Author: MIL-OSI Publisher

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Chris Lamb, Professor of Journalism, Indiana University

John Rivers, John Bailey, David Middleton, Leroy Major and Buck Godfrey – all teammates from the 1955 Cannon Street YMCA Little League All-Star team – left Charleston, South Carolina, on a bus on Aug. 18, 2025.

After a stop at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, for a couple days – where their story is included in an exhibit on Black baseball that opened in 2024 – they’ll head to Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

There, they’ll be recognized before the Little League World Series championship game on August 24, 2025 – 70 years after the players, then 11 and 12 years old, watched the championship game from the bleachers, wondering why they weren’t on the field living out their own dreams instead of watching other boys live out theirs.

When the Cannon Street team registered for a baseball tournament in Charleston in July 1955, it put the team and the forces of integration on a collision course with segregation, bigotry and the Southern way of life.

White teams refused to take the field with the Cannon Street team, who represented the first Black Little League in South Carolina. The team won two tournaments by forfeit. They were supposed to then go to a regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, where, if they won, they’d advance to the Little League World Series.

But Little League officials ruled the team ineligible for the regional tournament because it had advanced by winning on forfeit and not on the field, as the rules stipulated.

A 4-team Black league is born

The Civil Rights Movement is often told in terms of court decisions, bus boycotts and racist demagogues. It’s rarely told from the point of view of children, who suffered in ways that left physical and emotional scars.

When I was a journalism professor at the College of Charleston, I learned how the presence of a single Black all-star team was enough to cause one of the biggest crises in Little League history. In 2022, I wrote the book “Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War.”

The team’s story begins in 1953. Robert Morrison, president of the Cannon Street YMCA, petitioned Little League Baseball to create a league for Black teams, and Little League Baseball granted the charter. Dozens of Black 11- and 12-year-old boys were selected for the four-team league before the 1954 season.

They played on a diamond of grass and gravel at Harmon Field in Charleston, a city with a long history of racial strife. In 1861, the Civil War began in Charleston harbor, where hundreds of thousands of slaves had been brought to the U.S. from the 1600s to the 1800s. The field also wasn’t far from Emanuel AME church, where nine Black parishioners were murdered during a prayer meeting in 2015.

Little League Baseball barred first-year leagues from the postseason tournaments. At some point during the 1955 season, the best players were selected for the league’s All-Star team. Cannon Street YMCA officials then registered the team for the Charleston city tournament, which included all-star teams from the city’s all-white leagues.

Little League Baseball officially prohibited racial discrimination. But in South Carolina, racial discrimination was still legal.

Dixie fights back

The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled a year earlier that segregation in schools was unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, paving the way for racial integration.

Few states resisted integration as fiercely as South Carolina, and no politician fought harder against racial equality than the state’s junior U.S. senator, Strom Thurmond.

So when the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars registered for Charleston’s citywide tournament in July 1955, all the white teams withdrew. The Cannon Street team won by forfeit and advanced to the state tournament.

Danny Jones, the state’s director of Little League Baseball, petitioned the organization to create a segregated state tournament. Little League Baseball’s president, Peter McGovern, denied Jones’ request. He said that any team that refused to play the Cannon Street team would be banned from the organization.

Thurmond let it be known to Jones that an integrated tournament could not be permitted. In the end, Jones urged all the white teams to withdraw from the state tournament. He then resigned from Little League Baseball, created the Little Boys League and wrote the league’s charter, which prohibited Black players.

The Little Boys League – which was rebranded as Dixie Youth Baseball – soon replaced Little League in other Southern states; within six years, there were 390 such leagues spanning most of the former Confederacy. It would be decades before Little League Baseball returned to South Carolina.

Having won the South Carolina tournament by forfeit, the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars prepared for the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, where the state’s governor, Marvin Griffin, objected to integration. If youth baseball could be integrated, so, too, could schools, swimming pools and municipal parks, he said.

Let them play!

Little League rules said that teams could advance only by playing and winning, so the Cannon Street’s state championship was ruled invalid because it had come by forfeit.

