Reduced to the Small ScreenIncident, Reaction, Forget, Repeat: Formulaic Entertainment Replaces Serious Discussion on RaceBy DeNeen L. Brown and Darryl FearsWashington Post Staff WritersSunday, November 11, 2007; M01
Has racial conflict become amusement? Is the conversation about racism mere entertainment, dialogue rendered for show, inflammatory words tossed back and forth over a racial divide to excite an audience?
Thousands of black people are marooned after Hurricane Katrina amid government paralysis, and the race debate on TV kicks into overdrive. A black woman accuses some white men of rape at a Duke University party and the inflamed rhetoric flies.
Comedian Michael Richards shouts the N-word at a black man in a comedy club. Radio host Don Imus calls the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.”
Shouts of injustice fill the small-town streets of Jena, La., after white teens are suspended from school for hanging nooses from a tree while black teens are charged with attempted murder for a schoolyard fight. Nooses are found at the University of Maryland, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Columbia University.
Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly has his turn on the stage of race after dining at a famous soul food restaurant and musing at the surprising civility of black people. Then comes James D. Watson, Nobel Prize winner and head of one of the world’s leading genetics research institutes, questioning the intelligence of black people.
And with each episode in the long-running Saga of Race in America, a string of characters lines up to react to the latest eruption. The media records them as they take up positions in the Great Race Debate. The media stokes the discussion as self-proclaimed black leaders scream outrage while opponents — often white, sometimes black — scream counter-outrage. The “colorblind” wonder why we all just can’t get along. And the rest of us watch from ringside, rooting for one camp or another, sometimes in silence.
Then inevitably, the media turns away. The outrage fades. The talking heads go silent. The curtain falls, and the debate recedes to wherever it goes until the next eruption.
Which raises the question: Has the debate over race become a melodrama? A bad television soap opera? A theatrical stage play with complex issues boiled down to a script? Entertaining words thrown around simply to satisfy the 24-hour news cycle, the blogosphere?
Are we doomed to debate racism over and over — stuck in purgatory, a cycle of skirmishes, of shock and awe, with nothing gained, nothing learned?
Or is there a way to change the ritual, to go deeper into our national consciousness and get off this merry-go-round?
‘Putting On a Show’There it was on television one afternoon, another episode in the Great Race Debate. A perky commentator moderated the banter between two intellectuals discussing the Jena 6 case and the debate over racial injustice.
Even with the sound off, it looked like entertainment, says Alan Bean, executive director of Friends of Justice, a Texas-based criminal justice reform organization that began probing the Jena 6 case long before it became big news. Bean was watching the show while sitting in an airport. That’s when it occurred to him: The race debate had become theater.
“When I looked at the woman who was the correspondent refereeing the fight between two talking heads, I didn’t get the impression she was concerned about enlightening the audience or coming to a meeting of the minds or shedding light on inequities in the criminal justice system,” says Bean, who is white. “Her primary concern seemed to be putting on a show.”
The talking-head debates about racial conflicts “exert a kind of car-wreck fascination,” says John McWhorter, senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.
The debates are like a “recreational source of psychological policing,” McWhorter says, “which reminds me of the place that religious faith held in medieval society. Being charged with racism today is like being charged as a heretic in medieval Europe. One must indulge in all kinds of gestures which one may or may not feel because to not do these things is to invite condemnation as a moral pervert.”
The debate dissolves into a routine, “where all good thinking people are supposed to condemn that person,” he says.
An example: Michael Richards’s racist tirade at a comedy club in Los Angeles, where he even evoked a lynching. His words were caught on tape and played over and over. Black leaders demanded an apology. Richards issued a statement and apologized again and again.
Then there was silence. Episode ended.
“And now here we are today and the whole humbug over that looks like the formulaic cartoon that it was,” says McWhorter, who is black. “We know now and we knew then that what Michael Richards said some night in some club, in the grand scheme of things, was utterly insignificant. But there is a ritual that America has been going through for 40 years where we grab on to all and any opportunity to show we are morally pure in not being racist.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton knows about this pattern, of course. Those accused of racism often go to him or to Rev. Jesse Jackson seeking absolution. Sharpton has carved out a leading role in racial matters. He defines himself, Jackson and others as strategists with a goal. But he is aware that some people define him as a demagogue.
