I read and write about issues of racism on a near daily basis, so I probably didn’t need a study to tell me that people don’t understand how racism works. But it helps.
University of California-Berkeley professor Clayton R. Critcher and University of Chicago professor Jane L. Risen have published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that shows when “non-African-Americans — whites, Asians and Hispanics — who had seen images of successful black Americans were less likely to believe that systemic racism persists,” according to The Hufffington Post. The study’s abstract reads: “After incidental exposure to Blacks who succeeded in counterstereotypical domains (e.g., Brown University President Ruth Simmons, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison), participants drew an automatic inference that race was not a success-inhibiting factor in modern society.”
Seeing images of successful black people makes others think racism doesn’t exist. That’s hardly surprising. Not much is when it comes to racism. But it underscores what’s so frustrating about our “national conversation on race.” People come to the table not understanding what racism is.
We’re as superficial as our education system and what it teaches and exposes us to.
While a good education system may not completely obliterate racism, it can continue to help us along a trajectory of progress, rather than the trajectory of regression, especially in the past six years.
We need more voter engagement. We need more progressive candidates who are committed to remaining focused on the main issues that face us, rather than allow themselves to be distracted by phony side-issues thrown at them by the opposition. So much has gone by the wayside over the last six years while we have regressed.
Political polarization is the defining feature of early 21st century American politics, both among the public and elected officials. As part of a year-long study of polarization, the Pew Research Center has conducted the largest political survey in its history – a poll of more than 10,000 adults between January and March of this year. It finds that Republicans and Democrats are further apart ideologically than at any point in recent history. Growing numbers of Republicans and Democrats express highly negative views of the opposing party. And to a considerable degree, polarization is reflected in the personal lives and lifestyles of those on both the right and left.
In Washington, DC a bi-partisan effort is underway to chip away at the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which is supposed to prevent the type of economic meltdown that brought the world to the brink in 2008.
Wall Street banks are lobbying to de-fang sections of the law related to derivatives — the complex financial contracts at the core of the meltdown. One deregulation bill, the “London Whale Loophole Act,” would allow American banks to skip Dodd-Frank’s trading rules on derivatives if they are traded in countries that have similar regulatory structures. Continue reading @BillMoyersHQ Preview: #TooBigtoFail and Getting Bigger→
Today, the Senate votes on Elizabeth Warren’s bill to refinance previously issued student loans to current rates, which would save borrowers $55 billion over 10 years. The bill is designed to play up a contrast between the two parties on student aid; it’s not going to pass. And ultimately we need to give young people a free or near-free public option for higher education, rather than modestly subsidize the indebtedness that causes delays in major purchases and harm to the economy. But you could certainly do worse than reducing the massive amount of money the government makes off student borrowers (and I don’t think you have to pay for it; an investment in higher ed pays off itself in the long run). Continue reading Elizabeth Warren faces right-wing stooge: Here’s who’s quietly funding her top critic – Salon→
On Tuesday, a California superior-court judge ruled that the state’s teacher tenure system discriminates against kids from low-income families. Based on testimony that one to three percent of California teachers are likely “grossly ineffective”—thousands of people, who mostly teach at low-income schools—he reasoned that current tenure policies “impose a disproportionate burden on poor and minority students.” The ruling, in Vergara v. California, has the potential to overturn five state laws governing how long it takes for a teacher to earn tenure; the legal maneuvers necessary to remove a tenured teacher; and which teachers are laid off first in the event of budget cuts or school closings. Continue reading @DanaGoldstein: Will California’s Ruling Against Teacher Tenure Change Schools? – The Atlantic→
How did America come to have the highest rate of incarceration in the world? In this video, lawyer and activist Michelle Alexander says that unfortunate fact is not simply a response to crime but deeply connected to racial attitudes, fears and anxieties exploited by politicians over the decades. Continue reading @BillMoyersHQ: Race, the War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration→
Here’s a look at some stats on guns — the deaths and school shootings, America’s public opinion and the failed Congressional attempt to take action — in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 27 people, including 20 children and the shooter.
Slate editors note in the introduction to their crowdsourced map that attempts to visualize gun deaths in the US (pictured below), determining the actual number of gun deaths each year is “surprisingly hard.” That’s because as many as 60 percent of gun deaths are suicides that usually go unreported by the press. Continue reading @BillMoyersHQ: #Guns in America After #Newtown→
In January of 2001, a blue-ribbon Senate committee headed by Sens. Gary Hart (D-CO) and Warren Rudman (R-NH) released a report that would become famous for its prescient warning that “the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the US homeland to catastrophic attack.”
