Fact Checking President Obama's NAACP Speech

Again, past time for the black community to empower itself and start solving it's problems from within - at the heart of the problem.

dont you just love good news

You call this a story? This isn't journalism, it reads like something an 8th grader downloaded off the internet the night before it was due. The title should have read, "Here's some statistics, draw your own conclusions." How about digging down into the issues?

How can anybody who lives anywhere near any major urban area be surprised by these numbers ? How can anybody expect any external force, government or charity, to correct this ? NAACP must come to the front and say, as did Pogo, "We have met the enemy and they is us".

Especially regarding the health related issues, only controlling by race doesn't really give us any information that can be used to help the situation. If you ignored race and controlled for family income, what would the results look like? Is it lack of access to health care or is it an attitude that ignores preventative care. Do fat people not KNOW why they are fat? Do people still not KNOW how HIV gets transmitted? If so, they must be living in a cave in Pakistan.

This is incredibly racist. Let's just imagine if George Bush presented the EXACT same data to a room full of white people, and said 'Great job, everyone.' The media would go ballistic. But Obama presents the statistics and basically says 'We need to do better than them (aka white people)' and everyone's just okay with it.

Why can't we just let it all go? We do we have this need to categorize people as anything other than 'American'?

I'd like to see the CURRENT info -- some of this data is four years old. I'll bet the unemployment data is different now, for example.

Tom,

How could you come to any conclusion if you did what you suggest? If you ignore race, then you won't learn anything about it.

This is pathetic and so outrageously racist. Minorities want equality except when it comes to everything! Now we have a half black president that wants to guilt trip the rest of America into what, turning America into a welfare state for blacks? It's the bad white people who are staying out of prison, avoiding aids, staying fit, staying in school, and now a half black president feels it is justifiable to what? It's white peoples fault, all these statistics because white folks do what to create this? This is what you voted for America. Take a look at Africa, a country with enormous natural resources, and a continent that has been around for a lot longer than America, that's where this president is going to take America with this sort of well meaning misguided leadership.

I study these issues as a journalist and as a statistician. One lesson that I inflicted on literally thousands of Columbia students is the statistical association of race versus income with respect to single-parent households in The Bronx. Income was 5 times more predictive than race using 1980 Census data, even after accounting for such effects as "autocorrelation." It is true that almost all of the inequalities the President mentioned can be tied more firmly to income than race (HIV is a major exception and there are others as well).

But what causes the income disparity in the first place? Also, poor people living in areas that are mixed with regard to income and race tend to do better than poor people in a large, homogeneously poor area. The generally accepted hypothesis is that such areas generally have little political clout and thus do not get their share of available government help.

If you looked at household income, you'd see the same disparity. So the question is not "who's living in a cave," but whether the disparities in mortality and health education have something to do with endemic, generational social injustice. Why does a particular group not have the resources or wherewithall to "fix the problem from within?" These are the questions the journalist is trying to spark, without editorial comment.

Ignorance is not about just the uneducated, it also is masked by the educated who hold powerful seats today....Silence is deadly, and denotes a criminal mind in these men who are fixsated on holding their postions of authority...Maybe speaking is not for me either...I have already been hit by the "Mob" of Men who indirectly use their soldiers to bring me down...The game is deadly President Obama...and I can speak very well on the issue at hand...How do I "stand" belittled, stripped of financial gain, and more...Why...Power and Men of Means! Women are involved only because of faith in the men who gave them the empowerment to keep a status quo! Apache

Mr. Obama is like any other President for me. I have allow him to push to the side our Black leader whether good or bad they got us to this point, and I have listened to him. The info presented by him is not surprising, again our gains have been step on and push aside by passed presidents and their hounds since blacks started believing in this dream of an higher education. One can not say that blacks should not aspire to be a little wayne or Lebron because when times or tough the money look to these folks for quick revenue, such is the case with Jackson. We can not fault them for having weakness, they were used and further the cause. We have had Black politicans to get caught up in bad deals because of their weakness. Obama for some one who is only going on his skin color, and know nothing about slavery on either side of his family, I do not know that it is appropriate to speak in terms as he has spoken to the NAACP. Perhaps it is just how he said it I think I understand what he is saying. Hopefully he is not saying that he can not find a black female for the supreme court. Too bad he can not find a Native American. He sounded like a white man speaking to black people. He wants to say what he want to and yet not in need of black people only when he needs their support. Mr. Obama you have 135 issues out on the table that you say are broke. You have open up the closet and pulled everything out. It is time to fix some issues your time is running short. I am going to give you your chance.

Steve, government help? your thesis makes no common sense, if African Americans need so much government help affirmative action etc, etc, etc, to equal the injustice placed upon them from an unequal society by whites, then how do you explain Africans in Africa that have no white oppression, Africans governed by Africans, there's your example of a microcosm of what is occurring here in America, that's what government help creates, a society that eventually implodes and cannot help itself.

I'm a supporter of President Obama, but this speech was not presidential. I didn't vote for a black minister addressing his flock. Where was this rhetoric in his campaign...if he had presented me this I would have voted for the old white guy.

You were not listening, it was there, no one was listening, all you heard was one word, change, and you swallowed it hook line and sinker, you were fooled and duped with clever rhetoric and simple words.

Hi Jill.

Most of this information is the most recent available. Some of the health data are a few years old. But the unemployment figures for June 2009 were released just about two weeks ago.

And Steve Ross, you raise some interesting points.

I also believe that income is a more relevant causal factor than race in many of the above statistics. To see the true discrepancies attributable to race factors, you would need to sort by income then race. For example, what percent of prisoners in a given year were living below poverty level when charged? Then, what percent of those were black? Then, how does this compare to the black percentage of the total population under the poverty level? All of these factors would need to be considered to determine if race was a factor, or merely poverty. This is why I seldom give much credence to statistics, they are generally overly simplistic and used subjectively, without cross-examination to screen out other relevant factors.

welcome to their word, me me me me me me me me me !

This is a fact check? Where is the back-up? This looks like quotes from the speech without any analysis of their veracity. I'm assuming that this reporter never sat through a statistics class in his indoctrination institution.