“Don’t assume that because a lot of us are screaming and hollering in the middle, we don’t have a strategy,” he says. The media “try to reduce us to being performers on their stage rather than thinkers in our studies.”
Of his penitent radio show guests, such as Richards and Imus, Sharpton says, “I think that they want to appear like they want absolution, but I really don’t think that’s what they want.”
But he plays along, hosting them on his show as part of an orchestrated trap. In the case of Imus, Sharpton wanted him fired, and he wanted his employers to change their policy regarding racial language.
“I wanted to make it very clear to people why it is that I’m going after them, and to let them trap themselves with their own language,” he said.
On the Sharpton show, Imus complained that he just could not win with “you people.” Sharpton and many other African Americans find that phrase offensive. More fuel for the Great Race Debate.
In April, Imus was fired. The punishment didn’t last. He’s set to return to the airwaves next month.
And the race show goes on.
‘A Public Conversation’If the debate over racism has indeed become entertainment, many say the media and the entertainment business are to blame for encouraging searing sound bites and rhetorical racial skirmishes instead of forums for intellectual discussion.
Most of the infamous episodes of late have been white on black — except for the ongoing anti-immigrant rhetoric, which many view as discriminatory against Latinos, and not just by whites.
Whether it’s about blacks, Latinos, whites, whatever, the race rhetoric has transfixed audiences on television, in blogs and in newspapers for months. Often it is covered as if the debate was simple enough for soundbites. And that, some say, is the problem.
“I think the media’s contribution is to make racism an entertainment issue,” says Ted Morgan, professor of political science at Lehigh University, whose upcoming book is about the media culture.
“Television makes politics entertaining by turning politics into polarized conflict between two sides,” he says. “The audience sympathizes with one side or the other because they are basically getting entertained. It leaves the public with no place in the conversation.”
The media treats racism the same way, says Morgan, who is white.
“A public conversation isn’t what you get when you tune into the nightly news,” he says. “TV is trying to give us a lot of drama, conflict, pictures, basically to entertain us, keep us there watching that channel. That is not a venue that is compatible with public conversation.”
Pueng Vongs, diversity committee chair for the Society of Professional Journalists, one of the largest associations of journalists in the country, says racially charged comments — much like shootings and fires — have become “big clicker stories,” that drive up traffic on news organization Web sites.
News has been molded to fit the short attention span of viewers, Vongs says.
“With the Internet there is a constant hunger for something new and exciting to get hits or with broadcast media to get the viewers,” Vongs says.
While the media provides context for events and a frame of reference by which people understand each other and the broader culture, they also perpetuate stereotypes and fuel sensationalism in the race debate, says Doreen Loury, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Arcadia University outside Philadelphia, where she teaches a course called “African American Images in the Media.”
“I think it needs to do what it was charged to do,” Loury, who is black, says of the news media. “It was charged to look at a situation and report . . . with some accuracy, not to look at racism as the flavor of the month.”
“Objectivity is the key,” she continues. “I know not every white person in Jena is a racist, but most of us think that now. The [media] objectivity isn’t there. It’s all about getting the story and not about getting the angle of the story to enhance the dialogue.
“Racism is a rough thing and it’s real,” she says. “I’m tired of people treating it as entertainment.”
How White People Might See ItRacism. Isn’t that the real rub here? Isn’t all the shouting and hyperventilating and finger-pointing in the Great Race Debate about racism, its presence or its absence?
Let’s put racism on the couch for a minute. Analyze it, get it to explain its tendency to persist despite attempts to kill it.
Often, whites don’t see it — or don’t want to see it. Often, blacks know it is there — or are primed to believe it is. That is the deep divide in how black and white Americans see racism, says John Dovidio, a Yale psychology professor.
That perception gap is complicated by the evolution of racism into a more “quiet” phenomenon, often viewed “as an exception, not typical,” he says.