McGovern decided against making an exception for the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars.

Most white-owned newspapers, whether in the South or North, had long stayed silent on the topic of racial discrimination. But the story of the Cannon Street All-Stars broke through. Editors and reporters may have wanted to avoid the topic of racism, but boys being denied the opportunity to play in a baseball tournament was too objectionable to ignore.

On July 31, 1955, New York Daily News columnist Dick Young asked Brooklyn Dodgers star Jackie Robinson, who had broken Major League Baseball’s color barrier eight years earlier, about the white teams that had quit the tournament rather than play against a Black team.

“How stupid can they be?” Robinson said. “I had to laugh when I read the story.”

Perhaps pressured by criticism, McGovern, Little League’s president, invited the team to be Little League’s guests for the championship game. So the team boarded a bus for Williamsport. They arrived the night before the championship game, which pitted Morrisville, Pennsylvania, against Delaware Township, New Jersey, an integrated team.

The Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars and their coaches were introduced before the game, and the players recall hearing a loud voice from the bleachers.

“Let them play!” it boomed.

Others in the crowd joined in, the players said.

“Let them play! Let them play!”

John Rivers, who played second base for the team, told me he can still “hear it now.”

After their brief moment on the field, the Cannon Street All-Stars returned to their seats and watched other boys live out their dreams. A photograph of the team in the stands reveals the disappointment on their faces.

On the following day – Aug. 28, 1955 – the team boarded its bus to return to Charleston. It was the same date that Emmett Till, not much older than the players on the team, was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, for reportedly whistling at a white woman.

The boys and girls who play in the 2025 tournament will forever remember the experience. The surviving members of the Cannon Street All-Stars, who are all in their early 80s, never forgot what they were denied.

Rivers, who went on to become a successful architect, says this is the moral of their story.

“It’s a tragedy to take dreams away from a youngster,” Rivers told The Washington Post in 2022. “I knew it then. I know it now, and I’ve seen to it that no one takes dreams away from me again.”

Now there are some on the political right who want to bury America’s ugly racial history.

America has never fully reckoned with slavery or the decades of segregation, Rivers recently told me. “It just decided to move on from that ugly period in its history without any kind of therapy,” he said. “And now they are trying to sweep it all under the rug again.”

Portions of this article first appeared in an article published on Aug. 19, 2016.

Chris Lamb does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How bigotry crushed the dreams of an all-Black Little League team – https://theconversation.com/how-bigotry-crushed-the-dreams-of-an-all-black-little-league-team-263003

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Perin Gürel, Associate professor of American Studies, University of Notre Dame

Fear of reprisals from the Trump administration has made many people cautious about expressing their opinions. Fired federal workers are asking not to be quoted by their name, for fear of losing housing. Business leaders are concerned about harm to their companies. Universities are changing their curricula, and scholars are self censoring.

But one group has refused to back down is the hosts of America’s late night comedy shows.

Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show team, for example, have been scathing in their coverage of the Epstein case. John Oliver continues to amass colorful analogies for describing the president and his actions. After the “Late Show” was canceled, ostensibly due to financial reasons, host Stephen Colbert was defiant: “They made one mistake – they left me alive!”

We may think of being loud, persistent, and edgy as the modern comedians’ job. However, unrelenting, critical humor has a long history in folklore.

I’m a scholar who examines the intersections between culture and politics and I teach a class on “Humor and Power.” A timeless folktale, known as “The Bird Indifferent to Pain,” can help us understand why comedy fans enjoy the annoying persistence of the jester, and explain why this trope has endured across cultures for centuries.

The invincible rooster

“The Bird Indifferent to Pain” belongs to a genre known as “formula tales.” Such tales consist of repeated patterns or chains of events, often with rhymes weaving through them. “The Gingerbread Man” captures this style perfectly with its infectious, teasing rhyme – “Run, run, run as fast as you can…”

“The Bird Indifferent to Pain” also stars a persistent and irritating creature. In most versions, a bird – often a rooster – angers a master or king for singing too loudly or saying the wrong things. The king comes up with elaborate punishments, but the bird always seems indifferent to them, responding to each move with an increasingly defiant and sometimes vulgar rhyme. At the end, the king cooks and eats the rooster, but the bird flies unharmed out of his body, rhyming and singing ever more.

