When Robert C. “Bobby” Scott was elected to Congress in 1992, he was Virginia’s only black representative, chosen by voters in a serpentine district designed to include most of the state’s heavily African American neighborhoods.

Nearly 20 years later, in a rapidly diversifying state, Scott remains Virginia’s only non-white congressman. He still represents a district that stretches from Hampton Roads into Richmond with squiggly boundaries, drawn to maximize black votes.

Is that a problem?

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In the 1970s and 1980s, civil rights leaders pushed to increase the number of African Americans in Congress, said David Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and an expert in black representation.

Because voting was so racially polarized, particularly in the south, that meant creating districts with high percentages of black voters, he said.

Read more at The Washington Post.

As U.S. Census figures roll out and states begin the politically charged process of redrawing state legislative maps, the politics of race is rising up as minority groups demand that their lawmakers look more like the communities they represent.

At issue is just how they do that and the two very different political approaches to promising minorities better representation in state Legislatures. One strategy concentrates minorities in a district, known as packing, the other dilutes them, often called cracking.

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Democrats and political watchers say there’s no question that packing is being pursued.

“It’s a national strategy,” said senior political analyst David A. Bositis at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C. “Democrats want to spread out minorities. Republicans want to create white districts, or ones with a small enough minority population that it won’t have an effect on the vote.”

Read more at the Sparta Independent.

Blacks in the Democratic Party remain enthusiastic about President Obama and his policies despite the ailing economy and a growing concern that the administration is not paying enough attention to the needs of African Americans.

African-American Democratic leaders who attended the Democratic National Committee’s Winter Meeting at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Northwest from Thu., Feb. 24-Sat., Feb. 26, were generous in their praise of Obama.

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David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, has heard the critics of Obama.

“There are some activists who are complaining because they were expecting some things that were not realistically going to happen,” he said. “But overall, African Americans are satisfied with the president.”

This article was previously available at The Washington Informer.

Roderick J. Harrison, demographer and former Chief of Racial Statistics at the U.S. Census Bureau, discussed what the census results, which were released on Thursday, reveal about DC.

Read more at The Washington Post.

Prudential will reveal the findings of its inaugural research study “The African American Financial Experience,” and offer journalists the opportunity to hear leading personal finance and multicultural experts discuss the financial concerns, information preferences, goals and aspirations of the African American population in the U.S. and the critical role America’s financial industry must play to help the community build assets to achieve financial and retirement security.

Read more at Digital Journal.

Two weeks.

That was the longest stretch of time Michael Seals, 58, has ever looked for work. That was the longest stretch, until now.

Seals, an Atlanta native, has watched his hometown grow from charming city to thriving metropolis -- and the fortunes of many fellow African Americans grow with it. He describes himself as a man who is good with his hands, having spent nearly a decade as a supervisor at an area cabinet company. The firm specialized in outfitting kitchens and bathrooms in the high-rises that changed Atlanta's skyline, and in the subdivisions that transformed what had been the countryside into sprawling suburbia, in places as far away as North Carolina and Tennessee.

"By 2008, the housing market here, it just plain fell out," Seals said. "The owner came to me and said they had to cut back. That was the end of my job and the beginning of a very rude awakening."

Overall unemployment fell to a better-than-expected 8.8 percent in March as the economy added roughly 216,000 jobs, the Labor Department announced Friday. Those are the kind of figures that economists say indicate a strengthening recovery, though they caution that it's well below the rate of job growth the nation needs to see -- uninterrupted, for years -- if employment is ever to return to a level comparable to the years before the Great Recession.

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When the recession began in 2007, black and Latino workers lost their jobs at a faster clip, said Roderick Harrison, a Howard University sociologist and demographer who is also a fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Research, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Now, despite the recession's official end and incremental job gains for all types of workers, it's black and Latino workers who are having the hardest time finding work again. The industries that added jobs during the recession -- health care and educational services -- and those that have begun to do so now have historically employed more women then men. That's why the uptick in black unemployment in March was driven largely by black male unemployment, Harrison said.

Black workers are typically less educated than white workers. But before, during and after the recession, black college graduates have been far more likely than their white peers to be unemployed, Harrison said. And for more than a decade, the ability to get to a job in a car has become the key to work. Office jobs -- the kind this month's job report indicated are being created -- are by and large located in far-flung suburbs, not in the cities and inner-ring suburbs where most black people live, Harrison said.

"The jobs are being created in the sorts of places you can't get to without a car or without dedicating significant time and significant resources to the commute," Harrison said.

Read more at the Huffington Post.

