The University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute in cooperation with King’s alma mater Morehouse College in Atlanta will kick off the first of the webcasts at 10 a.m. EDT on Friday, April 4, when experts from UF and Morehouse, along with institutions in China, India, Kenya and South Africa, discuss and share in real-time King’s meaning for the 21st century, said James Oliverio, director of UF’s Digital Worlds Institute. The other three programs are also scheduled at 10 a.m. on successive Fridays in April, and all can be viewed on the Internet at www.worldhouse.morehouse.edu.

In his “World House” speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, King said “modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think. Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.”

The UF-Morehouse international conversation will use technology to bridge that divide, Oliverio said. “We’re going to have a cultural exchange, a scholarly dialogue and a motivational call to action for the students of today to carry forward the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who proceeded with the nonviolent resistance movement of Mahatma Gandhi in India and influenced Nelson Mandela in South Africa,” he said. “Using technology to literally connect places across the globe simultaneously, we will create a shared virtual space around the world on the network and have performances and workshops over that global platform.”

The outreach developed from a collaboration between UF and Morehouse College, the recipient of about 10,000 pieces of Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal writings in 2006. Terry Mills, a former UF dean who moved to Morehouse last year to become the Margaret Mitchell Marsh Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, said the idea came in discussions he had with Oliverio about how the two institutions might use the acquisition in educational programming.

The innovativeness of the technology at Digital Worlds Institute, which Mills called the “Imac Theater of Videoconferencing” for its ability to allow multiple partners around the globe to engage in an interactive, unified virtual space, made UF the natural choice to help produce the program, he said. “There are also geographic and historical reasons for the connection, notably Gainesville’s close proximity to St. Augustine where Dr. King had led freedom marches as well as its location near the site of the Rosewood massacre,” Mills said.

The purpose of the global discussions is not only to remind the world of King’s legacy but to keep his vision alive, as his message continues to have relevance today, Oliverio said.

“This is a memorial to Dr. King, not just in the sense of looking backward to some academic papers in a museum, but honoring his life’s work in the hopes that students of today at Morehouse, UF and the other participating institutions will reassess their involvement with their own societies in the same way that Dr. King took a stand against oppression of African Americans in the United States,” he said. “Even at the beginning of the 21st century human kind is still butchering each other in tribal conflicts over economic materialism and resources.”

Although King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is well-known among college students, many are not familiar with the “World House” concept mentioned in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech and his writings where he discusses the need to fight racism, war and poverty, he said.

The topic of the April 4 90-minute session is King’s challenge to citizens in “transcending tribe, race, class, nation and religion to embrace the vision of World House.” Speaker presentations as well as performances by artists, dancers and musicians are planned from each participating location, which, besides UF and Morehouse, are the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in India; Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya; and the U.S. Embassy in Johannesburg, South Africa. UF presenters from the Digital Worlds Institute’s Research, Education and Visualization Environment in 101 Norman Hall include Stephanie Evans, an African American studies and women’s studies professor, and drummer Mohamed DaCosta, a lecturer in UF’s College of Fine Arts School of Theatre and Dance. The 60-minute April 11 session will feature UF social anthropologist Faye Harrison and poet Sharon Burney of UF’s African American Studies Program.

“Many people who are involved in the labor movement see African-American workers, other minorities and women as being the key to any hopes of unions recovering some of their organizational strength,” said Robert Zieger, a UF history professor. His new book “For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865” was published this fall by University Press of Kentucky.

With the shift from an industrial to a service-based economy, growing numbers of jobs are emerging in places such as hospitals, nursing homes and entertainment complexes, with minorities taking many of these positions, Zieger said. “If unions don’t organize these workers, they’re not going to be able to sustain a very viable and extensive labor movement,” he said.

As organized labor continues its decline by representing an increasingly smaller segment of the American work force, a bright spot has been the Service Employees International Union, which counts janitors, hospital and nursing home workers and home care staffers among its members, Zieger said. “They are the fastest growing union in the country, with about a million and a half members, and they have had a number of outstanding successes in recent years,” he said.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union, which represents police officers, building inspectors, grounds workers, maintenance workers and administrative and clerical workers and others in the nonfederal public sector, also has a large membership, much of it consisting of women and people of color, he said.

“It’s important to recognize that even in a state like Florida, which we don’t normally think of as being a union-friendly state, there are 400,000 union members, and they, along with their families, represent an important potential political voting bloc,” he said.

In the 2000 presidential election, a coalition of organized labor and blacks worked together to target the minority vote, Zieger said. The formation of this black-labor coalition is an important historical development that has received little attention, he said.

“If a Democratic president is elected in 2008, that, along with legislation now pending before Congress that would make the process of union recognition easier, could generate a rebirth of organized labor,” he said. “If it does, it is likely to feature minority workers.”

Until the 1930s, organized labor’s record on race, particularly that of the American Federation of Labor and the railroad unions, was poor, Zieger said. Many unions explicitly barred blacks from membership and even those that did not actively discourage them from joining maintained collective bargaining agreements with employers that excluded blacks, he said.

An exception was the integrated United Mine Workers, the largest union in the first half of the 20th century, which had black officers, even in the South, he said.

In the 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, actively recruited blacks to work in the rapidly growing auto, steel, textile, meatpacking and rubber tire industries that marked the rise of industrial unionism, Zieger said. “CIO leaders realized that blacks had come to play an important part in these mass-production industries and that if you wanted to organize these industries, you had to organize black workers,” he said.

Even so, blacks tended to occupy less-skilled positions in the factories and often felt that even those unions dedicated to the principles of racial egalitarianism, such as the United Auto Workers Union, weren’t sufficiently responsive to black workers, Zieger said.

“There were tensions going through the post-World War II period and these continue in some ways even today,” he said. “But I think if you look at the current AFL-CIO, which is the primary labor organization in the country, with headquarters in Washington, it seeks to be very responsive to black workers.”

