have filed.  Briefly tell us about how that came about.

HEIDI BEIRICH, Southern Poverty Law Center:  We started filing lawsuits against the Klan in 1981 over a lynching of a young black man in Mobile.  That was our first anti-Klan law suit.

And we came up with this idea that we should sue these folks in civil court to bankrupt them.  That was the plan.  We have now had a series of Klan groups that we have sued, put them basically out of business, leading all the way up to very recently with the Imperial Klans of America.  Our hope is that by taking their money away, they can't function anymore.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT:  And that was successful?

HEIDI BEIRICH:  Yes.  Every single one of them has been successful.  Obviously, when these groups don't have money, that means there's less violence that they could perpetrate.  The whole idea is to not allow them to function.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT:  But at the moment, there seems to be a resurgence and what appears to be a rise in hate groups.  What explains that?

HEIDI BEIRICH:  We have seen a sustained rise in hate groups since basically 2000.  And the main thing driving this has been changing demographics in the United States.

POLITICS - More Diversity, What Does That Portend?

"As diversity increases, will U.S. be more or less politically divided?" PBS NewsHour 2/24/2015

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SUMMARY:  The United States is rapidly transforming into a more diverse, more educated and older nation.  Gwen Ifill talks to Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute and Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress about a special collaborative report that analyzes the implications of these changes and what they mean for American politics.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  America is in the midst of rapid change, politically and demographically, as the nation grows dramatically more diverse, more educated, and older.

Two research organizations with normally divergent views combined to produce a new study that shows the far-reaching implications of that shift.

Karlyn Bowman analyzes public opinion for the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute and Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress.

I find this so interesting.  I just want to walk through some of your findings one at a time.

The big one I noticed was that majority minority states, that is, the number of states which have a minority population — a majority minority population, are going to increase.  I think it starts at — right now, we have four states which meet that, California, New Mexico, Texas, and Hawaii.

And by — let me see, let me get this right — it’s be 20 — in 2060, it’s going to account for two-thirds of the country’s population.  That’s 22 states we’re talking about.

Karlyn Bowman, that’s a big change.

KARLYN BOWMAN, American Enterprise Institute:  That’s one of the big takeaways from this work that we have been doing that really in particular has done with Bill Frey of the Brookings Institution.  And I think that’s one of the biggest takeaways from the survey.

GWEN IFILL:  What does it mean?  What’s the significance of that?

KARLYN BOWMAN:  Well, it has both political consequences, economic consequences, and consequences for the private market.  It will affect every aspect of society going forward.

U.S. DEMOGRAPHICS - Massive Changes

"How the values, uphill optimism of the Millennials compare to older generations" PBS NewsHour 3/19/2014

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JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Next, there’s the so-called silent generation, the boomers, Generation X, and most recently the millennials.  Each has left, and is leaving, an imprint unique to their times.

But now we know more about the ways the youngest adults differ from and clash with their parents and grandparents.  That’s the focus of the new book “The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown” by Paul Taylor, the executive vice president of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

I talked with him recently.

Paul Taylor, it’s great to have you back on the program.

PAUL TAYLOR, Pew Research Center:  What a pleasure.  What a pleasure.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  So let’s talk about this.  The looming showdown, what do you mean by that?  And, as you talk, I want our audience to look at how we break down those age groups just to remind everybody.

But what do you mean by looming generational showdown?

PAUL TAYLOR:  Well, there is a book about demographic change and its generational equity.

The country has gone through two massive demographic changes simultaneously.  We’re becoming a majority non-white nation.  In 1960, we were 85 percent white.  By 2060, we will be 42 percent white.  At the same time, we’re going gray; 10,000 baby boomers a day, today, turned 65.  Another 10,000 tomorrow will turn 65.  This continues every single day until 2030, at which point we have doubled the number of people on Social Security and Medicare and those systems don’t work anymore.

So what this book does is look at those changes and it looks at the potential generational conflicts they set up, because young and old today, because of these changes, don’t look alike, they don’t think alike and they don’t vote alike.  And we are going to have to figure out how to rebalance our social safety net to make it work in the 21st century with a lot of political differences between young and old.

AMERICA - Unwed Mothers Tops 50%

"For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage" by JASON DePARLE and SABRINA TAVERNISE, New York Times 2/17/2012

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It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.

“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.