Gallup Daily tracking data reveal that Asian-Americans tend to be more Democratic and much less conservative than the general population in their political views.

Overall, 41% of Asians identify politically as Democrats, 41% as independents, and 16% as Republicans. As a result, Asians are above the national average in terms of the percentage of political independents (37% nationwide) and Democrats (34%), and below average in terms of the percentage of Republicans (27%).

The data also show that just over half of Asians say religion is an important part of their daily lives, significantly lower than the percentage of whites, blacks, or Hispanics who say this. The percentage of Asians who attend church on a weekly basis also is lower than for other U.S. racial or ethnic groups.

So can we say that political ideology and religiousness are related? Looks like it.

One can compare the political leanings of Asians with those of the other major racial and ethnic groups by looking at the percentage of each group that identifies as Democrats or leans Democratic (after initially identifying as independents) versus the percentage that identifies or leans Republican. On this basis, Asians are not as Democratic as blacks, somewhat more Democratic than Hispanics, and much more Democratic than whites.

It’s becoming a mini-trend, say some advertising industry watchers: create a controversial ad, let it get rejected by TV or print media, then create a buzz from the outrage.

That may be what’s happening for a company that wanted to promote a gay dating site during the Super Bowl. American Public Media’s Marketplace reports that not long after CBS agreed to run an anti-abortion spot this Sunday paid for by Focus on the Family, it rejected an ad from ManCrunch.org, a dating site for gay men. Noel Biderman, the president of the company that owns Man Crunch, insisted he did want publicity for the site. Plan A, he said, was to get it through the commercial. Plan B, though, was what’s happening now: intense buzz created through the internet, gay community outrage, and now traditional media, about how the ad was rejected. Either way, he says, the company’s name should be much more familiar very soon.

Hear the story here.

Last week, Glen Bell Jr., the founder of Taco Bell, died at 86.

Bell launched his first restaurant, called Bell’s Drive-In, in 1948 in San Bernardino after seeing the success of McDonald’s Bar-B-Que, the predecessor of McDonald’s, which was founded in the same city in 1940. Like McDonald’s, Bell’s restaurant sought to take advantage of Southern California’s car culture by serving hamburgers and hot dogs through drive-in windows.

An NPR Marketplace contributor, Gustavo Arrellano, says gracias to the late founder, for making Mexican food mainstream (at the expense, many will say, of flavor and authenticity, but still…):

When Bell sold his first crunchy taco in 1951, Americans outside the Southwest didn’t know much about Mexico, beyond Hollywood’s banditos and spicy senoritas. Then Bell — a white man with a burger stand in a San Bernardino, Calif. barrio — saw an opportunity. Imitators soon sprung up. Now, tacos and Doritos and salsa and burritos are as American as pizza, gracias to Taco Bell.

I’ll make an even bolder claim: Taco Bell and its spawn became a gateway for Americans to accept Mexicans — hasn’t been an easy ride, of course, but one smoothed by an endless stream of refried beans and nacho cheese. Because if you can enjoy the cuisine of newcomers, then surely you can start thinking of them as fellow citizens, right?

Or, should purveyors of “real” Mexican food (i.e., without rubbery cheese and beans made from powder), give the raspberry to Taco Bell for “dumbing down” Mexican food for white middle America? In either case, the influence of Mr. Bell and his chain is undeniable.

Without question, the election of the first African American man to be President was a watershed in American history, and of utmost significance to the Black community.

But the election of Obama is, according to Black Agenda Radio commentator Glen Ford, causing blacks to be a little irrational. According to Ford, Blacks now have a much rosier picture of the state of their position in society than statistics show.