Paul Ortiz, a community studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wrote “Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920,” said Zieger’s book is a crowning achievement. “Professor Zieger’s ‘For Jobs and Freedom’ is the premiere historical synthesis on the complex relationships between African Americans and labor unions from the 19th century to the present,” he said. “It will be the standard text in this field for years to come.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Restrictions to keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States are having the perverse effect of encouraging those who are already here to stay by any means necessary, a new University of Florida study finds.

The culprit is tightened post 9-ll security, which has prompted immigrants to skip visits to their homelands because of the risk of not being allowed back into the U.S., said UF anthropology professor Maxine L. Margolis.

“These draconian measures do not deter undocumented immigrants from trying to enter the country so much as discourage those who are already here from returning home,” said Margolis, whose research is scheduled to be published in the January issue of the journal Human Organization. “The restrictions are doing exactly the opposite of what they intend to do by locking these people in place.”

The research is based on interviews with Brazilian immigrants and applies to other nationalities as well, Margolis said. “Whether they are Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Dominicans or any other group with a large undocumented population, they are experiencing the same problems,” she said.

Unlike in the past, when most illegal immigrants made a single, permanent move to the United States, in the last few decades they have tended to move back and forth between their home and host countries for a variety of economic and social reasons, Margolis said. Many foreigners come here temporarily for jobs paying anywhere from four to 10 times as much money as they would earn in their native countries in order to support their families, but they may return home briefly to see a sick relative or to attend a family wedding or funeral, she said.

It has become increasingly difficult, however, for immigrants to leave the United States and return since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the government tightened restrictions for tourist visas, increased deportation of undocumented foreigners, strengthened border patrols and made it harder for immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses and other legal documents, she said.

Many of these people have children, investments, jobs and apartments in this country and don’t want to risk being unable to return, Margolis said. Even with valid passports and visas, they can be denied re-entry if they previously overstayed the limit on their visa, she said.

One Brazilian immigrant, who owned a floor tile company in New York and had lived in the state for several years with his wife and American-born daughter, flew to Brazil when he learned his elderly father was seriously ill, Margolis said. On his return, he was stopped at JFK International Airport and was deported to Brazil for having previously overstayed his tourist visa, she said.

Some undocumented immigrants have found creative ways to get around the regulations and avoid detection, often at considerable expense, she said.

One Brazilian woman living in North Carolina who was desperate to visit her family returned to the U.S. through the Caribbean islands where she boarded a cruise ship bound for Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, Margolis said. Correctly assuming authorities were unlikely to search for illegal immigrants aboard cruise ships, she got through with her Brazilian passport and flew back to the states, she said.

Margolis’ study also revealed immigrants developing schemes to circumvent the requirements for driver’s licenses. Typically, Brazilian immigrants in the Northeast load up in minivans and drive to states such as Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina, which do not require a green card or valid Social Security card for a license, but some have traveled as far as the West Coast, she said.

So far none of the proposed federal, state or local immigration bills has included a provision that would allow immigrants to travel home to visit family and friends and be assured re-entry into the United States, she said.

Conrad Kottak, a University of Michigan anthropology professor, said Margolis “provides a valuable case study of how one group of transnational migrants — Brazilians in the United States — have been affected by changes in American border policies since the 9/11 attacks. Many of her findings no doubt apply as well to other new immigrant communities.”

Pilgrimages, retreats and conventions are fast becoming one of the most reliable and desirable forms of income for the travel industry, said Harrison Pinckney IV. He did the study for his master’s thesis in UF’s department of tourism, recreation and sports management. Participants usually bring along their families and stretch their visits over three to four days, making a mini-vacation out of the affair by shopping, visiting museums and eating out, Pinckney said. He is now working on a doctoral degree in recreation, parks and tourism at Texas A&M University.

“There may be 80,000 people in town, but they’re not the kind to show up at bars and drive home drunk,” he said. “Because they have their kids with them they might go to a family restaurant or catch a movie afterwards.”

Another advantage of these religious gatherings is they are less likely to be canceled because many churches’ bylaws require congregations to hold annual conventions, Pinckney said. “After 9-11 there was a decline in attendance at professional conferences, but the numbers stayed steady for church conferences and in some cases even increased,” he said.

Although greater attendance at large church-oriented events is part of a broad social trend, Pinckney focused on black churches in his study. Historically, the church has assumed great importance to blacks because it was one of the few places in society that welcomed them, particularly before desegregation, when black-owned businesses were rare, he said.

“More than just a church, it became whatever the African-American community wanted it to be — a civic center, an after-school program and then a summer camp, even a homeless shelter,” he said.

Pinckney distributed questionnaires at seven Church of God by Faith congregations in Florida and Georgia during 2004. A total of 102 participants returned the surveys at the end of the church service or gave them to their pastors the following week.

Eighty-two percent reported having traveled to at least one Church of God by Faith national event. Sixty-one percent said they attended the four-day national convention for its entire length, while 26 percent said they were there for three days. The remaining 13 percent of churchgoers reported going for two days, with no one reporting a shorter visit.

While at the conventions, churchgoers reported sampling a variety of outside events such as sightseeing, shopping, visiting family or friends, and attending local performances or sporting events. The most popular activity was shopping– 30 percent reported heading for retail outlets –followed by visiting family and friends, 21 percent. Attending sports events was least popular, attracting only 5 percent.

Like major sporting events, church-oriented special events have been a financial boon to cities, with some attracting more than 80,000 visitors at a time and generating as much as $18 million for the local economy, Pinckney said. MegaFest, a religious event in Atlanta, draws about 150,000 a year, he said.

Lori Pennington-Gray, director for UF’s Center for Tourism Research and Development and a professor in UF’s tourism, recreation and sports management department who supervised Pinckney’s research, said the travel industry is recognizing the importance of such events by assembling more meeting planners specializing in this type of market, she said.

Because church-oriented special events operate on such a grand scale, they must usually be planned at least a couple of years in advance, Pennington-Gray said. “That makes them less vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy than segments of the leisure market where people’s discretionary income is affected if the economy takes a downturn,” she said.

DeWayne Woodring, executive director of the Religious Conference Management Association headquartered in Indianapolis, said a survey conducted by his organization shows that the number of religious meetings grew 195 percent in the past 10 years.

