A few weeks ago, we reported on the new LPGA policy of kicking out any golfers who don’t speak English proficiently. Apparently the sponsors of the tournament are not too happy about the English-only plan and says it may re-examine its sponsorship. From AdAge:

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Saying it was “flabbergasted” by the Ladies Professional Golf Association’s new policy requiring “effective communication in English on the part of all of our Tour members,” State Farm is urging the group to reconsider — or the insurer may reconsider its sponsorship.

And State Farm is not the only sponsor reexamining its relationship to the LPGA. Choice Hotels International is “monitoring” the situation, which could mean nothing or it could mean they will follow State Farm’s lead should the insurance giant pull its sponsorship.

For now the LPGA is standing firm and defending its policy.

Democratic leaders say the Democratic convention last week was the most racially diverse in history. The 4,438 delegates break down approximately like this:

- 57% white
- 24 % black
- 12 % Hispanic
- 5 % Asian/Pacific Islander
- 2.5 % Native American

By contrast, the Republican party has long been considered the “old white man party.” According to the L.A. Times, the party is no longer attempting to dispel that notion, with a convention that is whiter and older than in past years.

ST. PAUL, MINN. — – Michael Steele was once the symbol of the Republican Party’s ambitions to expand its reach into black America — a high-ranking African American elected official who traveled the country telling longtime Democrats why the GOP should be their new home.

But as he stepped onto the stage Wednesday to deliver a prime-time speech, he was greeted with a disheartening sight: Out of 2,380 Republican delegates in St. Paul, only 36 were black, or 1.5%.

That’s a jarring decline from four years ago, when the GOP, eager to chip away at the Democratic Party’s black voter base in the South and big cities, seeded the presidential convention with minorities, including 167 black delegates, according to a report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington.

Last Thursday, Sen. Barack Obama accepted the nomination of the Democratic party for President of the United States. His acceptance speech fell on the 45th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. “I have a dream” speech. Whether this was coincidence or planned is not clear - the convention schedule was supposedly set before he became the presumptive nominee.

Still, the historic nature of the event was not lost on black leaders. It is especially moving for older African Americans, as reported by Politico.com. Rep. Jim Clybourn (D-SC), who told the web site:

“I think my most emotional moment came the night of South Dakota and Montana. … I was thinking about all those times I was telling people, ‘Be what you want to be when you grow up’ and, hell, I didn’t believe it. … It’s a big moment and, with these sorts of things, you usually don’t expect to see the day.”

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), a longtime leader in the civil rights struggle, said:

“A few days ago, I was speaking to a group, and one young lady asked me, ‘What do you think Dr. King would say about Barack Obama’s nomination?’ I said, ‘Young lady, I don’t know, but I have a feeling he would look down and say, ‘Hallelujah.’”

Beverly Tatum, president of Spelman College, a historically black college for women founded in 1881

“I was born in 1954, and in 1954 we would not be having this conversation. So the fact that we have come to a place in our society where there are enough people willing to endorse, through their votes, financial support and political capital, a black male candidate is very significant in terms of how society has evolved.”

Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP:

“I think this would be something that [civil rights leaders such as King] would have hoped for, but I don’t believe they would have imagined it happening now, so quickly, so soon.”

It is possible, given polling that suggests younger Americans are less hung up about race (and grew up, supposedly, in a post-racial climate), that African Americans under say, 30 years old may not have the same opinions about the historic significance. The attitudes of younger African Americans will be explored in a future post.

More than six in ten U.S. voters say they could support an openly gay candidate for president of the United States, according to a new Zogby International poll.

The poll asked 1,089 likely voters if they would support an openly gay president, U.S. senator, vice president or cabinet-level secretary if they believed the individual was the most qualified person for the job. Sixty-five percent of survey participants indicated that they “strongly” or “somewhat” agree they could support the presidential candidate.

Seventy-one percent of respondents claimed they would support the appointment of an openly gay cabinet-level secretary.

The Zogby poll underscores a Gallup poll conducted last year which also showed a majority of Americans willing to support a gay or lesbian president. Interestingly, the only kind of candidate a majority of Americans could NOT support, (out of Catholic, Jewish, African-American, female, Hispanic, Muslim, married three times, over 72 years of age, or gay) was an atheist.

The Los Angeles Times today opined that such openness is only likely to rise, given a greater level of acceptance of gays and lesbians.

Critics of such polls will argue that they reflect a homophobic version of the Bradley Effect — named for former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley — in which racist voters lie about their willingness to vote for a black candidate. But even if some respondents say they will vote for a gay candidate for fear of seeming politically incorrect, that is itself a comment on how far gays and lesbians have come.

With same-sex marriage, as with gay rights generally, the younger generation is leading the way. Last month’s Field poll found that opposition to Proposition 8 was greatest among voters under 30 years of age. That was consistent with a finding by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that roughly half of adults under 30 supported same-sex marriage. The trend is clear: Support for gay rights and same-sex marriage is being driven by generational change.