Because folklore is shared casually across cultures and languages, it’s hard to tell when and where this tale first originated. However, folklorists have identified versions all over the world, from Tajikistan in Central Asia to India and Sri Lanka in South Asia, as well as Sudan in northeast Africa.

Armenia’s famous poet Hovhannes Tumanyan collected one version of this tale, which he titled “Anhaght Aklore” or “The Invincible Rooster.” In this version, a rooster finds a gold coin, and boasts about it from the rooftop: “Cock-a-doodle-doo, I’ve found gold!” When the king’s servants take the gold, the rooster continues crowing defiantly: “Cock-a-doodle-doo … the king lives on my account!” Frustrated, the king orders his servants to return the money. But the rooster still won’t shut up: “The king got scared of me!”

Finally, the king orders him slaughtered for dinner. “The king has invited me to his palace!” the rooster boasts. While he’s cooked, he claims the king is treating him to “a hot bath.” Served as the main course, he crows, “I’m dining with the king!”

The tale reaches its climax when the rooster, now in the king’s belly, complains about the darkness. The king, driven to fury by the persistent voice, orders his servants to cut open his own stomach. The rooster escapes and flies to the rooftops, crowing triumphantly once more: “Cock-a-doodle-doo!”

Tumanyan doesn’t tell us what happens to the king after that.

My great-grandmother told us a Turkish version of this tale, featuring a rooster defying his “bey,” or master, in the 1980s. Her rooster crowed in rhyming couplets and used some naughty words to describe the master’s digestive system. Plus, in her version, the master’s behind – and not his stomach – tore open during the bird’s escape. We were obsessed with this story and begged her to tell it over and over.

The power of persistent irritation

What makes this tale, and its many variations, so compelling across languages and centuries? Why do so many cultures enjoy the rooster’s humorous defiance and literal indifference to punishment?

In our case, as children, we were drawn in by the rhythm of repetition and rhyme. The rooster’s colorful language held a delightful sense of transgression. Children also often identify with animals because of a shared vulnerability to adults’ power. Therefore, it is significant that the bird, the weaker of the two parties, survives the ordeal, whereas the master’s fate is uncertain. But the rooster doesn’t merely survive – he thrives and keeps on squawking. This is a story of hope.

In fact, when I told Tumanyan’s version to my 6-year-old son, he said he loved the rooster’s optimism.

Modern American popular culture contains many jocular characters that resemble this folkloric bird, who is delightfully impervious to pain, from cartoon characters such as the Road Runner – an actual bird – to the foulmouthed, self-regenerating antihero Deadpool.

Today’s political comedians, I argue, are using the rooster’s tactics as well.

Release or resistance?

Debates about political humor often circle back to its purpose. Scholars debate whether anti-authoritarian humor is just a coping mechanism, or whether can it spark change.

Psychologist Sigmund Freud believed humor’s main function was “release”: jokes offered a way to reveal our unacceptable urges in a socially acceptable way. A mean joke, for example, allowed its teller to express aggression without risking serious repercussions.

Philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that humor in corporate capitalist media was a mere safety valve, siphoning off protest and releasing righteous outrage as laughter.

Anthropologist James Scott, however, gives jokesters more political credit. In his 1992 book “Domination and the Arts of Resistance,” Scott agreed that authorities allow some dissident humor as a safety valve. But he also identified a powerful “imaginative function” in humorous resistance. Humor, he claimed, can help people envision alternatives to the status quo.

Scott pointed out that release and resistance need not be mutually exclusive. Instead of reducing the chance of actual rebellion, comedy could serve as practice for it.

Authorities do perceive some danger in comedians’ output. In countries with fewer free speech protections, comedians may face more serious repercussions than a stern tweet.

In the case of Colbert, President Donald Trump’s gleeful response to the show’s cancellation, and his suggestion that others will be “next up,” shows just how seriously some political figures take comedic critique. At the very least, they are irritated.

And the story of the “Bird Indifferent to Pain” reminds us that sometimes the best a jokester can do is to keep irritating the bowels of the system, singing all the way.

Perin Gürel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What an old folktale can teach us about the ‘annoying persistence’ of political comedians – https://theconversation.com/what-an-old-folktale-can-teach-us-about-the-annoying-persistence-of-political-comedians-262860

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Peyton McCauley, Water Policy Specialist, Sea Grant UW Water Science-Policy Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

As demand for artificial intelligence technology boosts construction and proposed construction of data centers around the world, those computers require not just electricity and land, but also a significant amount of water. Data centers use water directly, with cooling water pumped through pipes in and around the computer equipment. They also use water indirectly, through the water required to produce the electricity to power the facility. The amount of water used to produce electricity increases dramatically when the source is fossil fuels compared with solar or wind.

A 2024 report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that in 2023, U.S. data centers consumed 17 billion gallons (64 billion liters) of water, and projects that by 2028, those figures could double – or even quadruple. The same report estimated that in 2023, U.S. data centers consumed an additional 211 billion gallons (800 billion liters) of water indirectly through the electricity that powers them. But that is just an estimate in a fast-changing industry.

We are researchers in water law and policy based on the shores of Lake Michigan. Technology companies are eyeing the Great Lakes region to host data centers, including one proposed for Port Washington, Wisconsin, which could be one of the largest in the country. The Great Lakes region offers a relatively cool climate and an abundance of water, making the region an attractive location for hot and thirsty data centers.

The Great Lakes are an important, binational resource that more than 40 million people depend on for their drinking water and supports a US$6 trillion regional economy. Data centers compete with these existing uses and may deplete local groundwater aquifers.

Our analysis of public records, government documents and sustainability reports compiled by top data center companies has found that technology companies don’t always reveal how much water their data centers use. In a forthcoming Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal article, we walk through our methods and findings using these resources to uncover the water demands of data centers.

In general, corporate sustainability reports offered the most access and detail – including that in 2024, one data center in Iowa consumed 1 billion (3.8 billion liters) gallons of water – enough to supply all of Iowa’s residential water for five days.

How do data centers use water?

The servers and routers in data centers work hard and generate a lot of heat. To cool them down, data centers use large amounts of water – in some cases over 25% of local community water supplies. In 2023, Google reported consuming over 6 billion gallons of water (nearly 23 billion liters) to cool all its data centers.

In some data centers, the water is used up in the cooling process. In an evaporative cooling system, pumps push cold water through pipes in the data center. The cold water absorbs the heat produced by the data center servers, turning into steam that is vented out of the facility. This system requires a constant supply of cold water.

In closed-loop cooling systems, the cooling process is similar, but rather than venting steam to the air, air-cooled chillers cool down the hot water. The cooled water is then recirculated to cool the facility again. This does not require constant addition of large volumes of water, but it uses a lot more energy to run the chillers. The actual numbers showing those differences, which likely vary by the facility, are not publicly available.

One key way to evaluate water use is the amount of water that is considered “consumed,” meaning it is withdrawn from the local water supply and used up – for instance, evaporated as steam – and not returned to the ecosystem.

For information, we first looked to government data, such as that kept by municipal water systems, but the process of getting all the necessary data can be onerous and time-consuming, with some denying data access due to confidentiality concerns. So we turned to other sources to uncover data center water use.

Sustainability reports provide insight

Many companies, especially those that prioritize sustainability, release publicly available reports about their environmental and sustainability practices, including water use. We focused on six top tech companies with data centers: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Digital Realty and Equinix. Our findings revealed significant variability in both how much water the companies’ data centers used, and how much specific information the companies’ reports actually provided.

Sustainability reports offer a valuable glimpse into data center water use. But because the reports are voluntary, different companies report different statistics in ways that make them hard to combine or compare. Importantly, these disclosures do not consistently include the indirect water consumption from their electricity use, which the Lawrence Berkeley Lab estimated was 12 times greater than the direct use for cooling in 2023. Our estimates highlighting specific water consumption reports are all related to cooling.