“Meetings are becoming more and more important because within this increasingly complex and global society, people feel a need to meet with others with whom they share a common faith, bond or purpose,” he said.

“A man and a woman of different races in the movies have a greater statistical probability of dying than of getting married or dating seriously,” said Nadia Ramoutar, who did the research for her doctoral dissertation in mass communications at UF and is now a communications professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine.

White women have not appeared in an interracial relationship in a top-selling film since “Pulp Fiction” in 1994, she said. American Indian women have not been portrayed this way since “Dances with Wolves” in 1995, and the last time an American Indian man was part of such a union was in “The Trial of Billy Jack” in 1974.

The findings are important, Ramoutar said, because popular films do more than entertain: They are a powerful means of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.

“The results of this study sadly show that racial and ethnic segregation in romantic relationships is heavily practiced in Hollywood blockbuster films and has become more common rather than less common in the past four decades,” Ramoutar said.

The study analyzed interracial relationships in blockbuster Hollywood films between 1967 and 2005, beginning with the landmark social commentary “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Ramoutar selected the 15 top-grossing box office hits of each year for her sample. Of these, she found 36 films with interracial couples.

Forty-two percent of the women in such partnerships were victims of violence. “Lying on the table like a piece of sushi” is how police described Cheryl, the drug-addicted, sexually deviant female character in “Rising Sun” responsible for three men’s deaths who dies herself.

The scripts use certain interracial combinations more than others and avoid some entirely, the study found. No Arabic or eastern Indian appears in any film, for example.

The most common racial coupling was a white male with an Asian female, who was often portrayed as a “model minority,” in that she was smarter, more compliant and less sexually aggressive than women of other races, Ramoutar said.

But while Asians were the most common women of color, representing nearly one-quarter of interracial romances, Asian men were practically invisible, Ramoutar said. The only major Asian male in such a relationship in nearly four decades was Jackie Chan’s character in the 2001 movie “Rush Hour 2,” she said.

And a Hispanic woman playing a CIA double agent who briefly falls in love with Chan’s character marks the first time a Hispanic female appears in an interracial relationship at all during those years, said Ramoutar.

Hispanic men also were marginalized, cast in only three movies, Ramoutar said. The women they were paired with, including Michele Pfeiffer’s character Elvira in “Scarface,” were drug addicts with no purpose in life but getting high, she said.

“Despite the large number of women actively employed in the American workplace, the most commonly portrayed occupation of all the women in these films is that they have no identifiable occupation,” Ramoutar said. The second most popular occupation was working as a spy, followed by a tie between prostitute and entertainer, she said.

While white women in interracial relationships came across as either morally corrupt or socially inept or as victims of physical or sexual abuse, women of color who become involved with white men were often presented as erotic, exotic and possessing exceptional talents, she said.

“(Chinese-American) Alex in ‘Charlie’s Angels’ is a sky-diving, computer-hacking, black belt martial artist who can defeat a room full of men – her only misgiving is that she is a bad cook,” she said. “And Charlotte Lewis’ character in ‘The Golden Child’ can leap over tall walls or from high buildings, usually just wearing Eddie Murphy’s shirt and her underwear.”

The majority of black women on the big screen were pale skinned like Halle Berry, with dark-skinned actresses rarely cast except as villainesses or femme fatales, she said.

Terry Francis, a film studies professor at Yale University, praised Ramoutar’s choice of a topic. “It might be the quintessential American narrative,” she said.

Anemia, a reduction in the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood that can cause fatigue, weakness and dizziness, is common in old age. But its signs are often subtle, and doctors need to be sure they carefully consider it as they evaluate older patients, say study authors, writing recently in The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences.

“Considering anemia should be part of an overall patient’s risk assessment even if the person is without symptoms or apparent clinical disease,” said Marco Pahor, director of the University of Florida’s Institute on Aging and a study’s co-investigator.

The study revealed that even a mild case of anemia increases an elderly person’s risk, indicating that treatment recommendations may need to be adjusted for older patients, Pahor said. Researchers found an association between late-life anemia and heart conditions, cancer, infectious diseases and diabetes.

The World Health Organization defines anemia as a concentration of the oxygen-ferrying molecule hemoglobin that is below 12 grams per deciliter in women, and below 13 grams per deciliter in men.

“Those older patients having mild anemia have not been considered at higher risk, but our data show that even those patients with low or even close to normal range do have higher risk for death and hospitalization and they should be considered for more in-depth screening for other conditions,” Pahor said.

To more fully understand its detrimental health effects, the researchers studied the relationship of anemia to hospitalization and death in 3,607 people aged 71 years or older who participated in the National Institute on Aging-sponsored Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly. About 13 percent of people 70 or older are anemic, and those percentages increase with age. Most cases occur in association with underlying diseases such as stomach ulcers, chronic infections, cancer, chronic kidney ailments and congestive heart failure or due to malnutrition or iron deficiency. However, up to a third of the time, anemia is not attributable to these factors, so people with pre-existing conditions that could have caused it were excluded from the study.

In the study, 451 participants were anemic. They were more likely to be older black men and women with a lower body mass index. During the four-year follow-up period, 37 percent of those with anemia died, compared with 22 percent of the other study participants. In addition, two-thirds of anemic participants were hospitalized at some point in the study period; only half of those without anemia were.

“We hope this study will promote clinical awareness of anemia as a risk factor for other conditions,” Pahor said. “It is a risk factor for mortality, hospitalization, loss of independence, lower muscle strength and increased inflammation. We would like to do further studies to find out whether, if you could correct anemia, could you prevent these events?”

The first step toward correcting anemia is to, when possible, identify and then treat the underlying disease causing it, Pahor said. Treatment also may involve giving iron when iron levels are low, vitamin supplements to replace folate and vitamin B12 in people with poor eating habits, erythropoietin to increase red blood cell production in people with kidney problems and antibiotics to treat infections.

Dr. Paulo Henrique M. Chaves, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University’s Center on Aging and Health, said the paper provides insight into anemia as a strong prognostic factor for major health complications.