Life in the Delusion Zone is animated by the purest magic, a place where catastrophe is instantaneously transformed into its opposite. Examine an item from the real world Washington Post of January 15, whose headline screams, “U.S. unemployment rate for blacks projected to hit 25-year high.” Contrast that with the Pew findings released the same week, which concluded that “blacks’ assessments about the state of black progress in America have improved more dramatically than at any time in the last quarter century.”
The judgments of a nationally representative sampling of 812 blacks can’t be wrong, can they? Yes, they can. Obamamania appears to destroy brain cells and disable both short- and long-term memory.
Consider that the proportion of African Americans that say Blacks are “better off than five years ago” has nearly doubled since 2007, from 20 percent to 39 percent. What actually happened in the interim between 2007 and 2009? The negative assessment of the Black condition in 2007 compared to five years before, makes sense. Black unemployment in 2002 stood at 11 percent. By 2007, Black unemployment had dropped to 8.3 percent, significantly better than at the height of the Bush first term recession five years before. However, by 2007 the housing foreclosure crisis was casting a dark gloom over Black America, and December 2007 would retroactively be declared the first month of the Great Recession. It was, therefore, rational that only one in five Blacks would rate African Americans as better off in 2007 than in 2002.

So, Black Americans can believe something that’s statistically not accurate? Sounds like any other racial or ethnic group on the planet… sort of a human nature thing. We see what we want to see. The problem comes if this perception stops blacks from demanding real changes and real policies that really CAN improve their lives.

This time the word Negro is in the 2010 U.S. Census, question number 9. The question, which asks about race, provides the following answer choice: “Black, African Am., or Negro.”

The text of the Census was approved by the U.S. Congress more than a year ago.

Classifying blacks in America is a difficult and subject. There are those who prefer African American, those who prefer Black, those who prefer Negro, and even some who prefer people of color. Generally, the word Negro has fallen out of favor in U.S. society over the past five decades. It has come to represent a bleaker time for African Americans in American history. Though it is not as offensive as the other N word, is rarely if ever used today. There is a dispute in the community whether black or African American is most appropriate (some don’t care either way). But few African Americans under seventy years of age use Negro to define themselves.

But the Census Bureau has its reasons for using the word, apparently. “Many older African Americans identified themselves that way, and many still do,” Census Bureau spokesman Jack Martin told the newspaper. “Those who identify themselves as Negroes need to be included.”

There has been some eyebrows raised but little uproar over the terminology in the Census, so far. Still, it’s day four of the “Harry Reid Negro Controversy,” in which Republicans try to make hay out of, what most black commentators and thought leaders think, is a non-issue. See previous post.

Click here to read the New York Daily News story.

Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid is taking some lumps for a comment uttered in a private conversation (he thought) in 2008 about then-candidate Barack Obama. During the campaign, Reid said Barack Obama’s chances for the presidency were good because the country was ready for someone “light-skinned” who spoke with “no Negro dialect,” as reported in “Game Change,” a book detailing the 2008 race by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.

Now, the hapless (and African American) head of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, is calling for Reid to resign. Because, supposedly, what Reid said was just as bad as what then-Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-MS) said in 2002 about the segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond.

However, the comparison between Lott and Reid is specious at best, according to Salon’s Joan Walsh:

One guy is talking, perhaps inelegantly, about why he’s whole-heartedly supporting our first black president; the other is wishing the country had elected a racist.

At least one columnist says Harry Reid owes nobody an apology (although he did apologize to Obama, who accepted it). According to Sandy Banks of the LA Times, Reid was saying things that most black people already know:

Sure, it was a little odd to see the term “Negro” used outside of a history class or documentary. Sounds like Reid is stuck in the last century.

But the Senate majority leader didn’t say anything many Americans — especially us Negroes — don’t already know.

If you’re black, it is easier in this country to be light-skinned.

That’s borne out not just by anecdote and experience, but by research documenting favorable treatment for fair-skinned blacks in criminal cases, employment prospects, even social and romantic liaisons.

Studies have shown that darker-skinned blacks are more likely to be unemployed, earn less and hold lower-prestige jobs. In the criminal justice system, convicted murderers with “stereotypically black” features are more than twice as likely as light-skinned defendants to receive death sentences from juries.

Don’t blame Reid for the preference. Blame bigotry. Blame history.

The legacy of fair-skinned favoritism in this country has its roots in slavery. Light-skinned blacks tended to be slave owners’ progeny, and to be offered education, land and access to broader society.

