Mediaboss Marketing

In the aftermath of last weeks mass shooting in Georgia that killed eight people, political leaders and the Asian American community are grieving and calling for justice.

Let me start off by saying this: The role of an activist is not the same as the role of a politician. That has been true of grassroots campaigns and activists campaigns since the beginning of time. It was true during the civil rights movement, said Guy Cecil, chair of Priorities USA, during a recent briefing with reporters. Having said that, in the aggregate, when you look at the totality of the election, defund the police in the aggregate neither helped nor hurt the cause.

One analysis by a Democratic consultant, provided exclusively to POLITICO, measured the effectiveness of GOP attack ads on defunding the police. House candidates recently shared the report to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to a person familiar with their communications.

Matthew Weaver, an adviser for battleground Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.), said he conducted the study because he wanted to look at it in a very rigorous and statistical way, as opposed to via anecdotes, which is where a lot of the debate seems to be right now.

His findings: The GOP attack ads accusing Democrats of wanting to strip resources from cops were not any more powerful than other TV spots run by Republicans. On the other hand, Democratic ads that refuted the GOPs claims that they were looking to defund the police made a difference: Those candidates who aired such spots performed better than President Joe Biden by 1.5 percentage points for every 1,000 gross ratings points a measure of advertising impact run.

The lesson, Weaver said, is that not addressing certain false allegations explicitly and head-on is a strategic error that many cannot afford to make. But only a quarter of House Democratic candidates in the most contested races countered the GOPs blitz on broadcast television, he said.

The DCCC may be part of the reason why. During the 2020 election, some at the committee advised Cartwright not to reply on TV because candidates should never repeat a negative, said a person close to the conversations. With the help of a former local police chief who backed him up, Cartwright ultimately shot down the defund idea in ads anyway, and he won his competitive district by nearly four points; Biden lost it by more than four.

The DCCC is now under new leadership: New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney became chair after the election. Helen Kalla, a spokesperson for the DCCC, did not respond directly to questions about the discussions with Cartwright or where it stands now on the issue.

As for its preparations for attacks over defunding the police in the future, she said, We expect that Republicans will continue spreading lies and misinformation about our candidates and their positions, and Democrats will be ready to combat those Republican lies and make clear to voters where they stand.

Cartwright, an attorney by trade, said that he decided to respond to his opponents negative ads because he decided they were a kill shot an attack, which if believed by the decision-maker, either a jury or, in politics, the voter, will end your chance of success. He called Weavers analysis fascinating.

Cartwright confirmed that there were voices at the DCCC who were giving the archetypal when youre responding, youre losing advice. But once he explained, for instance, the large number of lawn signs in his district expressing support for police including in yards without any campaign signs at all others at the committee supported his efforts to push back.

Once they got the picture, Cartwright said, "they were all in."

Some of Priorities USAs findings were similar to Weavers. During a Zoom briefing with reporters last week, Cecil said the net effect of Republican attack ads over defunding the police was neither negative nor positive.

Certainly there are people that respond negatively to defund the police. There are people that respond in our surveys by the way, of all races, all income brackets, that respond negatively to defund the police, he said. What's also true is that the activism and the energy and the attention that was brought to this issue, without a doubt, led to more votes, and more voters coming into the fold for the first time.

Another item from Priorities USAs research demonstrates how potent Democrats response to this issue and racial justice could be in the midterms: Asked about their decision to go to the polls, 91 percent of new Biden voters said "they wanted someone that would address racism and stand up for racial justice, said Cecil.

Many activists say they are not arguing for the wholesale elimination of police funding but rather the reallocation of resources.

There is another effort underway that will likely play a major role in influencing the debate around the net political effects of defund: a Democratic post-mortem being done with the help of the CBC, CHC, CPC and other caucus groups.

The partnership of centrist and liberal groups examining the impact of the call to remove funding from the police, along with other hot-button issues such as socialism and the Green New Deal, includes Third Way, Collective PAC, Latino Victory Fund and End Citizens United. No conclusions from the report have been made yet, and it will be finished around the end of May, said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way.

Given the fact that the study is being aided by both moderates and progressives, as well as powerful institutional players such as the CBC, its findings could go in multiple directions and will likely have a big impact.