“From the perspective of the majority group, racism is not a big issue. We don’t see it often. When we see it, we can explain it away,” says Dovidio, author of “Prejudice, Discrimination and Racism.”
“In surveys, 60 to 70 percent of white Americans say racism is a thing of the past,” he says.
“From a white person’s view, when certain incidents occur that are blatant, it is easy to recognize them, but the outrage is more localized. If you don’t believe racism is widespread, you think once you take care of that little event, you can go back to business as usual. . . .
“Like Michael Richards: People were outraged. We have the debate. But because these are seen as rare and atypical events, they become like entertainment.”
The problem in solving racism lies first in seeing it, says Dovidio, who is white. As with any process of healing, one must acknowledge the injury to get better.
The inability of many whites to acknowledge racism has a deep impact on the way race is discussed in society, because white people “control the discourse on what constitutes race in this country,” says Paula Rothenberg, a senior fellow at City University in New York and author of “White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism.”
“The reality is [in] every aspect of life — economic, social, political — white people benefit from the way the system is organized and black people experience deficiency,” says Rothenberg, who is white. “The system is constructed so that it appears to be fair and just and neutral to all, when in fact white people inherit white supremacy and benefits. . . .
“White people are more likely to be hired. More likely to be paid higher salaries. Treated fairly. More likely to be assumed good people and kind people. . . . Every aspect of the system is rigged to benefit whites and to criticize or challenge people of color.”
How Black People Might See ItFor black Americans, the experience is the mirror opposite of whites. The eruptions do not appear to be merely isolated, but become more dots in the picture providing evidential clarity that racism is indeed real.
“Sixty to 70 percent of black Americans see racism as a continuing problem in America,” Dovidio says. “Events will occur and minorities will see it not as an isolated event, but the tip of the iceberg of what they have been experiencing.”
There is a genuine reaction not only to one offending event but a whole series of events in the past, says Dovidio.
“It confirms racism is out there and becomes a great way of pointing out racism is out there.”
Because black people are aware that the broader society is often deaf to allegations of racism, “We get mad and feel like we have to express that we are mad,” says Camille Z. Charles, associate director of the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Some black people then want to force society to hear their sense of grievance, thinking, “You have to acknowledge there was a wrong. I’m going to make you acknowledge that,” says Charles, who is black.
But some argue that racism has been perpetuated, kept alive by people who benefit from the show. Benefit from stoking white guilt. Benefit from encouraging victimhood.
Robert L. Woodson, founder and president of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, calls such people “grievance merchants whose purpose in life is to racialize every situation conceivable without finding out what the facts are.”
“Race is an intimidating issue,” says Woodson, who is black. “If you want people to back off, all you have to do is inject race, and all the rules of dialogue, all the rules of comity are set aside. You are either for the people who are charging racism or you are for injustice.”
Racism gets boiled down into inflammatory words, thrown like swords. Woodson argues that of course racism still exists, but people of color, particularly those with lower incomes, are hurt by perpetuated notions of their victimization.
Woodson, who worked in the civil rights movement, contrasts the marches of today with those of that era and its goal of fostering unity. “In today’s world, the purpose is never to unite,” he says. “The purpose is to make cheap headlines in the name of being champions of injustice. They are entertainers. I call them civil rights reenactors. Just like Civil War reenactors dress up and act like we are in still the Civil War.”
Black people, as a group, are still beset by intractable problems, says Shelby Steele, who is black. He is author of “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.”
Steele lists poverty, single-parent families, high school dropout rates. “But what do we do? Talk about Don Imus and Michael Richards and do nothing to explore the 70 percent illegitimacy rate.” Yet, when it comes to race relations, he says, the country has made remarkable progress.
“White America has undergone a marvelous if unremarked moral evolution in the last 40 years and racism is no longer the barrier that it used to be,” says Steele, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “That doesn’t mean it no longer exists, that it is no longer present. But it no longer stunts the life of black people.
“We have come to the point where we can entertain ourselves with it,” he says, adding sarcastically, “Isn’t that wonderful?”
And the Cycle Starts AgainAnd the Great Race Debate goes on. Nooses still appear, roiling the racial landscape. In the category of contrition, Duane “Dog” Chapman, TV’s “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” issued an apology late last month for using the N-word to describe his son’s girlfriend. (His reality show was canceled.)
