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Every metropolitan area in the nation is racially segregated, and Los Angeles is no exception. We tolerate residential segregation because we’re convinced that it happened informally — because of personal choices and private discrimination. But what cemented our separate neighborhoods is something most of us have forgotten — government’s unconstitutional and systematic insistence on segregated housing in the mid-20th century, establishing patterns that persist to this day. The 2010 census data show that 60% of Los Angeles’s African Americans live in neighborhoods where few whites are present. The exposure of blacks to whites is as minimal as it is in Chicago or Newark; concentrated African American poverty is as common in L.A. as in New York or Pittsburgh. The New Deal created the nation’s first civilian public housing in the 1930s, segregated not only in the South, but nationwide. In his autobiography, the African American poet Langston Hughes recounted his adolescence in Worl...

Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos Côte d’Ivoire, 1972 Whenever African writers are on a panel together, we are asked about the continent as a whole—its literature, its future, its political woes and economic potential. Whenever African writers get together on our own, we talk about glossaries. These additions to the main text, often vetted, if not entirely decided, by publishers, are crucial to how it will be received by readers. But when African writers talk about glossaries, we don’t just exchange tips. (How long? How comprehensive? By whom?) We talk about whether to include one at all, whether to offer glosses within the text or omit all glossing entirely. To gloss, or not to gloss? That is the question. Most of us reading in the postcolonies never received glosses for the strange foods and weather of Europe. We had to figure out what snow and crumpets were on our own. When Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was published in 1958, his British publisher Heinnemann included a bilin...

OVERVIEW “Wherever there is conflict in the world, a few years later you start to see that population showing up here,” says Andriana Abariotes, executive director of Twin Cities LISC ( Local Initiatives Support Corporation ). Minneapolis-St. Paul has a long history of welcoming immigrants and refugees from around the world and is home to many organizations serving these populations. St. Paul’s East Side, where LISC has worked for years, is home to a rich cultural mix of immigrants including Hmong , Somali, Karin, Bhutanese, Sudanese, Latinos and others, alongside Native and African Americans. “Wherever there is conflict in the world, a few years later you start to see that population showing up here.” “It is a hard to reach population,” says Amy Gillman at the LISC national office . These are “highly impoverished and culturally diverse residents , who face significant barriers to physical and social activities related to health.” To make matters worse , the city is experiencing a ...

Yesterday, August 22, a U.S. District Court judge sentenced Highlands Ranch resident Caroline Zarate Boyle after she pleaded guilty to ripping off her former employer, the U.S. Postal Service , by pretending to have cancer. This admission and the punishment she'll receive as a result, outlined below, have earned her a place in the Colorado Cancer Faker Hall of Fame, which has inducted seven members in the past eight years. Continue to meet the six other inductees via excerpts and links from our previous coverage, followed by new details about Boyle's case. Tausha Marsh, left. File photo If Tausha Marsh Did Fake Cancer, Here's Hoping She Invested Her Profits With the Mormon Madoff THURSDAY, APRIL 9, 2009, AT 11 A.M. Attention, Denver! Please keep your wallet in your front pocket at all times, shred all documents, and ask your girlfriend for two forms of ID before you let her in your apartment. Because apparently it's Really Brazen But Not All That Clever Scam Week . ...