At the same time, Black Lives Matter activists are discussing the possibility of holding a press conference or making some other kind of formal response to moderates claims, said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party and a leader in the Movement for Black Lives coalition. They considered the option last year but deprioritized it because they were busy in the aftermath of former President Donald Trumps efforts to overturn the election as well as the insurrection at the Capitol, he said.

I do think that there is a conversation that needs to happen that puts Democrats on notice around what our movement would consider harmful to our efforts in their efforts to push back on these attacks, he said. If they buttress themselves with law enforcement validators and tried to prove that they were more law-and-order than Republicans, then what you're doing is you're ceding and youre re-ascribing these far-right myths that make it harder for Democrats and harder for people in general to be able to critique and challenge what is by most measures a failing criminal legal system.

See the original post here:
A conversation that needs to happen: Democrats agonize over defund the police fallout - POLITICO

I am a pediatrician. It is my job to respond to young peoples needs. I listen and see them as the experts of their own lives. But even within medicine, not everyone does this, and the needs of Black people are systematically ignored. The physical pain that Black people experience is both under-recognized and undertreated, and young people are no exception. In a study of appendicitis management in emergency departments, for instance, Black children were less likely to receive the appropriate pain medication despite reporting the same pain scores as white children.

Emotional pain is even less visible and, therefore, harder to recognize. Adults caring for young people need to trust their expressions of anxiety or feeling unsafe and protect them from harm. But when Black students demand an end to ongoing trauma from police, the adults charged with protecting them often dismiss their voices. Black and brown youth activists have called for police-free schools, citing the disproportionate harm to Black and brown students, including extreme punishment for minor offenses, sexual harassment, and anxiety in the presence of policeall of which is supported by research.

In the 2015-16 school year, Black high school students nationwide made up 31 percent of arrests and referrals to law enforcement but only 15 percent of school enrollment. A 2018 Texas-based study found that increasing the numbers of school resource officers led to a decline in high school graduation and college-enrollment rates for all students. An investigation of the Chicago public schools in 2017 found that school resource officers had little oversight, accountability, or training and put Black students at higher risk of incarceration. As a pediatrician, I aim to see every child thrive by providing the resources they need to succeed within their context. The school-to-prison pipeline has threatened the futures of young Black and brown people for decades, and school resource officers contribute to this crisis.

The killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed brought national attention to the police-free school campaign. A few cities across the country, including Minneapolis; Oakland, Calif.; and Portland, Ore.; ended their district contracts with school resource officers. And the debates continue in districts throughout the country. As I see it, the continuance of school resource officer programs, despite their demonstrated and verbalized harms to Black students, reflects a much larger and problematic issue by extension: as a nation, we have been conditioned to distrust Black young people.

Black children are not given the same grace as white children because adults, including police officers, tend to see them as more mature than they are. According to one study, Black children as young as 5 to 10 years old are no longer viewed as innocent or worthy of protection, but rather as bad.

But they are not bad. Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun, an age-appropriate activity, when he was killed by police at the age of 12. Trayvon Martin was 17, wearing a hoodie on his walk home, when, unprovoked, George Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood-watch coordinator, approached and then killed him. We see this pattern of criminalization also in public schools. In 2020, 17-year-old Caleb Reed shared his experience of being arrested and held for six hours by a school resource officer. His crime? He left his ID card inside the gym when he stepped outside of a school sporting event. I cant watch the news or scroll through social media without seeing videos of police officers slamming students to the ground. These assaults by police officers in school are tracked on an #AssaultAt map by the Alliance for Educational Justices initiative, We Came to Learn. I counted a total of 12 incidents nationally in 2019. I worry that a return to school with resource officers present will once again make Black students disproportionately vulnerable to arrest.

We need to believe Black children. Believe their hurt. Believe in their innocence. Believe that they deserve to learn from their mistakes without a criminal record. And not hold them to a different standard from their white peers.

In Chicago, where I live, Black students have four times as many police interactions in school as white students. The extent of their arrests and feelings of unsafety has been alarming. As both a physician and Black woman, I felt compelled to get involved, to demonstrate with actions and not just words, that Black lives matter.

