I'm currently working on an hour-long radio special about race and culture, which is heavy stuff to be sure. I've interviewed students, parents, community workers, and experts to get their thoughts on race and what it means to be born Black or White or Latino or American Indian. Statistically speaking, race is predictive of a number of things, and it tends to correlate with relatively bad outcomes.

Here's a short list:

At 30, my husband and I became adoptive parents to a 5-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy. We began the adoption process through the Michigan foster care system in 2008.

Yesterday, the White House released its budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, and we got our first detailed look at how the President intends to pay for his plan to make preschool available to all four year olds in the country. Basically, he's going to make smokers pay for it.

First, some bullet points: 

Grand Rapids endured a surge of violent crime involving teenagers this winter. Since then, there have been community meetings and plans put forward. Now, a group of local hip hop artists is getting involved, with a new song targeted at kids. They let me sit in on their first writing session. Click above to hear their thoughts on the song. 

Here are a few quotes from the artists: 

Ken Dill: 

"It's hard to escape the violence when you come up in the community that we come in because you might have a mom and dad that's doing drugs, or that's not really there. You might be raising yourself."

President Barack Obama will be releasing his budget tomorrow. Already, organized labor and others who side with the President more often than not are upset with cuts he's willing to make (likely to be around $200 billion worth). 

The Republican leadership in congress isn't happy with the budget either. Most Republicans don't want to raise taxes in order to help raise revenue and decrease the deficit. 

Accusations the budget is getting balanced on the back of seniors, children and people in poverty can seem like tired political rhetoric. But, those are the people that disproportionately rely on government services.

So as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities points out in a handy chart, for the last few years it's true these groups have borne the brunt of the budget battle.  

It feels like  juvenile justice is getting more attention as of late, with reform efforts picking up steam.

There's the first federal case to end a school to prison pipeline in Mississippi, and a new book on the brazen corruption of judges who locked kids up in exchange for kickbacks in Pennsylvania.

The concern around kids in the justice system might turn out to be a cultural blip, in danger of being crowded out by national interest in something like gun or immigration reform.

But maybe not. The State of Opportunity team has been sending this short animation back and forth for about a week. Something about it seems to signal society might be willing to change the way we look at juvenile offenders. 

This chart comes from a report released yesterday by the Pew Economic Mobility Project. The report looked at the effects of unemployment on American families. Overall, the report says one third of families in America experienced some form of unemployment between 1999 - 2009. But minority families were far more likely to be affected. Forty-one percent of black families and 51 percent of Latino families experienced unemployment during the period, compared to 30 percent of whites. 

  If you want to know how kids gets their ideas about something like race or gender, it’s not just a matter of asking them. They might not know where they got their ideas. And you can’t really control all the variables.

For nearly two decades, psychologist Rebecca Bigler at the University of Texas has been testing race and gender ideas using colored t-shirts in a summer school program.