“A little bit of anemia is often perceived as a benign finding in older adults,” Chaves said. “However, results from this study by Penninx, Pahor and colleagues – as well as consistent and recently published findings that link mild anemia and even low-normal hemoglobin levels to a status of increased frailty and greater functional decline in older adults – suggest otherwise, at least in terms of prognostic significance.

“What remains to be established now is whether pharmacological correction of mild anemia in older adults may help slow the disablement process, preventing the onset and progression of frailty and disability, improving quality of life and prolonging survival,” he added. “Randomized clinical trials will be necessary to address these important questions.”

The multicenter team spearheading the current study was a partnership with industry and the federal government. It included researchers from the National Institute on Aging, UF’s Institute on Aging, the Netherlands and Ortho Biotech Products in Bridgewater, N.J., which manufactures Procrit, a hormone that stimulates red blood cell production. Pahor has served as a consultant for the company.

“There were a lot of preconceived ideas about which type of communicator would be better,” said Dolores Albarracin, who with Marta R. Durantini authored the study published in the March Psychological Bulletin. “Generally the idea that comes from community psychology is that community members are better.”

People who want to prevent HIV or need advice after a diagnosis often feel more comfortable talking with someone of their race and gender, Albarracin said. Patients often consult their friends, family, clergy, classmates, people who frequent the same bar or who live in their neighborhood. However, talking with peers may not always lead to the best advice, despite the growing popularity of peer health education since the 1970s.

“We actually found that community members are less effective than experts, which is completely contrary to previous philosophies,” she said. “This has a lot of implications because many of the programs these days are based on the idea that community members are better, so funds are given to community-based organizations, thinking they are going to be better.”

The study involved a comprehensive statistical analysis from 166 HIV prevention interventions, and included published and unpublished works. Interventions consist of programs sponsored by experts and peer leaders, visits to medical professionals and programs led by peers.

“Our study was a large review,” Albarracin said. “We collected everything that had been done, throughout the duration of the AIDS epidemic all over the world, from 1985 to 2005, and we ended up with a really extensive database of results of interventions by community members and experts.”

The study analyzed results of intervention in all population groups, including men, women and children, and all risk groups such as injection drug users and people with multiple sex partners.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends peer consultation for HIV prevention, but Albarracin said her findings suggest that a better connection is necessary between community-based organizations and state agencies to make sure programs have both types of sources and that peers are better trained.

A redirection of funds from peer-based prevention groups to expert-led groups could help encourage a wider diversity of experts, which Albarracin said is needed.

“We found that the best experts for prevention among African-American women are African-American and female,” she said. “If you look at physicians, nurses, psychologists and many other health professionals, many of them are white. So to find those experts with racial and gender matching isn’t always easy.”

The study revealed that female and minority experts are necessary to create effective campaigns for women and ethnic minorities. Because of a shortage of health-care professionals in these demographics, policy makers must consider the development of training programs to make the available agents more effective.

A long-term goal is to encourage greater diversity in the health professions among ethnic minorities, which Albarracin said could be achieved through affirmative action programs.

Through broad research on the effectiveness of HIV interventions, Albarracin said it will become apparent which tactics work and which ones don’t.

“Dr. Albarracin’s research syntheses are some of the most systematic and complete of any that have yet been published,” said Blair Johnson, a professor of social psychology at the University of Connecticut. “In the scholarly community, they are certain to stimulate renewed interest in the social psychological mechanisms underlying successful HIV prevention efforts for practically any population at risk for HIV. In the public health and policy community, they offer the hope of better interventions, with the result that fewer people will contract (or transmit) HIV.”

The findings, to be published in the April issue of the Journal of the National Medical Association, call attention to the need to screen these men early — beginning at age 45 instead of 50 — and to offer them ongoing prostate cancer education, UF researchers report.

Prostate cancer remains the second-most-commonly diagnosed cancer and the second-most-common cause of cancer deaths in American men over age 45. Even so, prostate cancer mortality rates in the United States have been steadily declining during the past 10 years, thanks to serum prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, blood tests and improved treatments.

But the researchers found a different situation for inner-city men in Jacksonville, Fla.

“It all came about when we noticed that several patients we screened in Jacksonville were presenting with more advanced disease than what we had seen in similarly sized settings — namely Houston and Winston-Salem,” said Dr. Charles Rosser, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of urology at the University of Florida - Jacksonville. “Patients who presented in Houston and Winston-Salem had already been screened so thoroughly that they presented with a lot earlier disease than what we saw here. We wanted to know why Jacksonville’s numbers were so much higher.”

Although several variables may be involved, Rosser thinks the cause is a lack of prostate cancer screening and ongoing education in inner-city Jacksonville.

“Other communities our size have had fairly large screening initiatives – first directed to the general community and then directed to minorities in the inner city,” he said. “Here in Jacksonville we didn’t have anything like that until 2003, when UF College of Medicine–Jacksonville urologists, in partnership with the Duval County Health Department, began offering free screenings at UF’s affiliated hospital, Shands Jacksonville.”

Using the data from these screenings, the seven-member research team set out to assess the detection rate of prostate cancer and disease stage at diagnosis. Researchers collected and analyzed clinical and pathological data from the biopsies of 368 men — 52 percent white, 42 percent black, 5 percent Hispanic and 1 percent Asian. Because of the small numbers, Hispanics and Asians were excluded for study purposes.

Researchers then reviewed clinic and hospital records for several key outcomes, including cancer incidence, tumor stage (if and how far the cancer has spread) and tumor grade (how far the cells have changed from normal to abnormal on a 1-to-5 scale, with grade 1 being the least aggressive).

Still, the researchers were surprised to find these men were four times as likely to have advanced cancer, Rosser said.

“The chance of usually presenting with advanced disease is maybe 5 percent nationwide,” he said. “Our study sample showed 16 percent for blacks and 3.8 percent for whites — a statistically significant finding.”

When patients don’t begin treatment until cancer is advanced, the cure rate drops dramatically.

“Once the cancer has spread beyond the prostate, we’re not looking to cure the disease — we’re just looking to slow its growth,” Rosser said. “Our findings strongly suggest that, despite two decades of increasing emphasis on prostate cancer screening and detection in the United States, such programs may not be reaching or having the desired effect on underserved inner-city populations, especially blacks.”