During the last year, I leveraged the expertise of my fellow physicians to amplify the voices of Chicagos young people. I texted friends who readily joined the cause. As physicians for police-free schools, we showed up wherever there were conversations: social media, protests, City Council meetings, even one-on-one meetings with school board members. We strategized with youth-serving community organizations, organized presentations for our peers, and co-led a webinar for hundreds of health-care providers in Illinois. Chicagos board of education voted against ending the school resource officer program by only one vote. Yet 17 schools voted to remove SROs, decreasing the districts contract expenditure by $18 million. Chicago public schools also introduced new reforms, such as implementation of school resource officer selection criteria, increased training, compliance monitoring, and research.

Although police may represent security for some, they do not signal or provide safety for Black young people. Their presence in schools as school resource officers amplifies those feelings of unsafety through continued discriminatory treatment on school grounds. To make learning environments truly safe for Black students, equip them with the resources that address the root causes of trauma and free them from the harm of overpolicing, we must invest in behavioral-health staffing and restorative-justice training. In 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union released an analysis of 2015-16 federal civil rights data showing that 31 percent of students nationwide attended schools that have school resource officers but no psychologist, nurse, counselor, and/or social worker. Black children, like all children, deserve to be seen, loved, and treated as children.

As we start to see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, we see more and more districts across the country discuss how to safely reopen their school buildings. But at this moment, lets not forget that COVID-19 isnt the only thing that threatens school safety. If we really want to make schools safe for Black children, we must remove school resource officers from campuses.

Until we do so, our work for school safety is not finished.

Follow this link:
We Ignore the Pain of Black Children (Opinion) - Education Week

By Shayna Gee

sgee23@mail.ccsf.edu

This years Womens History Month theme is We Keep Each Other Safe. The programming offers a series of 13 free remote events including multiple healthy relationship workshops with Project SURVIVE. The Womens and Gender Studies department, Womens Resource Center, Queer Resource Center, and Associated Students have also organized events.

Beginning February through April, the events embody what it means to keep each other safe. The series included a book event with author and artist Chanel Miller, an Anti-Imperialist Feminist Leadership event with combat veteran and activist Brittany DeBarros, a Workplace Rights Workshop with Trabajadores Unidos Workers United, and many more.

Project SURVIVE is City Colleges sexual violence prevention and healthy relationship promotion program that has been operating for more than 25 years. They train and pay peer educators on multi-layered topics.

In a recent event on healthy relationships, peer educators Hold, Diamund White, and Michael Rosenthal facilitated a Zoom workshop. The presenters jotted down community answers describing what healthy relationships look like surrounding a graphic of a heart with the text Healthy Relationships in the center.

The presenters also role-played a date scenario between two people who had differing power dynamics. The moderator took time to debrief the role-play, asking the presenters how they felt playing their character roles and addressing autonomy and accountability. Overall, the scenario taught what a healthy interaction includes.

Part of Project SURVIVEs philosophy states that, We can learn and share strategies to keep ourselves and each other safer, but rape is never a victims fault.

After the roleplay scenario, presenters and the audience brainstormed risk reduction strategies that can be used before and during a date. Project SURVIVE provided many resources for the audience including a healthy relationship handbook and a handout titled Protect Yourself and Your Friends. In addition, they have a club that meets every Monday where students can drop in, build community, and share space.

In a White House brief on March 17, the House of Representatives passed the expired reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), a law that protects domestic abuse and sexual violence victims, with a bipartisan vote of 244-172. The reauthorization of VAWA can aid funding for campus programs such as Project SURVIVE.

Project SURVIVEs commitment to social justice is united to Womens History Month, which celebrates all women, in which many historical as well as current movements have been led by women of color.

Womens History Month programming kicked off with an event honoring Marsha P. Johnson. Johnson was a prominent figure of the 1969 Stonewall riot which birthed the Gay Liberation Front against police and state repression. Johnsons activism and radical love for trans liberation and justice for people of color revolutionized the movement for the LGBTQ+ community.

The #MeToo movement was created by Tarana Burke, a Black woman in 2006 who wanted to empower marginalized women to reveal the magnitude of sexual harassment and assult. Although the movement has been popularized by white women and has since changed meanings, Burkes Myspace post opened dialogue for sexual assault survivors around the world.

Labor leader, civil rights activists, and co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) union, Dolores Huerta, organized for workers contracts while directing the first national boycott, the 1965 Delano grape strike.