Amazon releases annual sustainability reports, but those documents do not disclose how much water the company uses. Microsoft provides data on its water demands for its overall operations, but does not break down water use for its data centers. Meta does that breakdown, but only in a companywide aggregate figure. Google provides individual figures for each data center.

In general, the five companies we analyzed that do disclose water usage show a general trend of increasing direct water use each year. Researchers attribute this trend to data centers.

A closer look at Google and Meta

To take a deeper look, we focused on Google and Meta, as they provide some of the most detailed reports of data center water use.

Data centers make up significant proportions of both companies’ water use. In 2023, Meta consumed 813 million gallons of water globally (3.1 billion liters) – 95% of which, 776 million gallons (2.9 billion liters), was used by data centers.

For Google, the picture is similar, but with higher numbers. In 2023, Google operations worldwide consumed 6.4 billion gallons of water (24.2 billion liters), with 95%, 6.1 billion gallons (23.1 billion liters), used by data centers.

Google reports that in 2024, the company’s data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, consumed 1 billion gallons of water (3.8 billion liters), the most of any of its data centers.

The Google data center using the least that year was in Pflugerville, Texas, which consumed 10,000 gallons (38,000 liters) – about as much as one Texas home would use in two months. That data center is air-cooled, not water-cooled, and consumes significantly less water than the 1.5 million gallons (5.7 million liters) at an air-cooled Google data center in Storey County, Nevada. Because Google’s disclosures do not pair water consumption data with the size of centers, technology used or indirect water consumption from power, these are simply partial views, with the big picture obscured.

Given society’s growing interest in AI, the data center industry will likely continue its rapid expansion. But without a consistent and transparent way to track water consumption over time, the public and government officials will be making decisions about locations, regulations and sustainability without complete information on how these massive companies’ hot and thirsty buildings will affect their communities and their environments.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Data centers consume massive amounts of water – companies rarely tell the public exactly how much – https://theconversation.com/data-centers-consume-massive-amounts-of-water-companies-rarely-tell-the-public-exactly-how-much-262901

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Ivis García, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University

Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans, the images still haunt us: entire neighborhoods underwater, families stranded on rooftops and a city brought to its knees.

We study disaster planning at Texas A&M University and look for ways communities can improve storm safety for everyone, particularly low-income and minority neighborhoods.

Katrina made clear what many disaster researchers have long found: Hazards such as hurricanes may be natural, but the death and destruction is largely human-made.

How New Orleans built inequality into its foundation

New Orleans was born unequal. As the city grew as a trade hub in the 1700s, wealthy residents claimed the best real estate, often on higher ground formed by river sediment. The city had little high ground, so everyone else was left in “back-of-town” areas, closer to swamps where land was cheap and flooding common.

In the early 1900s, new pumping technology enabled development in flood-prone swamplands and housing spread, but the pumping caused land subsidence that made flooding worse in neighborhoods such as Lakeview, Gentilly and Broadmoor.

Then redlining started in the 1930s. To guide federal loan decisions, government agencies began using maps that rated neighborhoods by financial risk. Predominantly Black neighborhoods were typically marked as “high risk,” regardless of the actual housing quality.

This created a vicious cycle: Black and low-income families were already stuck in flood-prone areas because that’s where cheap land was. Redlining kept their property values lower. Black Americans were also denied government-backed mortgages and GI Bill benefits that could have helped them move to safer neighborhoods on higher ground.

Hurricane Katrina showed how those lines translate to vulnerability.

When history came calling

On Aug. 29, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans, the levees protecting the city broke and water flooded about 80% of the city. The damage followed racial geography − the spatial patterns of where Black and white residents lived due to decades of segregation − like a blueprint.

About three-quarters of Black residents experienced serious flooding, compared with half of white residents.

Between 100,000 and 150,000 people couldn’t evacuate. They were disproportionately people who were elderly, Black, poor and without cars. Among survivors who did not evacuate, 55% did not have a car or another way to get out, and 93% were Black. More than 1,800 people lost their lives.