There’s never a shortage of fodder for the race debate. And no shortage of people to comment, whether to enlighten or just to stir up the rancor.
Steele often is asked to participate in televised discussions. But sometimes the format is “racist,” he says.
“I will not be in a situation where we have a white moderator and two blacks screaming at each other. That is profanity. It is gladiatorial, where blacks fight for the amusement of whites. And the white moderator never takes a stand, never tells you what he or she thinks. . . . Whites can say we are having a discussion on race. And whites will not tell you what they think. They come to blacks to get statements because only blacks have the moral authority to speak about race. That is how the formula gets established. I’ve always resented it.”
Abigail Thernstrom, a white member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, says the race debate is one-sided because white people are afraid of revealing their thoughts in a climate of anger and accusation.
“People are afraid of saying the wrong thing, something that can be labeled as racially questionable,” says Thernstrom. “It stifles the debate and lessens our public lives because there’s much to be debated.”
So the show goes on. The debate over racism becomes as predictable as reruns on basic cable. The audience watches the Great Race Debate for a while, then changes the channel — until the next episode.
Archive for November, 2007
The question here is about building a new relationship. One where we do not fear the souls behind the eyes we see on the street. Where we accept the enormity of the world not we guarded reserve but an endless well of friendliness – even in the big city, even with the stresses.
****Stealing glances What are we afraid we’ll see if we look into a stranger’s eyes?
by Sheila Heti photo by Adam Krawesky : : : : : : :Sometimes I feel an urgent need to get out of Toronto, and this is one of those times. The strain does not come from difficult friendships or celebrity magazines or the noise, so much as my relationship to my fellow pedestrian. The crisis is almost always a crisis about strangers; it’s a crisis of eye contact. Someone approaches and the problem of whether to look away or look at them — and if to look, how long to keep looking for — does not resolve itself easily, quietly, in the background. It becomes a loud problem, and as people pass by, the anxiety of how to act and this question about responsibility to my fellow humans, paid out in a momentary acknowledgement of our mutual humanity, prohibits me from thinking about anything else.In such a state it is difficult to accept that we really are free on the streets of Toronto; free to look or not look as we choose, without consequence and without affecting anyone for the better or worse. In times like these, it feels as though what it means to look at someone and what it means to decide to not look is as central an ethical dilemma as any; that the question of our responsibility to each other really comes down to how we interact with people we do not know. What degree of regard are the hundreds of strangers we pass in a single day worth?That walking among others should present itself as a dilemma is pathetic. Perhaps it is because we are primarily a culture of drivers, not pedestrians. Even if we do not drive, still we share the streets with many who do, who do not occupy the sidewalks with pleasure but rather are wishing there was less space to travel between the restaurant and their parked car. “Urbanity and automobiles are antithetical in many ways,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust, a history of walking. “A city of drivers is only a dysfunctional suburb of people shuttling from private interior to private interior.” This is also true in a city of transit users — we rush to the streetcar stop, take a seat, look through whatever newspaper is lying closest. Walking is no longer, as Solnit points out, “a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned.” As a result, we are jarred by our encounters. Eye contact is an irritation. It disrupts the work of getting somewhere.Most of us accept as inevitable the sort of eye contact that is most pervasive, that rushed and fearful glance. You might argue that this way of looking is respectful; that since privacy is so scarce in a city, it is gracious to look away. But I have experienced such gentle looks away — giving them, getting them — and they’re not what I am talking about and not the norm. There still remains that quick glance away, which often leaves me with a feeling of shame or a sense of the diminishment of my humanity. And as I sweep my eyes rapidly from someone’s face onto the mailbox, I recognize that, in my wake, I may leave that person with this same anxiety.For some people, it seems clear, if someone looks quickly and uncomfortably away as soon as eye contact is made, no matter. This crisis doesn’t exist for them; the interaction barely registers. I wonder if such people are suffering from what George Simmel calls “the blasé attitude.” He defines it as the result of the over-stimulation of nerves that accompanies life in a metropolis, which results in a “blunting of discrimination, [so] that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no one object deserves preference over any other.” The lamppost, that boy, same difference.But for those of us who are not suffering from the blasé attitude, who are very conscious of the reality of the people we encounter, why do we look away embarrassed or scared, rather than gently, politely, in good conscience? Perhaps in every glance there is desire expressed. I don’t mean sexual desire — though sometimes there’s that — as much as the sort Constant Nieuwenheuys described when he wrote, in 1949, “When we say desire in the twentieth century, we mean the unknown, for all we know of the realm of our desires is that it continuously reverts to one immeasurable desire for freedom.”Perhaps the desire expressed in every glance, that we see in another person’s face and they see in ours, is a desire for freedom — which on the street comes down to the freedom to look at each other. We are naturally curious about other people. From the start, as babies, we are drawn to the eyes of our parents. Imagine a cat, neurotically trying not to look directly at a passing cat. We need eye-to-eye contact. We want to see each others’ faces. It is why we take and keep photographs, watch television, hang portraits in our homes. There is something terrible about looking at each other, only to have reflected back our own (and the other person’s) thwarted, repressed desire to look. Somewhere we have failed magnificently.Our culture is such that a greater value even than freedom is productivity, utility. I was having a conversation with a friend about leisure, and she was saying how much she enjoys doing nothing, just wandering aimlessly around her house, thinking. “I find it so productive,” she decided. Even an activity we enjoy precisely because it is not about production we must ultimately justify by way of its productivity. This being the situation we find ourselves in, how can we ever justify to ourselves or to each other the value of those most fleeting relationships, lasting at most two seconds long, with a stream of people we will never see again? What is the utility of the quarter-of-a-second-long relationship?When we look and look away, we reveal what we want — communion, citizenry — and what we lack — communion, citizenry. It is not unreasonable to think the health of a culture can be judged by how many seemingly inconsequential encounters and experiences are shared among its citizens. Take the option of making real eye contact with strangers — frank, fully conscious, unafraid, respectful, not obtrusive. This level of engagement would be satisfying, but so exhausting to sustain; possibly too relentless and demanding for a city-dweller, since to look at someone in this way is to acknowledge and recognize how they’re like you, how they are like everyone you know and love, and so to become responsible for them, just as you are responsible for those you love. But while your duty to your friend is directed only at your friend, as needed, your duty to a stranger can be paid only to the collective, constantly.We need to learn how to look away well, but we cannot fake it. We cannot look from someone’s face comfortably until we find what we are looking for in it.Sheila Heti is the author of the Middle Stories and the recently released Ticknor. She is also one of the creators behind Trampoline Hall http://spacing.ca/stealing-glances.htm
Days ago the CCPA released Eroding Tax Fairness: Tax Incidence in Canada, 1990 to 2005 by CCPA-BC Senior Economist Marc Lee. The study, which is the first comprehensive review of tax changes at all levels of government in Canada within the past 15 years, finds the system is delivering larger tax savings for high income families.
The news release for the study is pasted below. The entire study can be downloaded at www.policyalternatives.ca and www.growinggap.ca.
Canada’s rich not contributing fair share in taxes: study
TORONTO – More than a decade’s worth of tax cuts have disproportionately lined the pockets of Canada’s most affluent families, says a new tax study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).
The study finds the top 1 percent of families in 2005 paid a lower total tax rate than the bottom 10 percent of families.
“Canada’s tax system now fails a basic test of fairness,” says Marc Lee, senior economist with the CCPA’s B.C. office and author of the study. “Tax cuts have contributed to a slow and steady shift to a less progressive tax system in Canada.”
The study, which is the first comprehensive review of tax changes at all levels of government in Canada within the past 15 years, finds the system is delivering larger tax savings for high income families. This reinforces the growing gap in market incomes between high income families and the rest of Canadians.
“Most Canadians will be surprised by these findings because they believe we have a progressive tax system – but looking at all taxes combined, that’s no longer the case.”