Huerta attended the University of Pacifics San Joaquin Delta College, where she received an associate degree. Through the Dolores Huerta Foundation, Huerta continues to be a defining leader for immigrants, workers, and the womens rights movement.Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi are radical Black organizers who created #BlackLivesMatter. The project started in 2013 after Trayvon Martins killer, George Zimmerman was set free. Their project now has a global network that centers women, queer and trans people in leadership.

These women and their contributions have laid forth the continual strategic organizing we see today. Importantly, women around the world are leading the workforce as frontline workers during the pandemic. This March 2021 marks one year since San Francisco and the nation went into shelter-in-place.

The once invisible narrative of essential workers has brought to light how important food, agriculture, health care, janitorial, and many more essential service workers are to maintaining our everyday operations and care.

According to the national report from the Center of Economic and Policy Research, from 2014 to 2018, Women make up approximately 64% of frontline workers, despite making up half of all workers. In other reports including the Economic Policy Institute, this percent increased after 2018.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, women make up approxiately 76% of essential healthcare workers. The Mercury News reported a key finding from the National Nurses United, A third of registered nurses who have died of COVID-19 in the US are Filipino, despite Filipino nurses only making up 4% of the nursing population nationwide.

In addition, when examining intersecting identities, Immigrants are overrepresented in Building Cleaning Services and in many frontline occupationsabout one-in-six frontline workers, 17.3% are immigrants, the report said.

Many people are still home, enduring new challenges with heightened social and political uprisings, mostly through digital screens. Women, particularly immigrant women of color have always been and continue working on the frontlines of this pandemic. From cashiers to health care to social service workers, what does protection look like for women and marginalized communities and how can we keep each other safe?

For more information and the list of full events on Womens History Month, visit tinyurl.com/WHMccsf.

Read the original post:
Survival Beyond The Pandemic: Women's History Month The Guardsman - The Guardsman Online

On Jan. 6, the president of the United States, arguing with zero evidence that his reelection was stolen, incited a violent mob to storm the Capitol, where the bravery and wits of outnumbered security officers staved off catastrophe. The same man is still the undisputed leader of one of the United States two main political parties.

The United States convulsions are dramatic but not unique. Liberalisms crises predated Donald Trump and will outlast him in America and around the world. Hungarys Prime Minister Viktor Orban has successfully swapped out independent press, judiciary, civil society, and parliamentary representatives with pliable functionaries of his own. In India, long a marvel of democracy, the Hindu nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has wreaked violence on the countrys Muslims and taken legislative steps toward undermining their citizenship, while cracking down on journalists and nongovernmental organizations. In all, according to Freedom House, democracy has deteriorated in countries where three-quarters of all humans live this past year.

Many countries hold elections, for surebut without the guarantees of speech, assembly, or religion; the respect of individual dignity in government and law that is the hallmark of liberalism; and its promise of freedom. Liberalisms global recession is real and is not going away.

Like so many people, Ive spent the last years reeling from the illiberalism sweeping the world. Yet the term illiberal is helpful only in a very limited way. It has no positive, affirmative content and is hardly something any group would call itself. It assumes anything non-liberal is a deviation from the norm.

The end of the Cold War made it easy to see things that way. But victory can blind you too, and the Wests seemingly miraculous victory over Soviet communism was as blinding as Israels own victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Both seemed to settle not only geopolitical disputes but also ideological arguments once and for all. Western-style liberalism was to be the wave of the future, and Israels existence as both a Jewish and democratic state seemed at long last secured.

In Israel, the worlds only Jewish state, one-fifth of the citizens are Arabmostly, though not all, Muslim. It is a vibrant, raucous democracy in a largely undemocratic region; a military and technological power punching well above its weight, wracked by profound economic and social inequalities and burdened by generations of trauma; a state built by settlers who largely saw themselves not as colonizers but as stateless refugees coming home; a Western-style polity engaged in a decades-long occupation.

It has also been moving steadily in the direction of religious nationalism and authoritarian populism. The March 23 election propelled into parliament politicians belonging to the once-fringe Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) partya far-right group with roots in the late Rabbi Meir Kahanes violent anti-Arab Kach movement that was once described by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as racist and reprehensible.

The half of the body politic opposed to Netanyahus combative right-wing populism has so far failed to dislodge him. Liberalisms recession in Israel can offer some lessons about liberalisms crises elsewhereand show liberals in different countries that they are in this together and need urgently to learn from one another in order to preserve the ideals and institutions they hold dear.