This lack of transportation — what scholars call “transportation poverty” — left people stranded in the city’s bowl-shaped geography, unable to escape when the levees failed.

Recovery that made things worse

After Hurricane Katrina, the federal government created the Road Home program to help homeowners rebuild. But the program had a devastating design flaw: It calculated aid based on prehurricane home value or repair costs, whichever was less.

That meant low-income homeowners, who already lived in areas with lower property values due to the history of discrimination, received less money. A family whose US$50,000 home needed $80,000 in repairs would receive only $50,000, while a family whose $200,000 home needed the same $80,000 in repairs would receive the full repair amount. The average gap between damage estimates and rebuilding funds was $36,000.

As a result, people in poor and Black neighborhoods had to cover about 30% of rebuilding costs after all aid, while those in wealthy areas faced only about 20%. Families in the poorest areas had to pay thousands of dollars out-of-pocket to complete repairs, even after government help and insurance, and that slowed the recovery process.

This pattern isn’t unique to New Orleans. A study examining data from Hurricane Andrew in Miami (1992) and Hurricane Ike in Galveston (2008) found that housing recovery was consistently slow and unequal in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Lower-income families are less likely to have adequate insurance or savings for quick rebuilding. Low-value homes with extensive damage still had not regained their prestorm value four years later, while higher-value homes sustaining even moderate damage gained value.

Ten years after Katrina, while 70% of white residents felt New Orleans had recovered, only 44% of Black residents could look around their neighborhood and say the same.

Community-led solutions for climate resilience

Katrina’s lessons in the inequality of disasters are important for communities today as climate change brings more extreme weather.

Federal Emergency Management Agency denial rates for disaster aid remain high due to bureaucratic obstacles such as complex application processes that bounce survivors among multiple agencies, often resulting in denials and delays of critical funds. These are the same systemic barriers that added to the reasons Black communities recovered more slowly after Hurricane Katrina. FEMA’s own advisory council reported that institutional assistance policies tend to enrich wealthier, predominantly white areas, while underserving low-income and minority communities throughout all stages of disaster response.

The lessons from New Orleans also point to ways communities can build disaster resilience across the entire population. In particular, as cities plan protective measures — elevating homes, buyout programs and flood-proofing assistance — Hurricane Katrina showed the need to pay attention to social vulnerabilities and focus aid where people need the most assistance.

The choice America faces

In our view, one of Katrina’s most important lessons is about social injustice. The disproportionate suffering in Black communities wasn’t a natural disaster but a predictable result of policies concentrating risk in marginalized neighborhoods.

In many American cities, policies still leave some communities facing a greater risk of disaster damage. To protect residents, cities can start by investing in vulnerable areas, empowering a community-led recovery and ensuring race, income or ZIP code never again determine who receives help with the recovery.

Natural disasters don’t have to become human catastrophes. Confronting the policies and other factors that leave some groups at greater risk can avoid a repeat of the devastation the world saw in Katrina.

Ivis García receives funding from National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ford Foundation, National Academy of Sciences, Fundación Comunitaria de Puerto Rico, UNIDOS, Texas Appleseed, Natural Hazard Center, Chicago Community Trust, American Planning Association, and Salt Lake City Corporation.

Deidra D Davis receives funding from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The views expressed are those of Deidra D Davis and do not necessarily represent those of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Walter Gillis Peacock receives funding from the National Science Foundation to conduct research related to issues discussed in this article. The opinions expressed are those of Walter Gillis Peacock and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation.

– ref. One of Hurricane Katrina’s most important lessons isn’t about storm preparations – it’s about injustice – https://theconversation.com/one-of-hurricane-katrinas-most-important-lessons-isnt-about-storm-preparations-its-about-injustice-261936

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Fred L. Pincus, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Two big assumptions underlie President Donald Trump’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. The first is that discrimination against people of color is a thing of the past. The second is that DEI policies and practices discriminate against white people – especially white men – in what’s sometimes called “reverse discrimination.”

I’m a sociologist who’s spent decades studying race and inequality, and when I read the documents and statements coming out of the Trump White House, these assumptions jump out at me again and again – usually implicitly, but always there.

The problem is that the evidence doesn’t back these assumptions up.

For one thing, if discrimination against white Americans were widespread, you might expect large numbers to report being treated unfairly. But polling data shows otherwise. A 2025 Pew survey found that 70% of white Americans think Black people face “some” or “a lot” of discrimination in general, and roughly two-thirds say the same of Asian and Hispanic people. Meanwhile, only 45% of white Americans believe that white people in general experience that degree of discrimination.

In other words, white Americans believe that people of color, as a group, face more discrimination than white people do. People of color agree – and so do Americans overall.

In a second national study, using data collected in 2023, Americans were asked if they had personally experienced discrimination within the past year. Thirty-eight percent of white people said they had, compared to 54% of Black Americans, 50% of Latinos and 42% of Asian Americans. In other words, white Americans are much less likely to say that they’ve been discriminated against than people of color.

The ‘hard’ numbers show persistent privilege

These statistics are sometimes called “soft” data because they reflect people’s perceptions rather than verified incidents. To broaden the picture, it’s worth looking at “hard” data on measures like income, education and employment outcomes. These indicators also suggest that white Americans as a group are advantaged relative to people of color.

For example, federal agencies have documented racial disparities in income for decades, with white Americans, as a group, generally outearning Black and Latino Americans. This is true even when you control for education. When the Census Bureau looked at median annual earnings for Americans between 25 and 64 with at least a bachelor’s degree, it found that Black Americans received only 81% of what comparably educated white Americans earned, while Latinos earned only 80%. Asian Americans, on the other hand, earned 119% of what white people earned.

These gaps persist even when you hold college major constant. In the highest-paying major, electrical engineering, Black Americans earned only 71% of what white people did, while Latinos earned just 73%. Asian Americans, in contrast, earned 104% of what white people earned. In the lowest-paid major, family and consumer sciences, African Americans earned 97% of what white people did, and Latinos earned 94%. Asian Americans earned 117% of what white people earned. The same general pattern of white income advantage existed in all majors with two exceptions: Black people earned more in elementary education and nursing.

Remember, this is comparing individuals with a bachelor’s degree or higher to people with the same college major. Again, white Americans are still advantaged in most career paths over Black Americans and Latinos.

Disparities persist in the job market

Unemployment data show similar patterns. The July 2025 figures for workers at all education levels show that Black people were 1.9 times more likely to be unemployed than white Americans. Latinos were 1.4 times more likely to be unemployed, and Asian Americans, 1.1 times.

This same white advantage still occurs when looking only at workers who have earned a bachelor’s degree or more. Black Americans who have earned bachelor’s degrees or higher were 1.3 times more likely to be unemployed than similarly educated white Americans as of 2021, the last year for which data is available. Latinos with college degrees were 1.4 times more likely to be unemployed than similar white Americans. The white advantage was even higher for those with only a high school degree or less. Unfortunately, data for Asian Americans weren’t available.

In another study, researchers sent 80,000 fake resumes in response to 10,000 job listings posted by 97 of the largest employers in the country. The credentials on the resumes were essentially the same, but the names signaled race: Some had Black-sounding names, like Lakisha or Leroy, while others had more “white-sounding” names like Todd or Allison. This method is known as an “audit study.”

This research, which was conducted between 2019 and 2021, found that employers were 9.5% more likely to contact the Todds and Allisons than the Lakishas and Leroys within 30 days of receiving a resume. Of the 28 audit studies that have been conducted since 1989, each one showed that applicants with Black- or Latino-sounding names were less likely to be contacted that those with white-sounding or racially neutral names.

Finally, a 2025 study analyzed 600,000 letters of recommendation for college-bound students who used the Common App form during the 2018-19 and 2019-20 academic years. Only students who applied to at least one selective college were included. The study found that letters for Black and Latino students were shorter and said less about their intellectual promise.

Similarly, letters in support of first-generation students – that is, whose parents hadn’t graduated from a four-year college, and who are disproportionately likely to be Black and Latino – had fewer sentences dedicated to their scientific, athletic and artistic abilities, or their overall academic potential.

