Soul and Sorcery

News to me: an American black author named Charles R. Saunders is generally regarded as the inventor of the "soul and sorcery" subgenre of fantasy fiction. Starting in the late 1970s, Saunders wrote fantasy adventure stories used African myth and history as his inspiration, to provide an alternative to the more familiar swords and sorcery inspired by Western myth and history--the early examples of which often contained frankly racist and ignorant portrayals of Africans and pseudo-Africans.

New Evidence on the History and Ancestry of Europeans

New DNA evidence for a large-scale Bronze Age migration of the Yamnaya people from southern Russia into Central and Northern Europe. They brought with them genes for lactose tolerance and innovations in material culture.

This evidence also bears on the debate about the early spread of Indo-European languages. Some say it shows that Indo-European languages spread from the Russian steppes to Europe, but another possibility is that there were two waves and two routes of transmission: one from the Near East, through Anatolia, and another via the southern Russian steppe.

The Connection between Over- and Under-Policing

An article in New York Magazine discusses the making of a documentary film about "Grim Sleeper" serial killer Lonnie Franklin, Jr. The end of this article is noteworthy, for it raises the issue of the connection between over- and under-policing. Apparently, a lot of black neighborhoods are victims of both; police are overly zealous when it comes to handing out revenue-generating tickets for speeding and other infractions, but insufficiently zealous in investigating murders of low-status members of the community.

Blacks in the U.S.: 50 Years after the Moynihan Report

A recent piece in The Economist discusses persistent U.S. racial inequalities, 50 years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous (infamous?) 1965 report. Among other things, blacks in the U.S. have much lower life expectancy, much greater rates of homicide and incarceration, and much less social mobility than do whites.

Fifty years later, black America still fares badly on many of the predictors of success and signals of distress that concerned Moynihan. If it were a separate country, it would have a worse life expectancy than Mexico, a worse homicide rate than Ivory Coast and a higher proportion of its citizens behind bars than anywhere on earth (see interactive). This is despite the fact that, overall, America is home to the richest, most successful population of black African descent that the world has ever seen.

The above graph shows the rise in both black and white out of wedlock births since 1965. The chart below shows how blacks have much less "social mobility" (specifically, mobility between income quintiles) than do whites: