White Women

ON MARCH 25, 1965, between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit housewife, was driving with a black man named Leroy Moton from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. A quartet of Ku Klux Klansmen tailing the car pulled up alongside Liuzzo and shot her to death.Hundreds of miles away, Mary Stanton had finished her job as a secretary at a Manhattan brokerage firm. Only 18 and out of high school for a year, Stanton had little knowledge of the civil rights movement. But feminist leanings were beginning to stir within her. She knew she didn't want to get married and have a house in the suburbs or, in her words, spend the rest of her career being required to "make and serve the boss' coffee [and]

HOUSTON -- Like other black women who have battled breast cancer, Karen Jackson found the odds stacked against her when she learned the fearsome diagnosis three years ago.While black women are slightly less likely to develop breast cancer, their mortality rate is 5 percent higher than for white women, in part because many black women do not seek treatment until the cancer is more advanced.Then, when Jackson went to a support group, she found herself isolated and ignored. The group, which was mostly white, did not think about ordering wigs suitable for black women, she said.

Charging that the Army has unfairly targeted black soldiers, the NAACP yesterday called for an independent investigation of the sexual misconduct scandal at Aberdeen Proving Ground.Officials from NAACP branches in Harford and Baltimore counties objected to the Army's initial response -- relieving of duty 20 male sergeants and instructors from the Ordnance Center and School soon after the scandal broke in November. The officials charged that only black males are being investigated and prosecuted, many of them on the basis of complaints by white female recruits.

Author and social commentator Bebe Moore Campbell refuses to dodge the thorny issues.She tackles raw emotions fanned by the Rodney King affair. She takes on the subject of uneasy race relations among blacks, whites, Asians and Hispanics.She dives headlong into the complicated love attractions of black men and black women, black men and white women. She shines the spotlight on friendships between black women and white women. She puts the hot-button topic of affirmative action on the table for discussion.

Della Myers is trading in her calculator, her pencils, her business suits and her desk for a gun, a badge, a car with a siren and a blue uniform.Myers, a former accounting clerk at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, is one of 25 recruits in the most racially diverse class to graduate from the Howard County police academy.The new officers will graduate tonight in a ceremony at River Hill High School and will begin patrolling the county's streets Monday."Everything hasn't been peaches and cream; there's been grueling days of training and lots of hard work, but we've stuck together," Myers, 30, said this week after taking one of her last exams.

On the eve of Pope John Paul II's historic visit to Baltimore, I sort of feel the way I did a few years ago when my in-laws drove some 300 miles to arrive at our house at 9 a.m. on a Saturday for an unannounced visit. With a teething baby, a toddler who had just emptied the kitchen cabinets of their pots and pans and a sink full of dishes, I wanted to tell my in-laws to get back in their car and circle the block a couple times to give us a chance to regroup.Just as I didn't want my husband's family to think ill of us for being at less than our best, so, too, I'm a little embarrassed about the state of my country upon the visit of this religious and world leader.

TEN WOMEN set wife-battering O.J. free.Add it up for yourself. There were 10 women on the 12-person jury. They looked at pictures of Nicole Brown Simpson's bruised face, heard the frantic 911 calls, listened to what the prosecutors vividly called a plea from the grave and said, in effect, that none of it mattered.Wife-beater O.J. Simpson, the jurors concluded, was not a wife killer.In fact, female juror Brenda Moran, in her postmortem, went so far as to say the prosecution's emphasis on domestic violence was "a waste of time."

San Jose, California. -- I was an affirmative-action hire, back in 1978. As a result, I became the first woman on my newspaper's editorial board.Was I qualified? I certainly didn't have much experience. My boss took a chance on me. I like to think it paid off for him, as well as for me. At any rate, I made the editorial board safe for women, who now make up half the editorial-pages staff.Defenders of affirmative action have a new strategy: Consider the ladies. A liberal coalition has kicked off a campaign to cast affirmative action as a gender issue rather than a racial issue.

THIS PAST Sunday the Opinions section of my newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, featured a "positive-negative" discussion of affirmative action, which is fast becoming the subject du jour for high-minded writers. On one side was a William Raspberry column, on the other a Thomas Sowell column.It was interesting, but a little bit of a cop-out (surely unintentional), to let opinions from two black writers carry this argument.The truth is that affirmative action as a political and philosophical issue is destined to be mostly a black-vs.

Once upon a time, we believed America was a melting pot. But then we decided it wasn't.Multiculturalists suggested the salad bar was a better metaphor. You can mix everyone together, but each person and/or vegetable remains distinct. The problem with this theory was, of course, what to do with the salad dressing.Now, there's an even better idea.The new thinking is based on the life of Michael Jackson, our most successful crossover artist, who figured out how to be black and white simultaneously.