The study, Eroding Tax Fairness: Tax Incidence in Canada, 1990 to 2005, is available at www.growinggap.ca and www.policyalternatives.ca. Its key findings include:
Provincial tax cuts are the key culprit for the increasingly regressive nature of Canada’s tax system but the problem has been exacerbated at the federal level with billions of dollars worth of post-2000 tax cuts.
The richest one percent of taxpayers saw their tax rate drop by four percentage points between 1990 and 2005.
Most Canadians saw their tax rate fall by two percentage points of income, but not so for the poorest 20 percent of taxpayers, who pay three to five percentage points more in taxes.
Middle-income families pay about six percentage points more in total taxes than a family in the top 1 percent.
–
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
410-75 Albert Street, Ottawa, ON K1P 5E7
tel: 613-563-1341 fax: 613-233-1458
http://www.policyalternatives.ca
caw567
Days ago the CCPA released Eroding Tax Fairness: Tax Incidence in Canada, 1990 to 2005 by CCPA-BC Senior Economist Marc Lee. The study, which is the first comprehensive review of tax changes at all levels of government in Canada within the past 15 years, finds the system is delivering larger tax savings for high income families.
The news release for the study is pasted below. The entire study can be downloaded at www.policyalternatives.ca and www.growinggap.ca.
Canada’s rich not contributing fair share in taxes: study
TORONTO – More than a decade’s worth of tax cuts have disproportionately lined the pockets of Canada’s most affluent families, says a new tax study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).
The study finds the top 1 percent of families in 2005 paid a lower total tax rate than the bottom 10 percent of families.
“Canada’s tax system now fails a basic test of fairness,” says Marc Lee, senior economist with the CCPA’s B.C. office and author of the study. “Tax cuts have contributed to a slow and steady shift to a less progressive tax system in Canada.”
The study, which is the first comprehensive review of tax changes at all levels of government in Canada within the past 15 years, finds the system is delivering larger tax savings for high income families. This reinforces the growing gap in market incomes between high income families and the rest of Canadians.
“Most Canadians will be surprised by these findings because they believe we have a progressive tax system – but looking at all taxes combined, that’s no longer the case.”
The study, Eroding Tax Fairness: Tax Incidence in Canada, 1990 to 2005, is available at www.growinggap.ca and www.policyalternatives.ca. Its key findings include:
Provincial tax cuts are the key culprit for the increasingly regressive nature of Canada’s tax system but the problem has been exacerbated at the federal level with billions of dollars worth of post-2000 tax cuts. The richest one percent of taxpayers saw their tax rate drop by four percentage points between 1990 and 2005. Most Canadians saw their tax rate fall by two percentage points of income, but not so for the poorest 20 percent of taxpayers, who pay three to five percentage points more in taxes. Middle-income families pay about six percentage points more in total taxes than a family in the top 1 percent. –Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives410-75 Albert Street, Ottawa, ON K1P 5E7tel: 613-563-1341 fax: 613-233-1458http://www.policyalternatives.cacaw567
Who can explain it better than Wayne Roberts himself? Diabetes is a big issue not just for Toronto – it’s an issue for every population, our society as a whole. Planned prevention… Solve the problem when it’s small, at its source…
****
DIABETES PREVENTION
By Wayne Roberts
There’s nothing sickly sweet in a new report that confronts an epidemic spread of diabetes with the strong medicine of “healthy public policy,” a bold approach to disease prevention that’s been neglected and suppressed since it was first brought to international attention by Canadian health minister Marc Lalonde in 1974.
Produced by Dr Rick Glazier and Dr Gillian Booth of St Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, one of the few hospitals in the world to sponsor a unit specializing in health impacts of inequality, the well-written and richly-illustrated 223-page report has a title better suited to a doorstopper — “Neighbourhood Environments and Resources for Healthy Living-a Focus on Diabetes in Toronto.” But it plops the urgent need to reinvent medicare and public health right in the middle of government policy tables, and raises the possibility of revolutionizing the funding of hard-strapped cities that do the right thing by the environment and community development.