In his deeply researched and ambitious book Liberalism in Israel: Its History, Problems, and Futures, Tel Aviv Universitys Menachem Mautnera leading Israeli constitutional scholarsensitively and searchingly critiques his own, liberal camp, hoping to rescue it from oblivion. Doing so, he says, means rethinking liberal assumptions not only about law, but also about nationalism, economics, ethnicity, religion, and culture.

In a previous, illuminating work on Israels judiciary, Mautner demonstrated that Israels Supreme Court, under the presidency of Chief Justice Aharon Barak, developed a doctrine of liberal judicial activism going further than his avowed American role model. This was all the more remarkable given that Israel has no written constitution.

It does have a series of awkwardly named Basic Laws, mostly governing basic government structures. But 1992 saw a new one, passed jointly by the Labor and Likud parties: the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. This meta-statute incorporated international human rights principles into Israeli law and defined Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Barak, in over a decade of remarkable and controversial judicial opinions, used this Basic Law to launch a constitutional revolution. By the time of his retirement, the Supreme Court had final say over vast swaths of parliamentary legislation and governmental policyand it had hordes of new critics.

Mautner views this judicial revolution as the crusade of a once-dominant Labor Party establishment, based on socialist ideals and holding liberal views, to retain some of its steadily vanishing power. Failing to win votes, as new religious and nationalist groups became ascendant and core liberal values declined, the former Labor hegemons as he calls them looked to the courts to save what to them were the foundations of Israeli democracy, and to their critics and rivals symbolized elitist cosmopolitanism. Backlash was not long in coming, culminating in 2018s Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, in which the word democracy tellingly does not appear.

The vitriol heaped on Israels court is excessive, but the former Labor hegemons religious and nationalist foes were not entirely wrong. Barak and his allies were indeed fighting a culture war against themone with deep, complicated roots.

Israels secular elites had quite deliberately estranged themselves from, and weaned their children off, their own Jewish cultural resources, succumbing to the fate of revolutionaries who give their children an education as different as they can get from their own.

Israels first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his peers, for all their secularist, socialist rebellion, were deeply tied to Jewish tradition, texts, and history. After independence, they had no trouble making the argument to Religious Zionists and to the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox both that the Labor Zionist ethos was not only the better defense of Jewish interests but also the better interpretation of its values. The successors of Ben-Gurions generation, however, could not make that argument, if for no other reason than that they no longer shared with their religious interlocutors the same language or the same basic understanding of who they are and what they are doing in their own state.

To the ultra-Orthodox, the enterprise of secular Jewish statehood was a deep assault on tradition, necessitating retreat to an enclave paid for by the state. To the Religious Zionists, the secularists had lost their way, failing to grasp the true meaning of Jewish statehood as the occasion for a new, muscular Judaism, and the fulfillment of Messianic longing. For Sephardic Jews, arguments over secular Jewish nationalism were all very foreign.

The reengagement that Mautner urges, then, isnt a call for Israeli liberals to stop being themselves but to dig more deeply into the histories that made them who they are, see what they can learn, and interpret anew.

Deep, informed dialogue with the best of American political and legal thought is on every page. Yet, Mautner argues, seeking to imitate U.S. democracy isnt the answer. After all, the United States is full of problems: structural economic inequalities, a deeply dysfunctional health care system, high levels of imprisonment, and unending racial injusticeall of which made possible the rise of Trump.

Mautner calls on his comrades on the Israeli left to lay aside American liberalisms brand of rugged individualism in favor of what he calls the liberalism of human flourishing. From this perspective, politics still aims to help individuals flourish independently, but also through meaningful belonging to ethnic, religious, and cultural communities.

Concretely, such a project would mean parting with a form of liberalism modeled on untrammeled American capitalism and looking instead to social democratic models found in Europe. This could mean letting different localities arrange their own religious affairs, resurrecting ideas of civic nationalism as an alternative to ethnic nationalism, working toward a humbler and thus more legitimate judiciary, and finding ways to engage in good faith with religious thinkers and their ideas while still holding fast to fundamental freedoms.