A new study that suggests that racial differences in biology could be a key reason black women are more likely to die of breast cancer than white women has reignited an intense debate among medical experts about the role of genetics versus factors such as poverty, diet and unequal access to quality health care. For nearly three decades, researchers have known about the disparity in death rates, but they have been puzzled over the reasons why. In Maryland, for example, the breast cancer death rate for black women is 15 percent higher than for white women, even though African-Americans have a lower incidence of the disease.

U.S. soldier sentenced in killing of prisoners VILSECK, Germany: A U.S. soldier pleaded guilty yesterday to charges of accessory to murder and was sentenced to eight months in prison for his role in the killing of four Iraqi prisoners who were bound, blindfolded, shot and dumped in a canal. Spc. Steven Ribordy, 25, of Salina, Kan., also will receive a bad conduct discharge from the Army as part of a plea deal. In addition, he agreed to testify against other members of his unit. Ribordy testified that he had helped stand guard as the prisoners were killed by other members of his patrol in early 2007.

BOSTON - Is there anyone who still remembers the folksy winter tableau? Eight Democratic candidates against the picturesque backdrop of Iowa and New Hampshire. It was a feel-good photo op of diversity. The Democratic Party was black and white and Hispanic, male and female and proud. Our party, its leaders said, looks like America. As for Barack and Hillary? Yes, there were the predictable magazine cover stories asking whether America was "ready" for an African-American or a woman. But these were not long-shot candidates, a favorite son or daughter running to prove a point.

This primary campaign has been quite a learning experience, but the lessons have mainly been bitter ones for women. Here are some things I learned on the way to the Democratic National Convention: * People are more sensitive to racism than sexism. My twenty-something daughter returned home extremely agitated after casting her ballot in the Democratic primary. "This white guy was wearing a T-shirt that read, 'Hillary, cook my food, but don't run my country,' and no one said a thing. If I wore a T-shirt that said, 'Obama, shine my shoes but don't run my country,' I'd be called a racist."

There is a poignant significance to the passing last week of Mildred Loving at a time when a biracial senator leads the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Their stories are connected by time, skin color and a Supreme Court decision. Mildred and Richard P. Loving had been married only five weeks in 1958 when the sheriff burst into their Central Point, Va., bedroom with two deputies. They shined flashlights in the couple's eyes and a menacing voice demanded, "Who is this woman you're sleeping with?"

For scores of attractive, educated and successful black women in their 40s and beyond, home alone isn't just a 1990 blockbuster movie starring a cute child actor. It has become their existence. According to the latest U.S. Census, nearly 50 percent of black women between the ages of 30 and 34 have never been married, compared with 16 percent of white women. And 42 percent of black women of any adult age have never been married. "Black women are the most unpartnered group in the United States," says Dr. Audrey B. Chapman, a family therapist, host of her own talk show on Howard University radio WHUR-FM and author of Seven Attitude Adjustments for Finding a Loving Man. Daunting as these statistics are, imagine the application to a subset of Christian black women seeking to become "evenly yoked" with Christian black men, and you have the focus of Soulmate, the latest DVD documentary by Los Angeles filmmaker Andrea Wiley.

I stood in front of associate professor Barbara Osborne's sports law class at the University of North Carolina last week. The subject was the seldom-talked-about disparity of power and privilege between black and white women in the sports industry. The timing was fitting. This year is the 35th anniversary of Title IX, the congressional legislation that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program that receives federal financial assistance. A week earlier, hundreds attended a convention in Cleveland, the site of the women's basketball Final Four, to celebrate and discuss Title IX, the law that changed the sports landscape in America.

NEW YORK -- Pre-menopausal black women with breast cancer are twice as likely to have a more aggressive tumor than non-black women of any age or post-menopausal black women, scientists report. Doctors hope the finding will encourage more adult black women to undergo routine mammography. "This is powerful information," said Dr. Lisa A. Carey, medical director of the University of North Carolina's Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and lead author of the study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In 2002, the last year for which there are national statistics, 300,000 women between the ages of 18 to 44 were seeking to adopt a child and had taken specific measures to do so. It's not surprising that about half of the women preferred a single non-disabled child under the age of two. What is significant are the racial preferences of these black and white women toward the race of any future adopted child. Eighty-four percent of white women seeking to adopt would "prefer or accept" an African-American child as compared with 75 percent of African-American women who would "prefer or accept" a white child, a difference of only 9 percentage points.

WASHINGTON - New census figures offer dramatic evidence of education's big payback: Income for African-Americans with a four-year college degree has increased so much since the civil rights advances of the 1960s that we have almost closed our historical income gap with four-year, college-educated whites. In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, blacks with a bachelor's degree had a median income of $36,694, which is almost as high as the $38,667 median income of whites with a bachelor's degree.