But differences among age groups cannot completely explain the greater tolerance for gays and lesbians. Thanks to the gay-rights movement, Americans of all ages are likelier to have openly homosexual relatives, neighbors and co-workers. Those personal contacts make it harder for decent people to accept discrimination against gays and lesbians — including at the ballot box.

The LPGA has a new policy: learn English or be kicked out. Effective immediately, the organization will require new players to speak English. Starting in 2009, long-term LPGA members can face suspension if they can’t pass an oral evaluation of English skills.

The party line from the LPGA is that they want to help athletes in their professional development and succeed off the golf course as well as on it. It doesn’t exactly answer the ‘why now?’ question.

There are 121 international players from 26 countries on the LPGA Tour, including 45 players from South Korea.

“If it weren’t for Hispanic births, the U.S. could be confronting long-term population declines similar to those in Germany, Japan and other industrialized countries.”

That’s the conclusion reached by the reporter of this Dallas Morning News article.

Hispanics are the only ethnic group now producing more than two children per family, according to a Census Bureau report released Monday. That’s the number necessary to replace the mother and father and keep the population stable.

The average U.S. woman produces 1.9 children, but broken down by ethnicity, the numbers are 1.7 for Asian Americans, 1.8 for non-Hispanic whites, 2.0 for blacks and 2.3 for Hispanics. American Indians and Native Americans weren’t included in the report. The fertility rates are sufficient, combined with immigration, to keep the U.S. population growing.

According to this New York Times, Asian American young professionals are at the forefront of demographic shift Long Island City and downtown Brooklyn. Asian Americans, the story reports, account for 15 to 50 percent of the initial sales in some of the new condominiums under construction in those neighborhoods, even though Asians account for only 10 percent of the city’s population. Now some developers are trying to accelerate this trend by marketing heavily in the local Chinese and Korean media.

This demographic shift does not suggest that satellite Chinatowns and Koreatowns will pop up around these neighborhoods? Just the opposite, the article suggests: Asians, at least in New York, are going mainstream at an ever increasing rate.

…the relatively high concentrations of Asians moving to these neighborhoods may just be a sign that like their counterparts who grew up in the early-20th-century Italian and Jewish enclaves on the Lower East Side, these young Asian-Americans have more buying power than their parents’ generation and they are using it to meld into mainstream New York.

“Like their counterparts who grew up in the early-20th-century Italian and Jewish enclaves on the Lower East Side,” these young Asian Americans have more buying power than their parents’ generation and they are using it to meld into mainstream New York.

On the site newurbangeography.com, Thomas Tseng writes that millennials, the generation generally born between 1980 and 2000, will significantly alter not only the racial makeup of the U.S., but also will contribute to a broader and more inclusive idea of racial identity.

Acording to recent figures from the 2008 Current Population Survey, 44 percent of those born since the beginning of the 80’s belong to some racial or ethnic category other than “non-Hispanic white”. As a previous blog post points out, Census Bureau projections showing whites as a minority by 2050, and Millennials may be leading the wave of that shift. According to Tseng:

Given their more varied disposition, it should hardly be surprising that Millennials are blurring the color lines that have long-marked previous American generations. According to market research firm Teen Research Unlimited, 60 percent of American teens say they have friends of different ethnic backgrounds. More telling, however, is a 2006 Gallup Poll showing that 95 percent of young people (ages 18 to 29) approved interracial dating—compared to only 45 percent among respondents over the age of 64. Likewise, a USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted last year among teens showed that 57 percent have dated someone of another race or ethnic group—up 40 percent from when Gallup last polled teens the question back in 1980.

Thomas Tseng is a principal at New American Dimensions and will be contributing to this blog as well. Read the rest of his piece here.

Some startling projections from the U.S. Census Bureau. The racial make-up of the U.S. is changing so fast, according to the Bureau, that the country will be a majority-minority population in only one generation. From The NY Times:

The main reason for the accelerating change is significantly higher birthrates among immigrants. Another factor is the influx of foreigners, rising from about 1.3 million annually today to more than 2 million a year by midcentury, according to projections based on current immigration policies.

The Summer Olympics have reopened a lot of controversies about China’s record on human rights. But one might assume that Chinese Americans are uniformly thrilled to see Beijing host the Games.

According to the New York Times, feelings are mixed. Many Chinese Americans have mixed feelings about China and the communist government’s policies, but that almost unanimously proud of the Chinese people, how they have put the games together, and what the Olympics mean in general for the country.

Joe Lam, president of L3 Advertising who moved to New York 35 years ago from Hong Kong, said he watched the opening ceremony for the Olympics twice on Friday night, the second time with his daughters — ages 18 and 22 — who he said had little overt connection to Asia.

But watching the spectacle, with its blend of China’s ancient grandeur and dazzling modern technology, “was like a religious experience for them,” he said.

Mr. Lam said he was not a fan of the Communist Party, but, like many others, he noted the history that makes these Olympics resonate so deeply: 150 years of invasions and turmoil, from the Opium Wars to the Japanese invasion, civil war and the disastrous policies of Mao, which left China far behind the West.

“Our joy is not for Communists,” Mr. Lam said. “It’s for what hosting the Olympics means to the history of the Chinese people.”