Know It When You See It? The Qualities of the Communities People Describe as “Diverse” (or Not)
From the Journal of City and Community (2022), Maria Abascal https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4102-9320 and Flavien Ganter write about Chicagoans perceptions of diversity.
Sociological Epilogue
As our course lessons end, I want to leave with some final sociological wisdom. Much of what we learned may resonate with you over time and so I hope that you take lessons with you and find them beneficial as you go forth.
First, as we started the semester with a mindful meditation, be mindful of yourself. You are your own best advocate and friend. Keep yourself in your own thoughts and be aware of your own needs. Make time to spend quietly with yourself. Make time to detach from yourself and just be; listen for the silence. Recall that our lessons were meant to help you do all of that.
As you develop your mindfulness, remember to do this sociologically, and the message there was simple: YOU MATTER. You matter to yourself so be aware of the ways in which you are being influenced. Be kind to yourself knowing that you have been shaped by dynamics beyond your control and knowing that you are a work in progress. Every moment is new and you are not static. You are growing and changing.
And, you matter to others so be aware of the influence that you contribute to. This may seem trite, but it is in fact our reality. From quantum physics to epigenetic biology to sociology to theology, the more we learn, the more the research is clear – we all affect each other.
The awareness of the social influence on others also has helped me to be more understanding and forgiving because even if I do not agree with them, I know others have been influenced by forces beyond their control. Sociological mindfulness reminds me to be kind. Each person is part of a multitude of groups that have been shaped by social forces, but each person has a unique identity. It is a sociological paradox that we recognize the forces that shapes us all similarly at the same time that we recognize the individual identity uniquely held by each individual.
Personal evaluation.
Please fill out this anonymous course evaluation which helps me tweak the class to make improvements based on student feedback. I really value your feedback and I want to continue to make sure that the course serves students the best it can. Here is the Spring 2023 evaluation.
Here is the final assessment for the course. It is due by the end of our class's scheduled exam period.
Hi students,
Dr. Cohen is offering a course this spring in economic sociology. It is being offered
MWF 11:30AM - 12:20PM Dumbach Hall - Room 123
If you have enjoyed thinking sociologically this semester and have any interest in business or economics then definitely checkout this class!
Students, if you have not already done so, please fill out a course evaluation. These evaluations are anonymous and will only take a few minutes. You can use the QR code below to participate:
This is an in person event at the Seminary Co-op. At this time, masks are required for in-store events.
Register HERE
About the book: Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protestors, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protestors, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.
About the author: Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and the Director of Center on Transnational Policing. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living with Injury in Gangland Chicago (2014), which received the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 2015. The animated short film The Torture Letters (2020), which he produced based on his book The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence (2020), has been official selections for numerous film festivals. It received the Best In Show award at the Spark Animation Festival and contended for an Academy Award in the animated film category for the 2021 Oscars season.
About the interlocutor: Reuben Jonathan Miller is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago Crown Family School and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. His book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration (2021), is based on 15 years of research and practice with currently and formerly incarcerated men, women, their families, partners, and friends in Chicago, Detroit, and a number of cities across the United States. He was named a 2022 MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
In February, the Guardian published a deep investigation into Homan Square, a shadowy facility where the Chicago Police Department takes suspects without booking them, entering them into any official database, or giving them access to a telephone or their lawyer. A new Guardian report claims that more than twice as many people have been “disappeared” into Homan as officials initially disclosed...The paper obtained documents showing that more than 7,000 people were detained at Homan between 2004 and 2015—about 6,000 of whom were black. Less than one percent of those detainees were allowed to see their lawyers during interrogations. Attorneys described a system that seems deliberately engineered to make it difficult to find their clients; others said that they were turned around at the door. “Try finding a phone number for Homan to see if anyone’s there. You can’t, ever,” an attorney named David Gaeger told the Guardian. “If you’re laboring under the assumption that your client’s at Homan, there really isn’t much you can do as a lawyer. You’re shut out. It’s guarded like a military installation.”And from an August 2015 Guardian report:
Of the thousands held in the facility known as Homan Square over a decade, 82% were black. Only three received documented visits from an attorney, according to a cache of documents obtained when the Guardian sued the police. Documents indicate the detainees are a group of disproportionately minority citizens, many accused of low-level drug crimes, faced with incriminating themselves before their arrests appeared in a booking system by which their families and attorneys might find them.One of my former students was detained there:
Marc Freeman is the 11th person to come forward to the Guardian detailing detention inside Homan Square – and the first whose police record details how long he was stuck inside. ‘At no point was I ever processed, I was never asked for my information, they did not take any fingerprints,’ he said.