Many Americans may remember the Rev. Al Sharpton for his confrontational marches and his booming oratory, demanding – yes, demanding – corrective action for a perceived injustice.

He still marches when he has to. But these days the Rev. Mr. Sharpton is more likely to be seen in pinstripes, meeting with President Obama’s Cabinet officials and raising money from Wall Street firms for his National Action Network (NAN). Former New York Mayor Ed Koch, who once had Sharpton arrested, now calls him a friend. And, on Wednesday, President Obama will travel to New York to attend the NAN’s Twentieth Anniversary and National Convention.

Some political observers see the president's trip as an effort to firm up his African-American base in advance of the 2012 election. Others wonder if it’s the kind of visit that might later become a campaign liability as Mr. Obama tries to woo moderate voters. Still others see it as a mark of acknowledgement that Sharpton has become a more positive force for change, no longer the radical known for interjecting race into every issue.

“Rev. Sharpton has been a strong supporter of President Obama, and I see the president going there and speaking as a natural evolution of sorts in the reverend’s public persona," says David Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based organization that conducts research on issues important to people of color. “It is a mark of acknowledgement by the White House.”

Read more at the Christian Science Monitor.

The last decade hasn’t been kind to majority-black congressional districts across the country.

While the black population nationally ticked up 12 percent in the just-released Census numbers, eight of the top 10 majority-black districts across the country actually experienced population loss, losing an average of more than 10 percent of their black population, according to a review of Census data by The Fix.

Many of these districts lost voters of other races too, and are now in need of significant expansion during this year’s redistricting process.

The population loss is really more of a migration. The black population is moving from the major metropolitan areas – where most of these districts are – and into the suburbs. In fact, of the 15 districts with the greatest black population growth over the last decade, all of them are in the suburbs of these metro areas.

And that could play right into the hands of a Republican Party that controls redistricting in an unprecedented number of states and will be drawing many of these districts.

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“Without question, the last election came at a perfect time for Republicans in terms of taking control of a lot of state legislatures that they hadn’t before,” said David Bositis, an expert on race and politics at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “But the underlying fact is that, if you look at population growth of the U.S. over last 10 years, almost all of the growth came in minority communities.”

Read more at The Washington Post.

Latinos are nearly 20 percent of New Jersey’s population, but a mere six percent of the state legislature.

This weekend, that playing field may change for Hispanics, or stay the same -- for at least a decade.

That is when an 11-member commission working on redrawing the state’s legislative districts is expected to decide on the new legislative map. The commission is made up of five Democrats, five Republicans, and a neutral tie-breaker, in this case a professor from Rutgers University.

The process, which usually is contentious in New Jersey and elsewhere, is being particularly closely watched by Hispanics, who say that they have been ill-served by redistricting efforts in the past.

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Republicans are said to favor “packing,” supposedly because it keeps some predominantly non-Hispanic white, GOP areas theirs to win.

Republicans won't formally say that they support packing, but they brought in packing expert Benjamin Ginsberg.

Democrats and political watchers say there's no question that packing is being pursued.

"It's a national strategy," said senior political analyst David A. Bositis at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C., in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this year. "Democrats want to spread out minorities. Republicans want to create white districts, or ones with a small enough minority population that it won't have an effect on the vote."

Read more at Fox News Latino.

As both political parties push proposals for long-term deficit reduction, Social Security and Medicare are in the crosshairs. We’ll have leading experts on these topics, as well as a meeting with the Treasury Department’s Mark Iwry, a key advisor to the secretary on retirement savings, health care, and employee benefits.

With Baby Boomers moving deeper into their golden years, retirement resources and lifestyle choices loom ever larger. In one recent survey, only 13 percent of Americans said they feel ‘very confident’ they can retire comfortably. The National Press Foundation’s 7th Retirement Issues Program, held from June 12 through June 15 at the Beacon Hotel in Washington, DC, will help journalists keep up with the changes. Fellows will have on-the-record access to leading retirement experts from the federal government, think tanks and interest groups.

US-based business, consumer and lifestyle writers and editors, as well as editorial writers, will take away a wealth of new story ideas, sources and methods.

Speakers will include:

• J. Mark Iwry, Senior Advisor for Retirement and Health Policy, Treasury Department
• Wilhelmina Leigh, Senior Research Associate, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
• Stephen Goss, Chief Actuary, Social Security Administration
• Dallas Salisbury, President and CEO, Employee Benefit Research Institute
• Diane Oakley, Executive Director, National Institute on Retirement Security

Wilhelmina Leigh will make a presentation about Obstacles to Saving for Retirement on June 14, the third day of this four day event, from 9 AM to 10:15 AM.

For more information, visit the National Press Foundation's website.