When you are the only Indian-American female lead in a television show, you seem to be making sweeping statements about that person simply because you are that person and the only one whereas, for instance, Steve Carell — he’s not making sweeping generalizations about white American men on his show because there’s so many different white American men on different shows. …

So I get worried by doing this character that people think that I’m saying that about all those people. And I just have the weight of that on my shoulders, which is something that I do envy other performers for not having.

Mindy Kaling on being an Indian-American actress on TV

When I started doing this work in 1986, roughly 20 percent of all of the people in the United States who were living with AIDS were African-American. The most recent statistics from the Center for Disease Control indicate that 45 percent of all the new cases of HIV infection are amongst African-Americans. … If we continue on the current trend, in the year 2015, especially in the South, it will probably be the case that 5 to 6 percent of all African-American adults who are sexually active will be infected with the virus.

— Dr. Robert Fullilove, on today’s Fresh Air about AIDS in the African-American community.

Of the more than 1 million people in the U.S. infected with HIV, nearly half are black men, women and children — even though blacks make up about 13 percent of the population. AIDS is the primary killer of African-Americans ages 19 to 44, and the mortality rate is 10 times higher for black Americans than for whites.

— AIDS in Black America: A Public Health Crisis

AIDS is now the leading cause of death for African-American women between the ages of 25 and 34 and the primary killer for all African Americans in the 19-44 age group.

— Robert Fullilove, guest on today’s show.

(Source: mailman.columbia.edu)

Every nine and a half minutes, somewhere in America, someone is infected with HIV. Half of them are black.

— Today: why AIDS/HIV is so much worse in the black community. [Get tested]

Thursday: A discussion about AIDS and the African-American community.

Above: Philly AIDS/HIV cases by zip code (2010) [more on Philadelphia and HIV/AIDS testing]

[Find a testing site near you.]

The narrative of a black chef didn’t exist. Black people have always cooked and been part of serving but not from a chef perspective. Not in these establishments — the three-star, highest establishments. So when they say ‘Marcus Samuelsson’ coming in — that’s a Swedish name, and then they saw me, it was a shock. I was not applying for the dishwashing job. I was applying for a chef job, so being able to, in a non-threatening way, and getting the job just like anybody else — they were just not used to it. They had just never seen it, ever.

— Marcus Samuelsson on Fresh Air.

“In 1913, there was an anniversary celebration at Gettysburg — the anniversary of the 1863 battle — and they brought these Northern and Southern veterans together, and the Confederate and Union vets embraced one another. There are some wonderful photographs, and they’re holding Union flags and Confederate flags, and Woodrow Wilson went and gave a speech, saying that the ‘old quarrel has been forgotten.’ Well, it’s very symbolically significant that excluded from that reunion were the black veterans. They were not even invited to participate. That part of the Civil War history was, for a long time in this country, simply pushed aside and erased almost completely.” — Adam Goodheart

A lot of white people like black people. They buy hip-hop, they watch black athletic and sports figures and it’s super popular — from jazz through hip-hop. Having a black friend is a mark of progressive success as a white person. And the black person is usually seen as their asset. It’s like: I’m cooler by proxy.

— Baratunde Thuston, on why it’s important for white people to have a black friend

What a strange thing has happened as the years went by. The roles reversed. Today, our audience for blues-oriented music is white. And the black youngsters are not interested in it, and is something that pains us for many reasons — not just personally, but when you start to think from a cultural standpoint, how much we seem to have lost over the past 20 years or so in the African-American community, where blues and jazz artistry is concerned.

— Johnny Otis on the changing blues audience between 1969 and 1989

Get On The Bus: 50 Years Of Freedom Rides

Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

— Michelle Alexander, on the number of blacks in the criminal justice system. On Monday’s Fresh Air, Alexander details how President Reagan’s war on drugs led to a mass incarceration of black males and the difficulties these felons face after serving their prison sentences.

[The young black males are] shuttled into prisons, branded as criminals and felons, and then when they’re released, they’re relegated to a permanent second-class status, stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement — like the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to be free of legal discrimination and employment, and access to education and public benefits. Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you’ve been branded a felon.

— In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes that many of the gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the mass incarceration of black Americans in the war on drugs.

Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control, — in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. There are millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men or either under correctional control or branded felons and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.

—  legal scholar Michelle Alexander. On Monday’s Fresh Air, Alexander talks about how the mass incarceration of African-Americans in the War on Drugs has undermined many of the gains of the Civil Rights movement.

What we see in many places is that while you can bring crime down by occupying the neighborhood and stopping everybody, what you do in the process is lose that neighborhood. … You fuel the idea that the police are an occupying, inimical force in the neighborhood. You play into these real and toxic racial memories about what came before civil rights. And you can make it work in many places, but you can’t stop. You can’t ever say, ‘We’ve won. Things are good. Things are stable,’ because you have driven them into hiding.

— David M. Kennedy, on programs that target specific geographic areas through car and pedestrian stops in order to stop crime.