Annual screenings should include the PSA blood test and an exam, with biopsy and further examination recommended for a PSA level above 4.0, Rosser said.

UF’s research is valuable and confirms what others have published, said Dr. Isaac Powell, professor of urology at Wayne State University and Karmanos Cancer Institute, who has been studying prostate cancer in Detroit for 16 years. “Not only do black men have a higher incidence of the disease but their death rate is two to three times higher than white men,” he said. “Our data suggest the disease may be growing faster among blacks than whites, so we’re studying genetics, diet, prostatitis and health-seeking behavior to try to explain these differences.”

Education is key for these men, according to Rosser.

“Of course, we need to stress the importance of annual screenings, but we also need to let them know why they’re being screened and explain that, as black men, statistically they’re at higher risk for the disease,” he said. “Education must go hand in hand with screening.”

The study identifies a disparity in prostate cancer screening and detection among men of differing social strata that is especially worrisome at a time when the underserved — especially blacks — stand to benefit most from such programs, Rosser said.

“We need to rectify this disparity by establishing in underserved inner-city communities across the United States large-scale and innovative screening programs to educate men about prostate cancer, screen them for the disease and assist them in obtaining follow-up care,” he said.

In her new book, “Protecting Our Own: Race, Crime, and African Americans,” University of Florida law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown takes an unflinching look at how race, crime, fame and gender affect public attitudes toward people involved in public scandals. The book includes a foreword by New York University law professor Derrick Bell, a founding figure in the field of Critical Race Theory.

“This book was inspired by the O.J. Simpson case,” said Russell-Brown, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations at UF’s Levin College of Law. “I was intrigued by the black community’s support for O.J., when he had in many ways separated himself from the community.”

Opinions about the Simpson verdict remain seriously divided along racial lines, with a majority of blacks believing he was set up and a majority of whites convinced he got away with murder. In that and other racially charged criminal cases, each side is mystified by the other side’s decision-making process.

Russell-Brown examined 30 cases involving what she labels “black protectionism.” She also held focus groups with blacks and finds there is a simple explanation for the black-white divide in these cases.

“When white people hear that a black celebrity is accused of a crime, they ask one question: Did he do it?” Russell-Brown said. “For African-Americans, there’s a longer list of questions. Did he do it? If he did, was he set up? Is he the only person who has committed this offense? And is he being treated the same as whites who have done the same thing?”

Those questions are rooted in American history, which is rife with examples of entrapment and false prosecution of blacks, Russell-Brown said.

She notes specific historical examples of black celebrities who faced criminal charges that, even if true, seem in retrospect to be the result of selective prosecution. For example, after boxing great Jack Johnson defeated a white man to win the heavyweight title in 1910, he was convicted of transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. Similarly, U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, who represented Harlem in Congress, spent months defending himself against a $3,000 tax evasion lawsuit.

Whether or not those people were guilty, Russell-Brown said, it is clear today that they were charged because they were outspoken, powerful and black. It’s a lesson black people remember when they hear that a rich or famous black man is charged with a crime, she said.

“Russell-Brown’s book takes a fresh perspective on the concept of linked fate, the idea that African-Americans are alternately embarrassed, protective about, or inspired by the acts of famous or infamous members of their race, by using focus groups and critical race theory to analyze this confounding phenomenon,” said Randolph Stone, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago.

Blacks aren’t the only people who engage in protectionism, Russell-Brown notes. White people extend a similar protectionism to police officers facing charges of brutality. She cites the example of the beating of Rodney King, which was caught on video tape, and the killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man who was shot by New York police who had falsely concluded he was a serial rapist.

“In these cases, white people noted that the police have a tough job, that they have to make split-second decisions, or, in the King case, that we really don’t know what happened before the tape was turned on,” Russell-Brown said.

Russell-Brown said she is concerned about the black community’s failure to extend protection to black defendants of average means, who deserve the presumption of innocence.

“The larger community gains when every member is valued and afforded the same protections, regardless of their fame or fortune,” Russell-Brown said.

Analyzing data from more than 5,000 premature births, UF researchers pinpointed a link between gender and race and the survival rates of babies born at extremely low weights, according to findings released today (Jan. 3) in the journal Pediatrics. It’s the first scientific evidence of a phenomenon doctors have observed for years, said Dr. Steven B. Morse, a UF assistant professor of pediatrics and the article’s lead author.

Baby girls of both races had the strongest advantage when born weighing less than 1,000 grams, about 2 pounds or as much as a quart of milk, Morse said. Girls had nearly twice the odds of surviving as baby boys did, and black infants also had a slight survival advantage over whites, the research shows. Overall, black baby girls were twice as likely to survive compared with white baby boys, 1.8 times more likely to survive than black boys and 1.3 times more likely to live than white baby girls.

“When you’re talking about survival, that’s very significant,” Morse said. “We have known in general that females tend to have better survival rates than males and blacks better than whites. But quantifying that and finding if there was a statistical significance had yet to be done.”

Morse and other researchers from the UF Maternal Child Health Education and Research and Data Center also analyzed the infants’ developmental ages and weights at birth, combining these data with race and gender to specify the odds of survival for babies born in each demographic.

Nationwide, nearly a half million babies are born prematurely each year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Only about 1 percent of all babies born weigh less than 2 pounds, and one of the first questions parents of these infants ask is if their child will live, said Morse, who as a neonatologist works with families every day. Having accurate data can help families and doctors make better decisions at a time when choices can be hard to make, he said.

“I’m trying to get as much information as I can before the baby is born to give the parents a realistic expectation of survival,” he said. “Not all babies are the same, especially with regard to survival at this early gestational age. There are differences based on race and gender, so we can’t group all these babies together and say survival at less than 1,000 grams is X-percent.”

UF researchers studied vital statistics from 5,076 babies born in Florida between 1996 and 2000 and weighing less than 1,000 grams. The influence of gender and race on babies’ survival rates was more noticeable the smaller the infants were, the research shows. The higher the weights and developmental ages were at birth, the more survival rates increased for all babies.