Because it turns out that the programs which good cities sponsor and nurture – from community gardens, farmers markets and thriving main streets with mom and pop groceterias to bike lanes and recreation centres – are exactly what the doctors have ordered to prevent diabetes. Saying that diabetes is caused by lack of medical attention is more stupid than saying headaches are caused by a lack of aspirin, and trying to cure it in hospitals rather than prevent it with healthy public policy will bankrupt almost any government.
Here’s how a new funding formula might unfold, as we fast approach diabetes rates of one person in ten, and the bottom line of this highly-preventable disease looms large. By my calculation, the $13.2 billion a year now spent on medical care for diabetics — who typically suffer from a lifetime of collateral damage ranging from kidney failure and blindness to heart disease and high blood pressure – works out to about $5500 per typical diabetic per typical year. Extrapolating from that, a typical teen who develops juvenile diabetes and lives another 40 years (still 15 years less than the typical non-diabetic), will cost the medical system and taxpayers $240,000 over that lifetime, over and above similar costs in lost productivity at work and in the community. That’s an expensive way to subsidize the junkfood and auto industries, the two industries that have benefitted most from government neglect of healthy public policy.
What if the principles of avoided cost – turned into an art form by celebrated energy guru Amory Lovins, and widely used by dynamic companies and foundations (most recently, the Bill Clinton Foundation in its contribution to Toronto conservation campaigns) – were applied to diabetes prevention? Just as with energy waste, use future savings to finance today’s programs and to avoid future costs.
Canada’s federal and provincial medicare account can well afford to invest $239,999 to prevent one person in ten from contracting diabetes. Since we don’t know which person in ten will get diabetes, that money is most efficiently spent by investing $23,999 on the health supports needed by each person. Shall we take another look at whether or not cities can afford community gardens in schools and parks to encourage engagement with healthy and fresh veggies, or should we revisit how costly it really is to build safe and attractive bike and walking trails to encourage the burning of food calories rather than fossil fuel calories, or can we recalculate whether it’s a smart thing to spruce up main streets that attract pedestrians and let feet do the walking for grocery shopping, or can we add it up to see if public transit could replace junkfood ads with health promo’s that commuters could stare at when in public space? Nobody spends health dollars wisely like smart cities do. Nobody. So medicare should pick up the bill, donate the money to cities, and save taxpayer money doing it.
We could even get creative while following this avoided cost logic. The kind of money to be spent on diabetes could be more healthily spent to finance the transition to shorter workweeks (reinstate the 40-hour workweek, for example) so there’s time for home-cooked family meals, or even to finance students to take another year to go from grade 6 to grade 12 so they can burn some calories instead of burning the midnight oil doing homework every evening. Healthy public policy is all about finding non-medical causes of good health and financing them. Get weird and pay kids an allowance — $23,999 payable at age 18 for every six-year old who commits to start lifelong healthy habits by eating their veggies, foreswearing junk, and exercizing every day, even if it means skipping homework. A lot of kids could stomach a $40+ a week allowance to stay healthy. We may as well pay an allowance that costs no more than a subsidy to hospitals and junk food industries, especially since it makes lives better and preserves each person’s full economic productivity as a bonus.
Rising rates of preventable heart disorders, cancers and diabetes are often listed together as “diseases of affluence.” This study confirms they’re more properly called diseases of effluence and inequality.
The Glazier-Booth study is a milestone in health research because it uses computer techniques of Geographic Information Systems to literally put the relationship between inequality and illness on the map. Affluent white people in Toronto do not suffer as high a rate of diabetes as low-income people of color, a score of maps featured in the study show. A small portion of that difference in rates of diabetes may be blamed on genetics; south Asians seem to get diabetes even when they’re not as obese as typical whites who get diabetes, for example.
But almost all of class and racial divide in disease affliction is about the kind of neighborhood people come from, or the ways rich people have of getting out of the neighborhood. Few poor people live as far from a healthy and affordable food outlet or as far from an attractive community recreation centre as those who suffer this hardship in Rosedale or Forest Hill, for example. But most residents in these areas have the means to get chauffered to a gym or find someone to cater an alternative to KFC. By contrast, people who live in the northeast and northwest of the city, largely immigrants on low-income and without cars, are tied to resources in their community, where they have fewer available healthy options and more available unhealthy ones. That’s the way the high fat high sugar cookie crumbles, and that’s why people who live downtown in less car-dominated ‘hoods stay healthier even when they have less money. The “commons” they live in is richer, thanks to healthy public policy, and that trickles up to improve their health and well-being.
