Uprooting Inequity

On occasion of "Columbus Day" (Indigenous People's Day), here are former Chavez student Malachi "MalPractice" Byrd and Thomas Hill performing their slam poem "COLUMBUSING" back in 2014

Columbusing - Malachi Byrd & Thomas Hill - BNV 2014 Teen poets Malachi Byrd and Thomas Hill, of Split This Rock's DC Youth Slam Team, perform "Columbusing" at the 2014 Brave New Voices International Youth Poet...

Racism was called a health threat. Then came the DEI backlash.
A growing number of institutes exploring the nexus between racism and health — and their researchers — are under attack.

David R. Williams and Rachel Hardeman are population health researchers at different universities with one thing in common: Both have been added to a right-wing “watch list” for teaching about and researching the ways racism affects health.

At the American Academy of Dermatology, some members proposed “sunsetting all diversity, equity and inclusion programs,” arguing DEI has evolved into a political movement filled with perceived antisemitism that labels people as oppressed or oppressor — a proposal that failed at the annual meeting in March.

And grant-making organizations that awarded millions of dollars to investigate racism as a threat to public health are now asking some researchers to stop using the word “racism.”

A growing number of U.S. institutes created to explore the nexus between racism and health — and the researchers who preside over them — are finding themselves under attack, their missions and funding in peril barely four years after the nation had what many called its “racial reckoning.”

Other efforts to address systemic racism and inequality — in education and corporate America — have encountered resistance, but the stakes are especially stark with health care because centuries of inequities yield life-or-death consequences.

“It’s very taxing. This anti-DEI movement creates a climate of fear,” said Chandra L. Ford, a professor at Emory University and founding director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health.
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In spring 2020, George Floyd was murdered by Minnesota police officers as a crowd watched, begging the police to stop. Lives in Black, Hispanic and Native American communities were being cut short at grossly disproportionate rates by the coronavirus. And anti-Asian hate was on the rise.

Corporations declared Black lives matter and promised billions of dollars to address health, education and economic inequality. Hospitals created chief diversity officers. Anti-racism research centers and programs received an influx of money. Federal health agencies — and hundreds of cities and states — declared racism a threat to public health and vowed to end it.

The backlash was swift, as a mostly conservative countermovement began to argue that DEI doesn’t mean fairness, justice and representation but discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination.

It reflects a broader movement. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s DEI Legislation Tracker, state lawmakers have introduced at least 85 anti-DEI bills since 2023. More than a dozen Republican attorneys general sent a letter urging Fortune 100 companies to reexamine their DEI strategies after the Supreme Court banned race-conscious college admissions policies. And the conservative activist who led the campaign to oust Claudine Gay, Harvard University’s first Black president who resigned amid plagiarism allegations in January, said on X that it was “the beginning of the end for DEI in America’s institutions.”

Among the arguments against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives: that they deepen racial inequality by lowering standards to make space for unqualified people of color, resulting in reverse discrimination because skin color — not merit — becomes a deciding factor in hiring and school acceptance.
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Miller’s group, along with other conservative lawmakers, activists and organizations, is using the threat of litigation and the courts — once the venue used to help secure civil rights progress — to invalidate race-conscious programs dedicated to addressing the harm caused by centuries of legalized racial injustice.

Conservative lawmakers have threatened the funding of medical schools that have a DEI office or lessons on structural racism.

The Medical Board of California has been sued for requiring continuing medical education courses to include implicit-bias training. The suit is backed by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a Sacramento law firm that says it “fights for limited government, property rights and individual rights.” The firm represents two California doctors and Do No Harm, a nonprofit whose website says it was founded to “counteract divisive trends in medicine, such as ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’” and gender expansive care. The legal and advocacy group has suits pending in Louisiana, Montana and Tennessee, too.

And in August, Do No Harm and a Wisconsin law firm filed a complaint against the Cleveland Clinic with the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, saying two efforts — the Minority Stroke Program and Minority Men’s Health Center — illegally discriminate on the basis of race. In a statement, the hospital system said its mission is to “care for life, research for health and educate those we serve … regardless of race, ethnicity, or other characteristics,” adding that the stroke program is “open to all patients” but the men’s health center “has not be in place for several years.”
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“A lot of people are under the assumption that we live in a meritocracy, but what they don’t realize is how life chances are dictated by so many other factors,” said Linda Sprague Martinez, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and director of the Health Disparities Institute at UConn Health, adding that she, too, has had grant-funders recently challenge her use of the word racism in her work. “DEI initiatives don’t even fully level the playing fields. But if we’re not paying attention to the inequities and addressing them, they’re just going to persist.”