About 1,500 babies included in the study were extremely premature, born when their mothers were less than 24 weeks pregnant. On average, these babies had a less than 27 percent chance of survival. Because their organs have not had as much time to develop, these tiny babies are at the highest risk for disabling health problems, and doctors and families often struggle to decide what life-saving measures should be taken, if any, Morse said.

“This is the highest-risk population of babies and there is a lot of controversy, especially at the lower gestational ages, of how much should we really do for these babies, how aggressively should we treat them, especially around 23 to 24 weeks,” he said.

The researchers do not know what measures were taken to save the lives of each of the babies included in the study, which Morse describes as the only limitation of the research. Many families decide just to hold their babies as they pass away, while others adopt a wait-and-see approach or request all measures be taken to save the preemie’s life.

“It’s very hard to make rules as to which babies should be resuscitated,” said Herman A. Hein, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Iowa. “Each case should be addressed with individuals. These babies do have a tremendous risk, but it’s interesting when you talk to families and ask them if they regret their decision. I have yet to find one that says yes.”

Hein says the findings of the UF study do not surprise him. Prior research has shown that black women tend to have more premature babies than women of other races, possibly because their babies mature a little earlier and faster, he said.

There isn’t conclusive evidence yet to explain why girls and black infants have better chances of survival, Morse said. But female preemies’ lungs tend to be more developed at birth, which could be part of the explanation, Morse said.

For Morse, the next big question isn’t why these babies survive but what happens to them when they do. He now plans to study what happens to extremely low-birth weight children, who are more prone to health problems, as they age.

“Survival is not everything,” he said. “It’s a first step. Probably a bigger question to answer is quality of life. That’s the next step.”

People who left without paying for any items were six times more likely to be shoplifters who bypassed the check-out line to avoid drawing attention to themselves, said Richard Hollinger, a UF criminologist and one of the study’s researchers. The work also cautions against trying to spot shoplifters based on race, gender, age and ethnicity.

“We all believe it to be courteous behavior when a retailer asks ‘May I help you?,’ but what they’re really saying is ‘We know you’re here, please don’t shoplift,’” he said.

Behavioral cues are more important than demographic characteristics in identifying shoplifters, Hollinger said. Professional shoplifters often scan the store to make sure no none is watching them tampering with the products, he said.

“There’s a phenomenon called ‘shopping while black,’ with some evidence to suggest that certain shoppers, particularly blacks, are scrutinized more heavily and even harassed in various stores,” he said. “Our study raises serious questions about the profiling of suspected shoplifters, particularly black males.”

Popular shoplifting stereotypes were challenged in the UF study, in which researchers covertly observed 1,365 shoppers in an Atlanta drug store with closed-circuit television cameras. Slightly more than 8 percent of the people who entered the store stole an item.

The UF study, which was published in the December 2004 issue of Justice Quarterly, additionally disputes the image of most shoplifters being female. “The rule of thumb always has been that women shoplift more than men simply because there are more women shoppers, unless it’s a sporting goods store or a hardware store,” he said. “But we were able to determine that men actually stole more often than women.”

Drug abuse may be driving this trend, Hollinger said. “We estimate, based on other research, that many male shoplifters are not what we would call ‘primary household shoplifters,’ — they’re not shoplifting food for tonight’s dinner or medications for their child’s cold,” he said. “Rather, many of them hit the film, pain relievers or batteries, steal them in large quantities and sell them, using shoplifting as a way to feed their drug habit.”

And although shopkeepers often are quick to blame juveniles for missing items, the UF study found shoplifters were most commonly between the ages of 35 and 54. These middle-aged adults, most of them gainfully employed, were “primary household shoppers” who occasionally stole to acquire goods whose cost stretched beyond their household budgets.

Overall, blacks and Hispanics were no more likely than whites to steal merchandise. However, when race and gender were examined by subcategory, Hispanic females stole the most, shoplifting at more than seven times the rate of white females, he said.

Many stole household items they needed, such as medicine or makeup, or snatched a candy bar or lollipops off the shelf for their children, whom they had brought along, if they started to fuss or cry, he said.

Few studies have focused on family shoplifting, except those that examine “distraction teams,” Hollinger said. “These shoplifters might take children along with them, usually with an ice cream cone or a candy bar in hand, mainly to distract the sales clerk, who tries to head off the kids from damaging the merchandise while mom and dad steal,” he said.

Shoplifting is sometimes called the “crime tax,” because it results in annual losses of more than $10 billion that are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, said Hollinger, who did the study with criminology professors Dean Dabney at Georgia State University and Laura Dugan at the University of Maryland. “It’s been estimated that about $400 is spent annually by each family in America just to pay for the cost of replacing these stolen goods,” he said.

Recent evidence also suggests that many professionally shoplifted items are even fenced overseas and used to fund other criminal activities, including terrorism, he said.

Shaun L. Gabbidon, a criminal justice professor at Penn State Harrisburg and an expert on shoplifting, said the study is “groundbreaking and very important.” It raises serious questions about racial profiling of shoplifters, and unlike other research relies on observational rather than official data, which are often tabulated based on police arrests. Unfortunately, studies show police arrest patterns sometimes reflect bias, he said.

“With this observation data, we can actually see what is going on,” he said. “It tells us that relying on official data is fraught with problems and we should be very careful in how we interpret them. We need more studies like this one.”

“Unlike older grandparents who are frequently retired, middle-aged grandparents face problems trying to balance their newfound parenting roles with other responsibilities, including the demands of careers and personal interests,” said Terry Mills, a UF sociologist who did the study, which appeared in the April issue of the journal Marriage and Family Review.

Mills examined psychological distress in households where grandparents are raising grandchildren, with no biological parent present – so called “skipped-generation families.” He used data from the 1999 National Survey of America’s Families, a sample representing 430,018 grandmothers between the ages of 32 and 71, which was collected by the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute.

The older the grandmothers were, the study found, the less likely they were to experience symptoms of depression, the study found.

“Skipped-generation families,” a term coined in 1997, are growing because of a variety of social problems, Mills said. These include an increase in drug abuse, teen pregnancy, divorce, AIDS and the number of parents being imprisoned, he said.

