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We are committed to generating and synthesizing
research on key civil rights and equal opportunity policies that
have been neglected or overlooked.
All of The Civil Rights Project’s research relates
to race and ethnicity, and we generally organize our research around
substantive topics and their racial implications. In this section,
we highlight our work that focuses on particular racial or ethnic
groups. We focus on these groups for several reasons. Issues of
concern to some groups are often ignored or lost in general civil
rights discussions of a larger issue. Also, civil rights problems
facing a particular group may be especially serious for that group,
such as the lack of race and ethnic data collected on Asian Pacific
Americans. Moreover, current events and public policy trends often
make it urgent to address an issue of special relevance or significant
impact on a specific group, such as proposals to eliminate bilingual
education.
Examples of our work include:
- Asian Americans in Metro Boston:
Growth, Diversity, and Complexity explores how in the late
20th century, statistics were used to portray Asian Pacific Americans
as a monolithic Model Minority, a community in which everyone
was well-educated and well-off, a concept that is often used to
drive a wedge between minority communities.” Mindful of
the potential of statistics to perpetuate myths and misunderstandings
about Asian Americans, we are determined in this report to utilize
data drawn from the 2000 U.S. Census to paint as accurately as
possible a portrait of the often ignored and misrepresented Asian
American community in Metro Boston.
- “The Latino Civil Rights
Crisis" (co-sponsored with the Tomás Rivera Policy
Institute): December 3,1997, in Los Angeles, CA and December 5,
1997, in Washington D.C. This conference featured important new
research on a variety of civil rights policy changes that could
severely curtail the civil rights of Latinos, in areas such as
college admissions and aid, voting rights, the rights of legal
immigrants, and policies limiting bilingual education and school
desegregation. A number of the nation’s leading scholars
and advocates participated and presented new papers addressing
these critical issues.
- “Emerging
Civil Rights Issues in the Asian American Community”
(co-sponsored with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center): October
4-5, 2002 in Cambridge, MA. This roundtable was designed as a
strategic planning session to help map advocacy and research strategies
for addressing civil rights issues facing the Asian American community
in areas such as health, housing, community development, education,
and post-September 11 discrimination. The roundtable also focused
on strategies to better address issues facing Asian American subgroups
and for improving data collection on Asian Americans in the next
decade. Leading academics and advocates (working at national,
state, and community levels) from across the nation participated.
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