Ford said the debate about merit and inequities is ensnared in an assumption that people from historically underrepresented communities lack the expertise or credentials to hold positions in predominantly White workplaces and academic settings. Research shows Black college students are often asked if they’re on a sports scholarship, and Black doctors are mistaken for food service workers or janitors.

Six states prohibit lessons on meritocracy’s limitations, defining such critiques as “divisive concepts,” according to an April article in the Milbank Quarterly, a population health and health policy journal.

Social scientists say the anti-DEI movement has co-opted and twisted the fight for justice and equal opportunity, which calls for eliminating legal and practical barriers that restrict access to resources and makes climbing the socioeconomic ladder that much harder for people historically pushed to the margins.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra agreed.

Equity remains a key driver of the Biden administration, Becerra said in an interview, despite attacks by the anti-DEI machine. Becerra said he refuses to be intimated by the “McCarthy-type lists” the anti-DEI movement has created that target not just scholars but federal workers.

“We’ve seen this before where people get branded and listed and blackballed,” Becerra said. “In the end, it doesn’t work.”

Becerra urged researchers and “people of good will” who find themselves in the crosshairs to not get distracted or water down their efforts. “Some people can try to deny history. Some people can try to rewrite history. The facts and science prevail,” he said.

Health equity researchers say the hostile response to DEI is happening as the field and academia develop a critical mass of scholars of color.

“There’s always a backlash when we made progress,” said Thomas LaVeist, dean of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.

“Just like we had a moment during the civil rights movement that was kind of taken down when Nixon came in with his war on drugs,” said LaVeist, who has received hate-filled emails and phone calls because of his research into the economic implications of health disparities.
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Williams and other experts said the nation has made much less progress eliminating patterns of division and disparity than most people think. Residential segregation — which affects school boundaries, longevity, green space, grocery store access, policing, taxes, air and water quality — is worse today than a generation ago, research shows. And the wealth gap remains stubbornly persistent.

According to a 2023 Federal Reserve report, for every dollar of wealth the typical White household had in 2013, Black households had 9 cents and Latino households had 10 cents. By 2022, the gap had improved only marginally: Black families had 16 cents and Latino families had 22 cents for every dollar of wealth held by White families.

And physicians and health equity researchers point out that the dearth of doctors of color, who are more likely to be primary care providers and work in medically underserved areas, hasn’t changed much in more than a century.

A 2021 study from UCLA found that the proportion of Black physicians increased only marginally during the past 120 years, going from 1.3 percent in 1900 to 5.4 percent in 2018. Today, the number remains largely the same at about 5 percent, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
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One of the unrecognized aspects of the anti-DEI movement is that it stalls productivity and scientific inquiry, said Hardeman, a professor and reproductive health equity researcher.

Racism was called a health threat. Then came the DEI backlash. A growing number of institutes exploring the nexus between racism and health — and their researchers — are under attack.

Officials face antisemitic attacks over Hurricane Helene response

Report finds Elon Musk’s X is fueling conspiracy theories that risk undermining rescue efforts and preparations for Hurricane Milton.
October 8, 2024

Top officials in North Carolina and at the Federal Emergency Management Agency responding to Helene are being subjected to a flurry of antisemitic attacks, causing some of them to fear for their safety as they prepare for another hurricane to strike Florida.

Ask your climate questions. With the help of generative Al, we'll try to deliver answers based on our published reporting.
The attacks, which include wild claims that Jewish officials are conspiring to orchestrate the disasters, sabotage the recovery or even seize victims’ property, are being fomented largely on Elon Musk’s X. Antisemitic tropes have commingled on the site with false rumors and conspiracy theories amid the chaos of the recovery effort, according to a report released Tuesday by the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).

The online vitriol is compounding the challenges facing emergency management officials dealing with the aftermath of Helene and readying a response to Milton, a Category 5 hurricane barreling toward Florida. The volume and virulence of the X posts have dismayed experts who warn that they risk undermining lifesaving response measures.