“Some historians might point out that in more traditional agrarian times it was not unusual to have multigenerational families, such as those seen on ‘Little House on the Prairie,’” he said. “But ‘skipped-generation households’ are a 21st-century problem.”

U.S. Census data show nearly 8 percent of all children under age 18 (5.5 million) currently live in homes with grandparents, Mills said. Of these, 1.3 million are grandparent-headed households, with roughly half the children in such families under age 6, he said.

In the United States, the largest percentage of children living in a grandparent-headed
household are black, Mills said. Other research has found that black grandparents acting as parents are more likely than their white counterparts to be unemployed, live below the poverty line and have larger numbers of grandchildren to care for, he said.

“Such grandmothers are not all alike, and Dr. Mills’ work shows that younger grandmothers raising grandchildren are more susceptible to depression,” said Richard K. Caputo, professor of social policy and research at Yeshiva University’s Wurzweiler School of Social Work.

In Mills’ study, grandmothers were asked how much of the time during the past month they felt nervous, downhearted or calm and peaceful, as well as how frequently they were happy or could not be cheered up. Each item was measured on a scale that ranged from “all of the time” to “none of the time.”

“One reason for a grandmother’s emotional distress may be her sense of failure as a parent,” Mills said. “She may feel, ‘I’m having to do this because my own son or daughter could not care for their child.’”

Many re-enter the parenting role when their parenting skills are rusty, and some find it difficult to resolve the issues of whether they are a parent or a grandparent, he said.

The study found that besides being younger, grandmothers who experienced the most frequent feelings of psychological distress were those who were black and lived in the Midwest, had a family income below the poverty level, were on welfare, did not receive social service payments for child care and had a regular place for child care.

“It’s not surprising that having a family income below the poverty level or not receiving welfare payments for child care were associated with more frequent feelings of emotional distress,” Mills said. “One serious consequence of becoming a custodial grandparent is a change for the worse in the grandparent’s financial status.”

“A grandmother may want to work rather than receive welfare, but for those without a husband or partner who could help with child care, it might be difficult to manage,” he said.

He suggests that federal policies limiting welfare benefits and providing little assistance to skipped-generation grandparents should be revised to contribute more support for the valuable role they play.

“I don’t think society is aware of the public service these grandparents provide in struggling to keep families intact instead of just shipping the children off to foster care,” he said. “Yet foster parents get a lot more money and support in terms of social assistance than these kinds of caregivers do.”

A new book by a University of Florida history professor explores the origins of the black Protestant church in America through the life of an 18th-century former slave named Rebecca Protten, who converted to Christianity and later became a missionary. Juneteenth, observed on June 19, commemorates when the last slaves in America were freed in Texas in 1865.

Because of their living conditions, many slaves looked to the church for reassurance and the possibility of a better life after death. The church also was the one place a slave could express himself or herself freely without the fear of punishment or death.

In his book, “Rebecca’s Revival,” professor John Sensbach argues that Protten‘s conversion to Christianity and preaching efforts among enslaved workers helped lay the groundwork for what would become the black church more than a century before emancipation in the United States.

“We know that the black church is the vessel of African-American culture and has been for several centuries,” said Sensbach, who began researching Protten and her connection with the black church in 2001. “The more I began to look at her, I realized that she was a very important figure who can help us to understand this larger issue.”

Sensbach found information on Protten’s life in records kept by the missionaries and writers from her time, translating them from German, Dutch and Danish. Through those records, he found that Protten was born around 1718 of mixed racial descent and was sold into slavery in the Danish colony of St. Thomas in the present-day U.S. Virgin Islands.

“There, the records say she had a religious experience, when she was very young, perhaps in early adolescence,” said Sensbach, whose book was published in March. “She was freed by her master and began to preach to women on her plantation around the same time.”

In 1733, missionaries from the German Moravian church began preaching to the St. Thomas slaves, and Protten became immersed in the movement, Sensbach said.

“She went to meet the missionaries on the island, and they realized she was already a preacher,” he said. “She was exactly what they were looking for, so she joined their movement and became a missionary to the enslaved women.”

Sensbach added that Protten’s involvement was crucial because the Germans did not know the language of the Caribbean islands and had a hard time reaching out to the slaves, who spoke a mixture of Dutch and African tongues.

“They depended on converts like Protten and others to join the movement to the plantations and recruit slaves,” he said. “It became an indigenous movement to convert to Christianity that Protten and other black preachers helped spread.”

Through his research, Sensbach found that Christianity became prominent in black society because it was a religion of empowerment and spiritual freedom that sustained them through the ravages of racism and slavery.

“Her life is important in a couple of ways,” Sensbach said. “She was an essential figure in generating the movement that would lead to the spread of black evangelical Protestant Christianity throughout the Americas. Second, her life was unique in that it was virtually impossible for a black woman to make the travels she made.”

Up to Protten’s time, there were many black Christians in Europe, Africa and the Americas, but most were Catholic because Protestants had had little success converting people of African descent, Sensbach said. When the evangelical German missionaries arrived on St. Thomas, they were on the forefront of trying to emulate what the Catholics had done. As a result, they established a beachhead through the efforts of Protten and others like her, making possibly thousands of converts in one corner of the Caribbean.

“This proved inspiring to the other Protestant evangelicals like Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians who looked at this experiment,” Sensbach said. “So they sent out missionaries in North America, during a time that’s known as the Great Awakening, when the origins of the black church in North America began.”

Protten’s role in the origins of black Christianity is echoed by Sensbach’s colleagues.

“Jon Sensbach’s bold historical imagination has produced an important book rich with fascinating insights about the role of African-Americans in the international movement of evangelical Protestantism and the centrality of women in this movement,” said Sylvia Frey, a history professor at Tulane University and author of several books on similar topics.

Da’Quan or Damarcus, for example, are more likely to score lower on reading and mathematics tests and are less likely to meet teacher expectations and be referred to gifted programs than their siblings with more common names such as Dwayne, said David Figlio, a UF economist who did the research.

