I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
All the jokes about America morphing into a post-racial society with the election of President Obama may have apparently obscured a different, more concrete social indicator: We’re not a post-racial society, we’re a post-ancestry society.
At least, that’s one interpretation you can draw from a provocative front-page story in today’s Detroit Free Press about the upcoming 2010 Census questionnaire sans the question seeking information about residents’ ancestry.
The story, by Free Press staff writer Niraj Warikoo, focuses predictably on the Detroit Metro area’s large Middle-Eastern populations. From the story:
With her light-brown skin and Islamic headscarf, Khadigah Alasry of Dearborn said she doesn’t see herself as white. But the Arab American is officially classified as such by the U.S. government, which says that anyone with roots in the Middle East — including north Africa — is white. “That’s just weird to me,” said Alasry, 23, born to immigrants from Yemen.
The decennial census, of course, is the constitutionally-mandated exercise in national head-counting geared toward congressional reapportionment and redistricting, as well as tabulating federal funding for many government programs. Yet, it’s not clear from Warikoo’s story if shelving the ancestry question from the census long form randomly distributed to one in six households will really impact specific program funding-formulas. Or if it will mostly be a big bummer for sociologists in search of numbers to crunch.
In the past, long form respondents could list up to two ancestries.
According to the 2000 census, we know that Arab Americans make up about 1.5 percent of Michigan’s population. The 2010 census won’t yield a comparable statistic. But, Warikoo informs us, the ancestry question will be retained as part of the monthly sample taken for the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
Census bureau officials say the reason the ancestry question was eliminated on the 53-question long form was to shorten the time it takes to fill out the form — and increase participation.
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