Dear Commons Community,

Charles M. Blow has a column in the NY Times today that highlights the results of the 2010 census (local New York data to be released next week) that will show that New York City’s black population  is declining.  If those data come in as expected, it will be the first drop in the black population of New York City on a census since at least 1880, according to our own Professor Andy Beveridge (Queens College). The white, Asian and Hispanic populations are all expected to grow.   Blow speculates that the reasons for the decline  include the loss of manufacturing jobs, and a migration of blacks back to the South as well as to the suburbs.  He also speculates that  another reason is the hostility between the NYC police and black males over the past ten years.  He quotes that there were a record 580,000 “stop-and-frisks” in the city in 2009. Most of those stopped (55 percent) were black, young and almost all were male.

Tony