Though it made good sense and good cents, Prevent never got anywhere in the health field for the same reason Reduce (as in reduce, reuse, recycle) never got anywhere in the environmental field. There’s no commodity to push, and consequently no champion to push it. No corporation can figure out how to make more money from people who walk more, garden more, eat less, and eat less prepared food. So no health reformers who know what side their bread is buttered on campaigns for healthy public policy.
Follow the money. Even the sponsor of this study, St. Michael’s Hospital, has a Tim Horton’s that lays on sugar, grease and cream for diabetics who come seeking care and treatment, presumably giving a kickback in rental to the hospital that a company selling healthy foods can’t match. That penny-wise-pound-foolish market failure is the preventative to prevention, with costs to health and social justice, and with practical and affordable alternatives that an excellent study has now documented.
(adapted from NOW Magazine, November 8-14, 2007)
Sexist Humor No Laughing Matter
Measure the consequences of every action with care…
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Sexist Humor No Laughing Matter, Psychologist Says
ScienceDaily (Nov. 7, 2007) — A research project led by a Western Carolina University psychology professor indicates that jokes about blondes and women drivers are not just harmless fun and games; instead, exposure to sexist humor can lead to toleration of hostile feelings and discrimination against women.
“Sexist humor is not simply benign amusement. It can affect men’s perceptions of their immediate social surroundings and allow them to feel comfortable with behavioral expressions of sexism without the fear of disapproval of their peers,” said Thomas E. Ford, a new faculty member in the psychology department at WCU. “Specifically, we propose that sexist humor acts as a ‘releaser’ of prejudice.”
In their research article*, Ford and the graduate student co-authors describe two research projects designed to test the theory that “disparagement humor” has negative social consequences and plays an important role in shaping social interaction.
“Our research demonstrates that exposure to sexist humor can create conditions that allow men – especially those who have antagonistic attitudes toward women – to express those attitudes in their behavior,” he said. “The acceptance of sexist humor leads men to believe that sexist behavior falls within the bounds of social acceptability.”
In one experiment, Ford and his student colleagues asked male participants to imagine that they were members of a work group in an organization. In that context, they either read sexist jokes, comparable non-humorous sexist statements, or neutral (non-sexist) jokes. They were then asked to report how much money they would be willing to donate to help a women’s organization. “We found that men with a high level of sexism were less likely to donate to the women’s organization after reading sexist jokes, but not after reading either sexist statements or neutral jokes,” Ford said.
In the second experiment, researchers showed a selection of video clips of sexist or non-sexist comedy skits to a group of male participants. In the sexist humor setting, four of the clips contained humor depicting women in stereotypical or demeaning roles, while the fifth clip was neutral. The men were then asked to participate in a project designed to determine how funding cuts should be allocated among select student organizations.
“We found that, upon exposure to sexist humor, men higher in sexism discriminated against women by allocating larger funding cuts to a women’s organization than they did to other organizations,” Ford said. “We also found that, in the presence of sexist humor, participants believed the other participants would approve of the funding cuts to women’s organizations. We believe this shows that humorous disparagement creates the perception of a shared standard of tolerance of discrimination that may guide behavior when people believe others feel the same way.”
The research indicates that people should be aware of the prevalence of disparaging humor in popular culture, and that the guise of benign amusement or “it’s just a joke” gives it the potential to be a powerful and widespread force that can legitimize prejudice in our society, he said.
*Ford, who conducted research into sexist humor with three graduate students at his previous institution of Western Michigan University, presents their findings in an article accepted for publication in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The article, “More Than Just a Joke: The Prejudice-Releasing Function of Sexist Humor,” is scheduled for publication in February 2008.
Adapted from materials provided by Western Carolina University.
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Western Carolina University (2007, November 7). Sexist Humor No Laughing Matter, Psychologist Says. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 6, 2007, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2007/11/071106083038.htm
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