But what most people don’t remember is that the Hart-Rudman report also cautioned that “the United States finds itself on the brink of an unprecedented crisis of competence in government” that made such an attack more likely to succeed. Blaming a variety of factors for a “decay” in “the human resources of government,” the committee concluded that Americans’ “declining orientation toward government service” is “deeply troubling.” Continue reading @BillMoyersHQ: How Republicans Are Creating a Crisis of Competence in Government→
Who is to blame for the dramatic rise in inequality in recent years? The bankers, many people say. According to this view, the financial sector is guilty of triggering the global economic crisis that began in 2008 and still affects millions of middle-class families in Europe and the United States, who’ve seen their purchasing power diminish and job prospects wither. The outrage is amplified by the fact that not only have the bankers and financial speculators escaped punishment for their blunders, but many are now even richer than they were before the crash. Others blame growing inequality on wages in countries like China and India, where low salaries depress incomes of workers in the rest of the world. Asia’s cheap labor compounds the problem because it creates unemployment in countries where companies close factories and “export” jobs to cheaper markets overseas. Still others see technology as the culprit. Robots, computers, the Internet, and greater use of machines in factories, they say, are replacing workers and thus boosting inequality.
The true explanation is a lot more complicated, says Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose influential Capital in the Twenty-First Century has turned into a global sensation. In many countries, Piketty argues, capital (which he equates with wealth in the form of real estate, financial assets, etc.) is growing at a faster rate than the economy. The income produced by capital tends to be concentrated in the hands of a small group of people, whereas income from labor is dispersed throughout the entire population. Therefore, when capital earnings increase faster than wages, inequality grows because those who own capital accumulate a higher proportion of income. And given that growth in wages is directly dependent on the growth of the economy as a whole, economic inequality is bound to get worse if the economy expands at a slower clip than capital earnings.
Piketty summarizes this complicated theory with the formula “r > g” where “r” is the rate of return on capital and “g” is the rate of growth in the economy. The future is dire, he concludes, because he expects the economies of the countries he surveyed to grow at a rate of 1 to 1.5 percent per year, while the average return on capital increases at a rate of 4 to 5 percent per year. Inequality, in other words, is bound to rise. To avoid this, Piketty calls for a progressive tax on wealth in large countries—an idea that even he concludes is utopian. He acknowledges the enormous political hurdles that his proposal would face and the huge practical difficulties that would accompany its implementation. Last week, the Financial Times claimed that it had found grave defects in Piketty’s work, provoking an ongoing debate about his analysis. Nonetheless, most impartial observers believe that the issues with Piketty’s data are not serious enough to completely discredit his overall conclusions.
[. . .]
In order for this discussion to be valuable, however, the problem requires a more complete diagnosis. It is not accurate to assert that in countries like Russia, Nigeria, Brazil, and China, the main driver of economic inequality is a rate of return on capital that is larger than the rate of economic growth. A more holistic explanation would need to include the massive fortunes regularly created by corruption and all kinds of illicit activities. In many countries, wealth grows more as a result of thievery and malfeasance than as a consequence of the returns on capital invested by elites (a factor that is surely at work too).
Experts make an argument for why we should stop counting calories
You’ve heard it before: To lose weight, simply eat less and exercise more. In theory, that makes sense. Actually, it’s not just in theory—science has proven that burning more calories than you consume will result in weight loss. But the trouble is that this only has short-term results. For long-term weight loss, it simply doesn’t work, say renowned obesity experts in a recent JAMA commentary.
Ultimately their argument is this: stop counting calories. “We intuitively know that eat less exercise more doesn’t work. It’s such simple advice that if it worked, my colleagues and I would be out of job,” says Dr. David Ludwig, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. “The uncomfortable fact is that an exceedingly small number of people can lose a substantial amount of weight and keep it off following that advice.”
Blaming excess weight on people simply not changing their eating habits goes back thousands of years. Sloth and gluttony are two of the seven deadly sins, after all. But Ludwig and Dr. Mark L. Friedman of the Nutrition Science Initiative in San Diego, argue that this mindset disregards decades of research on the biological factors that control body weight. And they are not just talking about the role genetics play. They say we should stop viewing weight as something separate from other biological functions—like hormones and hunger and the effects of what foods we eat, not just how much of them.
We’re as superficial as our education system and what it teaches and exposes us to.