Another black columnist, Mary Curtis from the LA Times, agrees that Reid did choose his words stupidly, but he wasn’t lying:

I do know there’s a reason that for some, black beauty begins with Beyonce and ends with Halle Berry. I still recall that when Middle America’s favorite football hero, pitchman and bad actor O.J. Simpson became public enemy No. 1, Time magazine’s cover wasted no time in darkening him up. Tiger Woods – who invented the word “Cablinasian” to reflect his Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian background – is today all “thug life” bravado on the cover of Vanity Fair, transformed by his troubles into a black man, though no black person I know is rushing to claim him.

So, is all the outrage over the remarks an effort to make political hay? Or is there something significant there?

According to a report released last month from the University of Southern California, the Mexican middle class in Los Angeles is in a precarious position.

Jody Agius Vallejo, an assistant professor of sociology at USC, examines an understudied population, the Mexican-origin middle class, and asks two central questions. First, are middle-class Mexicans experiencing straight-line assimilation into the white middle-class or are they incorporating as racialized minorities? Second and more broadly, what does it mean to be Mexican and middle-class in a society that holds a narrow view of what it means to be Mexican?

Agius Vallejo’s research, which looks at the “pathways to success” that allow even people of humble immigrant origins to reach middle-class status, rebuts the widespread perception that Mexican immigrants and their offspring are following what she calls a “trajectory of downward mobility into a permanent underclass.”

Growing up in an Orange County family with both white and Latino members, the Mexican American people Agius Vallejo knew always had paths to social mobility, she recalls.

According to Hector Tobar of the Los Angeles Times, those paths to social mobility are severely constricted these days:

Back in the 1970s and ’80s, the middle class was where a Mexican American family arrived after generations of farm, factory and service work, thanks to union jobs and the GI Bill. Cities like Montebello and La Puente were its epicenter. For many Latinos then, ascension to the middle class involved cultural erasures — Spanish carried a certain stigma, so parents didn’t speak it to their kids.

Today the Mexican-origin middle class looks entirely different.

A healthy middle class with Latin American roots is critical to the entire country’s future too. That’s what another USC professor, Dowell Myers, argues in his book “Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America.”

Myers, a demographer, says our aging country needs to invest in its younger, immigrant communities as an act of self-preservation. Immigrants’ incomes and rates of homeownership rise the longer they stay in this country, he writes, and provide potential members of the taxpaying middle class that will fund the retirement of the boomer generation.

Growing that middle class doesn’t require just social investment in things like public education — it will also require immigration reform. Without a path to citizenship, millions of people living in the U.S. will lack the basic tool needed to escape membership in the “permanent underclass.”

The New York Times reports that gay candidates around the country are winning elections, while gay issues are still not warmly embraced by the majority of the public.

In the latest of a string of gay candidate victories, an openly lesbian woman, Anise Parker, won the mayor’s race in Houston, a city once called the buckle on the Bible belt. Many cities in the south have claimed that title, and in fairness most cities in Texas and elsewhere are much more liberal than their surrounding regions in general. And openly gay candidates are winning decisive victories as mayors, city council members and other positions across the country.

But what, then, about gay civil rights issues, which seem to have less support? In Maine last month a ballot initiative to overturn same sex marriage in that state passed. Some political scientists believe more people are willing to accept a gay leader as long as they don’t make gay issues part of their platform. From the Times:

“More and more people have been coming out,” said Sean Theriault, a political scientist at the University of Texas who tracks gay politics. “Ten years ago, you could talk to a lot of people who didn’t know a single gay person, and now, especially in the cities, you would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t know anyone who is gay.”

Yet, most of the openly gay politicians who have won races recently have done so by avoiding being labeled as single-issue candidates, several gay politicians said.

In Houston, Ms. Parker never hid her sexual orientation but did not champion gay issues either, focusing instead on municipal concerns like crime, the city budget and drainage. It was a formula that led her to win citywide elections first as an at-large City Council member, then as the controller and, now, as the mayor.