“We’re seeing an alarming trend of antisemitism being included now in false narratives around pretty much any breaking news event,” said Isabelle Frances-Wright, ISD’s director of technology and society. “This portends a grim outlook for the information ecosystem, both on X itself but also on other platforms where these narratives trickle into and evolve.”

The report focused on 33 recent viral X posts that spread misinformation about Helene, which made landfall in Florida as a major hurricane last month and caused at least 231 deaths and widespread devastation in six states.

The posts collectively attracted 159 million views, even though their claims were thoroughly debunked by local residents, FEMA, the White House and other government officials. Ten of the posts contained antisemitic sentiments and collectively drew 17.1 million views.

In comparison, FEMA, which leads the federal response to Helene, drew just short of 2.6 million views for its 10 most popular posts on Saturday and Sunday.

The report noted that antisemitic sentiments were largely directed at three individual officials: FEMA director of public affairs Jaclyn Rothenberg, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Asheville, N.C., Mayor Esther Manheimer. Many came from accounts that have also trafficked in other forms of misinformation on X, including false claims about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, the war in Ukraine, and the 2020 presidential election.

As of Monday evening, X had not removed any of the 33 posts, three of which received “community notes” appending fact-checks or additional context to the original post, according to ISD. While X’s rules prohibit hateful tropes or personal attacks based on ethnicity or religion, the company, previously known as Twitter, has pulled back on content moderation and reinstated prominent accounts banned for violating those policies since Musk bought it in 2022.

X did not respond to requests for comment.

FEMA has created a webpage devoted to debunking false rumors about Helene, and Rothenberg has used her professional X account to rebut several falsehoods. The replies to those missives have been studded with antisemitic comments questioning whether she is more loyal to Israel than to the United States because of her Jewish heritage.

The posts attacking Rothenberg racked up more than 4 million views in only 24 hours starting Friday, according to the report. One post accused Rothenberg of “treason” and repeated a false claim by former president Donald Trump that FEMA has used some disaster relief money to help migrants in the United States illegally.

When Rothenberg locked her personal account Friday and Saturday to protect against the abuse, she faced further attacks for doing so. While her verified government account remained unlocked, one user responded, “I thought gov’t accounts could not be protected. She thinks she can hide behind her nose.” (Jews have historically been portrayed in antisemitic films and N**i propaganda with large, hooked noses, according to the Anti-Defamation League.)

Rothenberg, a political communications veteran who worked for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration and President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, said she has never experienced so much misinformation and abuse.

“The fact that people are spreading misinformation and antisemitism is really disheartening,” she said. “Our jobs are to communicate information that helps people on their worst day, and the misinformation is having a negative impact on the people that need our help the most.”

Another post that has acquired nearly a million views features photos of Rothenberg, Mayorkas and Manheimer and identifies each as “jew.” Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security and Mayorkas, a Cuban-born Jew whose relatives were murdered by N**is, did not respond to a request for comment.

X users have also heavily targeted Manheimer, whose city was deluged by flooding brought by Helene. One post that garnered more than 36,000 views shared a photo of Manheimer accompanied by a caption that played on an antisemitic trope and claimed she “truly hates America.”

National Guard soldiers look for people in distress near the New River from a Black Hawk helicopter near Ashe County, N.C., on Wednesday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Manheimer, who surveyed the damage from Helene during a flight on Marine One with Biden last week, said she worries about her safety and that of other Jewish officials in the hard-hit region.

“Our community’s priority is managing this crisis and addressing the immediate needs that exist in Asheville and Western North Carolina,” Manheimer said in an email, adding that the comments create “a personal safety concern while trying to execute the work needed to move us through this catastrophe.”

The falsehoods online also threatened the safety of the general public, Frances-Wright said.

“When you already have these narratives that the government is bad, that FEMA can confiscate your property, and then you layer on to that FEMA is controlled by the Jewish ‘deep state,’ it just further undercuts people’s trust,” she said.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has apologized for her past embrace of the conspiracy theory that the Rothschild family used lasers from space to start wildfires, repeated a similar trope last week. “Yes they can control the weather,” she wrote on Thursday in an X post. (Greene, who was banned from Twitter in 2022, was among those whose accounts Musk reinstated when he bought the company.)

