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I think we need to increasingly look at elections in New York City from the point of view of the changing demographics of the city. Right now about 61% estimated of the population in the city are people of color. That is, white people are a minority in the city. And sometimes you canšt tell that by who's running the city, by the television programs, by the way the media covers it that the majority of the people in the city are not white people in the strict sense. So that's important and I think that needs always to be brought in when you talk about the politics of the city because it's too easy to say well that's not important anymore. Or you meet a lot of white people saying we're all minorities now so race isn't that important anymore. And I go, yeah, right.
So that's important to look at. Because you're talking about over 80% of the kids in the school system are from communities of color. Puerto Ricans, Latinos, make up an estimated 28% of the city's population. We're larger now than the black population. Those are the estimates which is about 25%. In the school system, for the first time in 1999, Latinos became the largest group of young people in the school system. About 39% of the kids in the school system are Latinos now -- the largest group. So those things I think are important -- important in terms of the way we frame issues. But interestingly enough, if you look at the politics, they're not very important in terms of how the mainstream politicians look at these kinds of issues. But I think we need to be insistent that the issue of race and ethicity is very important and needs to be addressed.
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in partnership with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College 