These and other studies don’t provide evidence of massive anti-white discrimination. Although scattered cases of white people being discriminated against undoubtedly exist, the data suggest that white people are still advantaged relative to non-Asian people of color. White Americans may be less advantaged than they were, but they’re still advantaged.

While it’s true that many working-class white Americans are having a tough time in the current economy, it’s not because of their race. It’s because of their class. It’s because of automation and overseas outsourcing taking away good jobs. It’s because of high health care costs and cuts in the safety nets.

In other words, while many working-class white people are struggling now, there’s little evidence race is the problem.

Fred L. Pincus does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Reverse discrimination? In spite of the MAGA bluster over DEI, data shows white Americans are still advantaged – https://theconversation.com/reverse-discrimination-in-spite-of-the-maga-bluster-over-dei-data-shows-white-americans-are-still-advantaged-262394

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Annika Abell, Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Tennessee

Consumers don’t mind when companies use misspelled words – think Lyft for “lift” or Froot Loops for “fruit loops” – as their brand names, as long as the alterations aren’t too extreme and the misspelling makes sense.

Those are the main findings of a new peer-reviewed paper I published with fellow marketing scholar Leah Warfield Smith. This builds on previous work that found that using misspelled brand names usually backfires.

Misspelled brand names like Kool-Aid, Reddi-wip and Crumbl seem to be everywhere. They are especially common in the names of smartphone apps and in certain industries, like fashion. Companies often do this to stand out or perhaps so they can use the misspelled word as their domain name.

Despite their popularity, we know little about how consumers respond to different types of misspelled names, especially when those names deviate significantly from correct or standard spelling. Our study aims to fill this gap.

In a series of six experiments, we tested consumer reactions to fictional and several real brand names with varying levels and types of misspellings.

Mild misspellings, such as combining two real words such as SoftSoap were perceived just as positively as correctly spelled names. When consumers saw different levels of misspellings – consider the brand names Eazy Clean, Eazy Klean and Eezy Kleen – they reacted more negatively the further the name deviated from the correct spelling “easy clean.”

However, we also found that relevance matters. A misspelled name that aligns with the product or brand identity can still be successful. For example, consumers responded just as well to Bloo Fog – a playful nod to Oolong tea – as to the correctly spelled “blue fog.” In contrast, Blewe Fog – a misspelling without a linguistic connection to the product’s name – performed worse.

Other experiments showed similar, more positive effects when the name related to the owner’s identity, for example Sintymental Moments by Joe Sinty, or a visual cue as in Toadal Fitness with a toad logo. In each case, the misspelling was more acceptable when it made conceptual sense to consumers.

Why it matters

The findings suggest that two main concepts play a role in how consumers process brand names: linguistic fluency – or how easily a name is pronounced and read – and conceptual fluency – how easily the meaning of a name is understood or how well it aligns with the product.

Linguistic fluency decreases with more severe misspellings, resulting in more negative responses. But if the misspelling adds some kind of meaning – related to the product, person or logo – these adverse effects can be easily mitigated.

For marketers and brand strategists, the takeaway is that misspellings can work, but only when they make sense. Naming a tea brand Bloo Fog might succeed where Blewe Fog fails, but only if consumers understand the name-product connection. Understanding when a misspelling helps or hurts a brand is crucial to crafting the right brand name; ideally, one that can be perceived positively while reaping the benefits of misspellings, such as increased memorability, uniqueness or trademark acquisition.

What still isn’t known

While this research uncovers how consumers react to different types of misspellings, it leaves open important questions about long-term effects. For example, do consumers still notice the misspelling in a 60-year-old brand name like Kwik Trip, a convenience store chain in the Midwest?

We also do not know how the effects of misspellings play out across different languages, cultures or product categories.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Annika Abell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Misspelled names may give brands a Lyft – if the spelling isn’t too weird – https://theconversation.com/misspelled-names-may-give-brands-a-lyft-if-the-spelling-isnt-too-weird-256792