A spokesman for Greene did not respond to a request for comment.

ISD’s findings track with a trend that researchers have been observing since Musk took over, said Yael Eisenstat, a senior policy fellow at the multi-university research center Cybersecurity for Democracy.

When Musk reinstated the accounts of “so many known extremists and white supremacists,” Eisenstat said, “he signaled to everyone on this platform that engaging in the worst kind of antisemitism and conspiracy theories and targeting people was fair game.”

Andy Carvin, managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab, said the inability or unwillingness of online platforms such as X to disincentivize the spread of such rhetoric has created a “perfect storm of weather-related disinformation and conspiracy theories intertwining with anti-government paranoia and antisemitic rhetoric.”

“What’s particularly worrying is the potential for online threats to escalate into real-world political violence,” Carvin added. “Federal, state and local emergency management officials have a difficult enough job to do responding to natural disasters, and now some of them are having to deal with doing that very job with a potential target on their backs.”

Officials face antisemitic attacks over Hurricane Helene response Report finds Elon Musk’s platform is fueling falsehoods and conspiracy theories that risk undermining rescue efforts — and preparations for Hurricane Milton.

"A new CNN poll showed that a majority of the Republican Party now agrees that “an increasing number of people of many different races, ethnic groups, and nationalities in the U.S.” is mostly threatening (55 percent) rather than enriching (45 percent) to American culture.

This represents a sharp rise from 2019, when just 21 percent of Republicans said that this increasing racial and ethnic diversity was threatening. Back then, Republicans said by a 48-point margin that it was actually more enriching than threatening.

It’s also up significantly even from just last year. A CNN poll in March 2023 found 41 percent of Republicans viewed this increasing diversity as threatening.

Over the span, there’s also been a rise in this sentiment among independents — from 11 percent in 2019 to 32 percent today. But that appears to owe mostly to Republican-leaning ones. The percentage of Democratic-leaning voters (including independents) who embrace the idea that this diversity is threatening to American culture has ticked up only slightly, from 6 percent to 13 percent. Democrats only have gone from 7 to 11 percent. And 86 percent of Democratic-leaning voters continue to say that this form of diversity is mostly enriching.

Source: Aaron Blake, "The nativists have taken over the GOP Post, Washington Post, September 25, 2024.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/25/republican-nativist-immigrant-threat/

EXCERPT:
Between broad phrases like “opportunity economy” and some policy talking points, she hasn’t found her footing on the economy yet. She sounded almost populist in North Carolina in August, mixing talk about the “dignity” of homeownership with denunciation of high prescription drug prices and calls for canceling medical debt. A few weeks later, in New Hampshire, she sounded more like the former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, promising to keep taxes on investment income significantly lower than President Biden recently proposed.

Democrats have worked to make freedom the theme of this campaign. Ms. Harris used the word “freedom” or “freedoms” 12 times in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, calling for reproductive freedom, freedom from gun violence, freedom to love and marry and freedom from pollution. When she rattled off a list of “what we stand for,” freedom came first.

The power of this theme lies in its concreteness. Reproductive freedom, in Ms. Harris’s telling, is about saving a woman from miscarrying in a parking lot because she can’t get an abortion. For her running mate, Tim Walz, gun control means protecting your child from being shot in a school hall. Freedom is in the safety that keeps us whole so we can live our lives.

Voters fear violence, abortion bans and losing the right to vote. They feel the same about the economy. Almost 70 percent of residents of five swing states told pollsters in May that our political and economic system needs major changes or should be torn down entirely, and about the same percentage said the economy is rigged to benefit the rich and powerful.

These numbers are rooted in a grim reality: People feel powerless, ripped off by monopolies in everything from phone service to concert tickets. They can’t get ahead in an economy where real wages have fallen behind the investments that wealthier people hold, which have skyrocketed in value. They see great fortunes made from addictive drugs and addictive platforms, and the pirates of high finance bailed out when bankruptcy looms. We are right to believe we deserve better.