Other successful gay candidates have followed the same strategy, and some have found their opponents are often unwilling to attack them directly about their sexual orientation, though smear campaigns often are carried out through proxies, as happened in Houston.

Nobody ever said he was. But when actor Danny Glover and members of the black Congressional caucus criticized him for not doing enough to help African Americans, the President bristled.

Glover, known for his activism along with his acting, said recently that “the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don’t see anything different. . . . What’s so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property.”

Earlier this month, 10 members of the Congressional Black Caucus criticized the administration for not doing enough to help African-Americans through the bleak economy. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said members of the CBC were lining up meetings with the president’s advisers to exert their power.

The CBC members cited a number of areas they wanted Obama to focus on, including efforts to reduce foreclosures and to provide more aid to banks that lend to African-Americans.

In the interview Monday, the president acknowledged the difficulties: “We were some of the folks who were most affected by predatory lending,” he said, using the plural pronoun to refer to black Americans. “There’s a long history of us being the last hired and the first fired. As I said on health care, we’re the ones who are in the worst position to absorb companies deciding to drop their health care plans. So, should people be satisfied? Absolutely not. But let’s take a look at what I’ve done.”

Obama added that he cannot pass laws “that say I’m just helping black folks. I’m the president of the entire United States. What I can do is make sure that I am passing laws that help all people, particularly those who are most vulnerable and most in need. That, in turn, is going to help lift up the African-American community.”

That’s accurate enough. He’s President of the entire country. Still, Obama does need to be careful how he responds to criticism from members of his base. He’s been attacked from progressives for a variety of issues, most recently for his support of the watered-down health care reform legislation coming out of the Senate. When former Governor Howard Dean trashed the bill as an insurance company gift that is better off scrapped, Obama (through his spokespeople) insinuated that Dean was crazy. Understand that Dean has burnished his progressive credentials with a vast swath of the left in this country. Obama, on the other hand, has moved consistently to the right over the past year. Moving to the right is one thing, but skewering a liberal icon (who has a lot of credibility) is another.

African Americans have been a core Democratic group, going back to the 1960s. They turned out in even higher number in 2008, understandably, voting for Obama by approximately 98%. If in November 2012 blacks don’t believe he’s working on their behalf as hard as he’s worked for, let’s say Goldman Sachs, the majority will still vote for him, but not nearly as many as in 2008. Obama won a decisive victory last year. But without the base of the party - not only in terms of votes, but for phone banking, canvassing and donations - he will have a harder time winning, especially if the economy is still an issue.

And also consider that, as unpopular as Bush was in the waning years of his presidency, it was his base - evangelical Christians and southern conservative whites - who still strongly approved of him. And Bush never, ever dissed his base. Obama has lost nearly 20 percentage points from his approval rating in a year - an ominous sign for the first year of an administration. And most accounts show that a good amount of that lost support came from his liberal base. Though Obama may not want to emulate Bush in many areas, he may want to take a look at how Bush handled his most loyal supporters and choose to follow it.

The social networking site Facebook, once popular primarily with whites and Asians, is not growing in popularity among blacks and Latinos, according to a new study. According to the Silicon Valley Mercury News, researchers at Facebook used a Census Bureau database of the demographic characteristics of 150,000 American surnames to track the rapidly changing racial makeup of its U.S. members over the past four years. They found that about that a much higher percentage of users were African American or Latino than four years ago. In the most recent survey, about 11 percent of the social network’s approximately 100 million U.S. members were African-American, about 9 percent were Latino and 6 percent were Asian, according to a post on Facebook’s blog.

Social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Linked-In skew younger and more female than the general population, but the increased diversity of Facebook may be another indication of the maturation of the Internet, as minorities and other groups come on board. With well over 90 percent of young adults and the college-educated population now online, “we’re reaching the saturation point in the early adopting population,” said Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

The hoard of demographic data owned by Facebook — age, gender,
education and now race and ethnicity of perhaps a third of the U.S. population, along with a list of their closest friends — is a huge potential bounty for advertisers. But Facebook said this study was not done for business purposes, but to get a sense of how closely the social network mirrors America.