National News
HARTFORD, Conn. — A Yale University dean has been placed on leave over offensive reviews she made on Yelp, including one in which she refers to customers of a local restaurant as “white trash.”
Pierson College Dean June Chu issued a public apology Saturday after reviews from her personal Yelp account began circulating at the Ivy League school.
Pierson Head Stephen Davis sent an email Thursday informing members of the residential college that Chu had been placed on leave after he discovered there were numerous “reprehensible posts,” not the two he had been led to believe existed.
“If you are white trash, this is the perfect night out for you!” Chu wrote in a review of a local Japanese steakhouse.
Davis, who is in charge of the college’s administration, said that review and another that described movie theater workers as “barely educated morons” were “deeply harmful to the community fabric.”
He said he discovered on Saturday night that there were other “reprehensible posts” that represented a more widespread pattern, compounded the harm of the first two and damaged his trust in Chu and her ability to lead the college.
“Let me be clear,” he wrote. “No one, especially those in trusted positions of educating young people, should denigrate or stereotype others, and that extends to any form of discrimination based on class, race, religion, age, disability, gender identity, or sexual orientation.”
Chu did not immediately return phone and email messages Thursday seeking comment.
WASHINGTON — More and more Americans are marrying people of different races and ethnicities, reaching at least one in six newlyweds in 2015, the highest proportion in American history, a new study released Thursday showed.
Currently, there are 11 million people — or one out of 10 married people — in the United States with a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.
This is a big jump from 50 years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled interracial marriage was legal throughout the United States. That year, only 3 percent of newlyweds were intermarried — which means they had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity. In 2015, 17 percent of newlyweds were intermarried, a number which had held steady from the year before.
“There’s much greater racial tolerance in the United States, with attitudes having changed in a way where it’s much more positive toward interracial marriage,” said Daniel T. Lichter, director of the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University, who studies interracial and interethnic marriages. “But I think that a greater reason is the growing diversity of the population. There are just more demographic opportunities for people to marry someone of another race or ethnicity.”
Asians were most likely to intermarry in 2015, with 29 percent of newlywed Asians married to someone of a different race or ethnicity, followed by Hispanics at 27 percent, blacks at 18 percent and whites at 11 percent.