When almost 70 percent of the country feels betrayed by the economy, the party that speaks to this frustration has a built-in advantage. Compared to Mr. Trump’s Republicans, the Democrats remain the party of protecting the system and making it work — the small-c conservative party of the liberal but comfortable coasts and other economic hubs. Many corporate leaders and Wall Street titans have rallied to her, partly because some genuinely fear Mr. Trump’s authoritarian instincts and anti-constitutional tactics, but also because they see her as the candidate of stability, the leader of a party that will not rock the boat. (At the debate, she invoked Goldman Sachs in saying that top economists said that Mr. Trump’s policies would “make the economy worse.”)

The Biden administration reversed decades of flawed economic policy by attacking corporate concentration, investing in domestic industries and infrastructure and keeping and refining Trump-era tariffs on Chinese goods in strategic areas. But partly because of Mr. Biden’s limitations as a communicator, his administration never had a cohesive narrative about what it was doing. Inflation, which everyone sees every day, filled the vacuum and became the economic story.

Ms. Harris can tell a much stronger story about freedom and the economy. It’s there just waiting for her — and she has to mean it. Anyone who works for Walmart or Amazon knows that when there’s only one game in town, you don’t push back against hours that keep you from your family. Democrats are trying to stop bosses from turning themselves into feudal lords — that’s what their antitrust initiatives are all about, and why Ms. Harris supports making union membership more accessible.

Democrats rarely stress these themes on the campaign trail, but when they do, it works. Senator Sherrod Brown argues that supporting “the dignity of work” means promoting union membership, pushing back on offshoring and regulating Wall Street. He has proposed legislation to ban mandatory arbitration, which locks workers and consumers into private courts funded by the same companies they want to challenge, and to prevent housing developers from colluding to drive up prices. An unapologetic class warrior who wants to re-engineer the economy to support workers and families, Mr. Brown is running 10 to 14 points ahead of Ms. Harris in Ohio.

If Democrats presented their economic policies not as individual priorities but as part of a broader push for economic freedom, they’d be telling Americans: You deserve the freedom to live a good life. No one gets to take advantage of you to get rich. If you are growing up in West Virginia or rural North Carolina, you should be able to find a good job where you are and not have to leave seeking work. When you have kids, a big tax credit will help you to decide for yourself whether to work or stay at home. Reproductive freedom includes the chance to raise a family without choking economic stress.

Opinion | Harris Can Win on the Economy, but She Needs a Stronger Message Optimistic words and some admirable proposals aren’t enough to overcome the discontent and anger that large majorities of Americans feel about the economy.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson's summary highlights of VP Kamala Harris's policy platform. September 9, 2024.

And oldie but goodie from cartoonist Barry Deutsch. "History Marches On; Nativism Marches in Place", 2008.

"Papist" (referring to the Catholic "Pope") was a derogatory term referring to Irish immigrants.

https://leftycartoons.com/2008/10/09/history-marches-on-nativism-marches-in-place/

For those reaching out to undecided or independent voters: below is a UNIFYING, FIELD-TESTED POLITICAL MESSAGING FRAMEWORK from the "Race-Class Narrative"/"We Make the Future". PART 1 of 2

Link to their website below with add'l resources & toolkits, including some that are topic- and state-specific.

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"We are building a multiracial movement across age, class, faith, and zip code to reinstill hope in our democracy and build a brighter tomorrow.

The Race Class Narrative (RCN) is an empirically-tested narrative incorporating both race and class that neutralizes the use of dog-whistle racism to win on the issues we care about.

Our opposition regularly uses racial fear as a tool to exploit economic anxieties and turn people against one another, even when their economic interests are aligned, and turn them against a government that works for all.

The Race Class Narrative messaging architecture fights back against these attacks to build cross-racial solidarity and support for our issues, from affordable health care to reproductive freedom to climate justice.

Research for the Race Class Narrative began in 2017 through collaboration between Heather McGhee ("The Sum of Us"), Anat Shenker-Osorio, Ian Haney López ("Dog Whistle Politics"), Lake Research Partners, Brilliant Corners, SEIU and Demos."

https://www.wemakethefuture.us/

Paul Heinegg's new genealogy researcher website. Please share!

Paul Heinegg Paul Heinegg, Genealogist “The world’s expert on the Free Black population in the United States.” — Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. Over 35 years of experience in genealogical research. Research Services About Paul Heinegg Paul Heinegg ([email protected]) has over 35 years of experienc...