Where in all this, one might ask, is Israels painful conflict with the Palestinians? To Mautner, the absence of robust liberal nationalism is both a cause and effect. In bringing out all of nationalisms evils, the occupation discredits nationalism as a whole, making it that much harder for Israeli liberals to assert the shared national commitments would make Israels broadly nationalist center take them seriously. In other words, if you want to end the occupation, Mautner argues, dont throw out nationalism but make it more liberal (as many early Zionists, including Theodor Herzl, hoped to do).

Mautners argument has lessons for other countries: We live in a world of nation-states that isnt going away anytime soon, not least because the kind of meaningful belonging nationhood provides speaks to deep human needs. By refusing to engage with the worlds of meaning that many people of good will draw from ethnicity, shared history, culture, and religious life, liberals are not helping their cause.

The point isnt to capitulate to the bristling animosities of sectarian or identity politics but to speak clearly about how liberal values are needed if people want to live together, seeking their varied paths of communal, cultural, and religious fulfillment and flourishing, without tearing each other to pieces. This is also true of the state whose own brand of nationhood, it likes to think, is the great exception: the United States of America.

There is a deep paradox at the heart of Americas claim to leadership of the democratic world, and it is tied to American exceptionalism. Its geography as a continent secure from invasion, its multidimensional religious history, and its being a nation of immigrants make its own senses of religion, ethnicity, and nationalism different from those of most every other country. The identities of African Americans, the descendants of people brought in chains, are inextricably intertwined with their having been the victims of the countrys original sin. (That the earlier American original sin, the slaughter and displacement of Native Americans, is not an acute source of discomfort to much of the body politic is because it was so murderously successful.)

The stunning Trumpist resurgence of racist politics in response to, among other things, the presidency of Barack Obama was on display in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, where Confederate flags were flying and Camp Auschwitz T-shirts were on display.

American liberals need to understand where the United States is exceptional and where it is not. The reckoning with race every American must make is at once very public and very personal. Public, because anti-Black racism that indelibly shaped American democracy for so long. And personal, because every American, no matter when or how their ancestors arrived, has inherited that past and must grapple with its legacies today.

The illiberalism of the right is more obviously violent; the illiberalism of the left is most pronounced in academia and to some extent in journalism. But both share the insidious assumption that we cannot think or feel as humans outside our bloodstreams and that all politics is a zero-sum struggle for power and privilege.

How then can the United States hope to serve as an example to other liberal democracies? The answer is that America can lead only if it is willing to learn.

Something embattled liberals need to understand is that while they may see their opponents as nothing but destructive, that it not at all how they see themselves. Yes, authoritarian populists, hyper-nationalists, and radical religionists are regularly on the attack, but they win adherents not only because they express peoples anger, but also because they offer them a vision of something good. Those visions, deceptive though they can be, speak to profound human needs for connection, community, and commitment that the U.S.-led post-Cold War order of globalized economics and culture simply fails to provide.

That failure is compounded by the very American faith that those who differ from Americas vision of what is good are bound sooner or later to come around. The excesses of Trumpism on the one hand and the Great Awokening on the other show us where those frustrations can lead when liberalism fails to respond.

The end of American exceptionalism, saddening though it may be, is also liberating. Crafting American policies rooted in liberalism at home and abroadwith lucid views of its genuine shortcomings and failures, of how far it reaches and how far it doesntis crucial. Self-professed liberals must also examine what kind of philosophical or theological justification liberalism needs to maintain its own conception of what it means to lead a good life.

Such an effort not only makes good sense but also seeks to reap the rich harvest of differing ideas of how to protect life and libertyfrom the violence of the state, the ravages of the market, the authoritarianism of the clergy, or the monolithic conformism of the tribe. This is liberalisms deepest, abiding good.

See the article here:
In Israel, Liberals Lost. The American Left Should Heed Their Lessons. - Foreign Policy

Of the many executive orders issued on Day One of the Biden administration, those directed at equity have caused perhaps the greatest consternation amongthe presidents critics.

The decrees four of them lay the groundwork for policies that aim to address and eventually undo systemic racism and discrimination in our economy, laws and institutions. Americas promise, the White House says, is out of reach for too many families of color.

Even though the use of the word equity has along pedigree in American politics, today its use and elevation in public policy discussions has set off hand-wringing in some circles that this is the beginning of the end the application of a term withno meaning that is really just a clever shortcut in our nations inevitable march toward socialism.