“This study suggests that the names parents give their children play an important role in explaining why African-American families on average do worse because African-American families are more inclined than whites or Hispanics to give their children names that are associated with low socio-economic status,” Figlio said.

Such boys and girls suffer in terms of the quality of attention and instruction they get in the classroom because teachers expect less from children with names that sound like they were given by parents with lower education levels, and these lower expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy, he said.

“When you see a particular name, like David or Catherine, you internalize it in a different way than a name such as LaQuisha,” said Figlio, whose findings appear in a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. “And it could be that teachers start to make inferences about a student’s parents, the parent’s education level and the parents’ commitment to their children’s education based on the names the parents give their children.”

To measure a name’s socio-economic status, Figlio studied birth certificate data to determine the most frequent name attributes given by mothers who were high school dropouts. Most commonly, these names began with certain prefixes, such as “lo,” “ta,” and “qua.” They ended with certain suffixes, such as “isha” and “ious,” included an apostrophe or were particularly long, with several low-frequency consonants, and were given overwhelmingly by poorly educated black women, he said.

Using information on 55,046 children from 24,298 families with two or more children enrolled in a large Florida school district from 1994-95 through 2000-01, Figlio studied national reading and mathematics test scores and grade transcripts to determine who was promoted to the next grade or referred to gifted programs. Comparing pairs of siblings, Figlio found teachers treat children within the same family differently depending on whether their name connoted low socio-economic status, resulting in discrepancies in academic performance.

A boy named Damarcus, for example, was 2 percent less likely than his brother Dwayne to be referred to a gifted program, even with identical test scores, he said.

“The black-white test score gap has been a persistent issue in American education for decades, despite the fact that African-Americans and white children are receiving increasingly similar education,” he said. “Our study shows that names are partly to explain for this gap.”

Although giving a child name associated with low socio-economic status accounts for only about 15 percent of the black-white test score gap, this is a more significant amount than the effect of dramatic reductions in class size found in other studies, teachers’ years of experience or whether teachers have bachelor’s or master’s degrees, Figlio said.

The opposite results were found with Asian names, said Figlio, who presented his paper to the American Economic Association in Philadelphia in January. Students with Asian-sounding names were more likely to be recommended for gifted programs than siblings with common American names and similar test scores, he said.

Names are important because they can reveal a parent’s educational level and parental aspirations, and help to mold a person’s identity, becoming information that people use in forming expectations about a child, Figlio said. “On one level people are aware of this because the No. 2 segment of the book sales market is baby name books, after Bibles,” he said.

In the African nation of Ghana, people recognize the power of names and take the choice away from parents altogether, Figlio said. Children receive one of only seven boys’ or girls’ names, depending on the day of the week they were born, he said.

David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Figlio’s research is provocative and persuasive.

“While other prominent researchers have argued that children who are given exotic names do not suffer for their parent’s choice, it is hard to dismiss the finding that even among sibling pairs, children with exotic names fare worse in school and are less likely to be classified as bright and gifted,” Autor said. “This suggests that value-neutral cultural choices, such as baby name, may have important economic consequences.”

The findings challenge the perception that depression among jailed juvenile delinquents is mostly a female problem and point to the need to address it before inmates are released and commit other crimes that land them in jail again, said Angela Gover, a UF criminology professor.

“Depression has been found to be the most common psychological symptom experienced by survivors of childhood sexual abuse, but as a society we’ve focused much more on childhood sexual abuse in females than in males,” she said.

Girls receive more attention partly because they are more likely than boys to be sexual abuse victims, said Gover, whose study was published in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology in December.

They also react differently to upsetting events, which makes them more prone to depression, Gover said. “Females are more likely to internalize traumatic events that happen to them in contrast to males, who externalize things,” she said. “Depression is one of those internalizing events. When bad things happen to girls, such as witnessing an act of violence or even seeing a dead animal lying in the road, it may affect them more in terms of making them sad right then and there.”

Gover’s study involved adolescents, ages 11 to 20, who were serving sentences in six juvenile correctional institutions in five states.

“What makes this research unique is that every adolescent in the sample was a serious delinquent and was incarcerated in a juvenile correctional facility,” she said.

Although studies have established a relationship between childhood sexual abuse and mental health problems, few have examined this association using samples of youths who are incarcerated, she said.

“We do know from several studies about violence being passed down through generations that the people who are victimized during childhood are more likely than those who have not been victimized to become involved in abusive relationships, either as an abuser or as a victim,” she said.

Other studies on gender’s effects on depression among sexual abuse victims have been inconclusive, Gover said. That’s partly because of small sample sizes that may not have detected gender differences in a definitive way, she said.

The UF study compared depression levels among 77 females and 32 males who reported having been sexually abused with 345 males and 129 females who said they had not been sexually abused.

To measure the extent of sexual abuse, the study participants were asked a single question: “How often were you personally ever touched in a sexual way or forced to have sex by an adult or older children when you did not want this to happen, including family members and people outside of your family?” Responses were recorded using a five-point scale from “never” to “frequently.”

With a similar five-point scale, depression was measured by how respondents rated statements such as “In the past few weeks, I have felt depressed and very unhappy” and “Sometimes recently I have worried about losing my mind.”

Sexually abused youths were found to be significantly more depressed than those who reported they had not been sexually abused, Gover said.

The findings suggest the importance of addressing the trauma of sexual abuse among incarcerated adolescents because they are at increased risk for depression, Gover said.

“Although the prevalence of sexual abuse is higher among institutionalized females, the negative psychological effects of depression are also present in males,” she said. “Without appropriate assessment and treatment, these youths have a greater likelihood of entering the adult criminal justice system.”

Heather Pfeifer, a criminal justice professor at the University of Baltimore, said Gover’s findings are important. “This study provides critical information to the research on childhood sexual abuse by bringing to light the need to assess the mental health needs of both male and female offenders within the juvenile justice system,” she said. “Unfortunately, many of these youth have a history of abuse, but few have received any mental health services to address the consequences of such trauma. By identifying these issues in both males and females, the system has an opportunity to provide these youth with the treatment they need, thereby helping to reduce their risk of future victimization and offending.”