In practice, achieving equity in America would mean that every person irrespective of zip code, income, race, ethnicity, or occupation has a fair and just opportunity to not just survive, but thrive. In reality, were not even at the end of the beginning of our nations path toward an equitable future.

During my tenure as commissioner of Chicagos Department of Public Health, efforts to achieve equity were not political maneuvers meant to give to one or take from another. My colleagues and I saw our work as integral to the long-term goal of ensuring that every person in Chicago had a fair and just opportunity to not just survive, but thrive. Health is about so much more than health care. A healthy neighborhood is one that is a genuine community, safe and walkable. Its a place with stable housing, access to fresh foods and public transportation. Its a place where a child can get a quality education, play in parks and read in libraries. We aspired to bring this form of equity to every child in Chicago and we should work together to achieve equity for every child in America.

Simply defined, equity is about fairness, which is among the most subjective words in the English language. However, we can objectively examine other measures theunemployment rate,household wealth,life expectancy, educational attainment that reflect the barriers centuries in the making that have harmed communities of color, in particular. Even so, equity is not a liberal or conservative concept that needs to be tethered to one party. Issues of inequity can plague people in rural America and urban dwellers alike a lack of broadband access, hospital deserts, a dearth of public transportation, food insecurity and underfunded schools are plagues unrestrained by politics or party. Individuals can suffer the effects of inequity because of economics, education, long-festering discrimination, or some other barrier like geography. In rural counties in the center of the country, for instance, a shortage of pharmacies is hampering the distribution of COVID-19 vaccine, potentially extending the pandemic in these communities. In addition, decisions not to expand access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act stand to exacerbate health care inequities in the dozen holdout states. In Georgia, Wisconsin and many states in between, peoples access to health care is limited simply because of where they live.

The reason we need policies at all levels that consider equity across sectors from education to health care to transportation to law and justice is because issues of equity can be like dominoes in a persons life. Im a pediatrician. I know that if a mother does not have access to prenatal care, her child stands to have a worse outcome at birth. And if that same child is born into a neighborhood with high crime rates and old homes slathered in lead paint, that childs chances are diminished further. And if that childs school doesnt have the resources to provide a good education and during this pandemic, online learning that child will be unlikely to grow up to find a stable job with good benefits. This all ultimately will impact how long that child will live and the dominoes of that life and other children with similar challenges and barriers in that neighborhood will continue to fall in familiar and predictable patterns.

The connections are clear to see, but only if were willing to look. Take the issue of safe streets and housing. The city of Chicago has been a convenient foil for gun rights groups who battle regulation by citing the carnage in my home city. These arguments tend to focus narrowly on gun violence while conveniently ignoring the many root causes. But that gun violence is the toppling of one more domino, often the end piece in a chain of inequities that began with redlining, forced segregation and other forms of embedded discrimination in housing that have long-term impacts on health and well being. Chicagos South and West Sides are disproportionately affected by gun violence and these neighborhoods also have not seen the investments in resources common in other parts of the city. These inequities show up in gun violence statistics, housing instability and inthe disproportionate impact of COVID on people of color weve seen in Chicago and across the U.S. throughout the pandemic.

Public health outcomes are not just about the choices an individual makes, but the choices available to people in any community. Importantly, equitable policies serve all people, including those who have benefited from our current system. As we have found during the pandemic, we are interconnected, and a communitys health and well being cannot and should not be sequestered by neighborhoods.

In our politics today, language is often weaponized in an attempt to end the discussion, blunt any policy changes and too often to maintain the status quo. This is done to inflame rather than illuminate the issues. We cannot let this happen with the word equity or the concept of a more equitable nation. We need health equity in America in the same way that we need clean water, nutritious foods, safe streets and good schools. We need these basic necessities in the reddest counties in Utah and in the bluest neighborhoods of Chicago.

Equity, properly understood, is a bridge to a better future for all Americans.

Julie Morita is executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and served on President BidenJoe BidenSupreme Court will hear Boston bomber's death case if the Biden administration lets it The Hill's Morning Report - Biden tasks Harris on border; news conference today Democrats face questions over agenda MOREs COVID-19 Advisory Board during the transition. She was formerly a medical director, the chief medical officer and then commissioner for the Chicago Department of Public Health. Follow her on Twitter: @DrJulieMorita.

See the article here:
Conservatives and liberals should rally around equity | TheHill - The Hill