BONUS SECTION: RACISM DURING COVID-19
...anti-Asian discrimination has ... manifested in plummeting sales at Chinese restaurants, near-deserted Chinatown districts and racist bullying against people perceived to be Chinese.
We asked our listeners whether they had experienced this kind of coronavirus-related racism and xenophobia firsthand. And judging by the volume of emails, comments and tweets we got in response, the harassment has been intense for Asian Americans across the country — regardless of ethnicity, location or age.
...one part of President Donald Trump’s reaction to coronavirus has remained consistent. More than a week after he prompted outcry by retweeting a supporter who called the novel coronavirus the “China virus,” photos from Trump’s Thursday press briefing about the virus showed that “corona” had been crossed out and replaced with “Chinese.” The President and his team have defended the use of that language—despite the World Health Organization making a point of not naming the disease after the place where the outbreak began, and despite advocates arguing that such terminology fuels the risk of hate crimes against people of Asian descent, who have already reported a surge in discrimination.While Trump may have his own political reasons for describing the virus as foreign, he’s also part of a long history of associating diseases with certain countries—a tradition that experts say has led to ethnic and racial discrimination, stymied efforts to effectively handle public health crises, and distorted public historical memory.
Despite not originating in Spain, the 1918 influenza pandemic is commonly known as the “Spanish flu”—a name that reflects a tendency in public health history to associate new infectious diseases with foreign nationals and foreign countries. Intentional or not, an effect of this naming convention is to communicate a causal relationship between foreign populations and the spread of infectious disease, potentially promoting irrational fear and stigma. I address two relevant issues to help contextualize these naming practices. First is whether, in an age of global hyperinterconnectedness, fear of the other is truly irrational or has a rational basis. The empirical literature assessing whether restricting global airline travel can mitigate the global spread of modern epidemics suggests that the role of travel may be overemphasized. Second is the persistence of xenophobic responses to infectious disease in the face of contrary evidence. To help explain this, I turn to the health communication literature. Scholars argue that promoting an association between foreigners and a particular epidemic can be a rhetorical strategy for either promoting fear or, alternatively, imparting a sense of safety to the public. (Am J Public Health. 2018;108:1462–1464. doi:10. 2105/AJPH.2018.304645)
David Ansell, an MD writes about the important role that inequality plays in health and life expectancy. His book analyzes Chicago as a case study. From U of Chicago press,
We hear plenty about the widening income gap between the rich and the poor in America and about the expanding distance separating the haves and the have-nots. But when detailing the many things that the poor have not, we often overlook the most critical—their health. The poor die sooner. Blacks die sooner. And poor urban blacks die sooner than almost all other Americans. In nearly four decades as a doctor at hospitals serving some of the poorest communities in Chicago, David A. Ansell, MD, has witnessed firsthand the lives behind these devastating statistics. In The Death Gap, he gives a grim survey of these realities, drawn from observations and stories of his patients.
While the contrasts and disparities among Chicago’s communities are particularly stark, the death gap is truly a nationwide epidemic—as Ansell shows, there is a thirty-five-year difference in life expectancy between the healthiest and wealthiest and the poorest and sickest American neighborhoods. If you are poor, where you live in America can dictate when you die. It doesn’t need to be this way; such divisions are not inevitable. Ansell calls out the social and cultural arguments that have been raised as ways of explaining or excusing these gaps, and he lays bare the structural violence—the racism, economic exploitation, and discrimination—that is really to blame. Inequality is a disease, Ansell argues, and we need to treat and eradicate it as we would any major illness. To do so, he outlines a vision that will provide the foundation for a healthier nation—for all.
As the COVID-19 mortality rates in underserved communities proved, inequality is all around us, and often the distance between high and low life expectancy can be a matter of just a few blocks. Updated with a new foreword by Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot and an afterword by Ansell, The Death Gap speaks to the urgency to face this national health crisis head-on.
The difference between living downtown compared to some neighborhoods on the South and West Sides can be up to 30 years, according to recent analysis done at New York University School of Medicine. That's the largest gap in the country.
The City Health Dashboard and the CIA World Factbook reveal Streeterville's life expectancy of 90 is slightly higher than Monaco, the highest for any country in the world. Nine miles south, Englewood's 60-year life expectancy matches the Republic of the Congo, a third world country.How did we get to this point?
Dr. David Ansell is the Senior Vice President of Community Health Equality at Rush University Medical Center and part of West Side United. He has spent decades taking care of patients at three different hospitals along Ogden Avenue and studying the life expectancy gap in Chicago.
A similar analysis in the New Left Review by Marco D'Eramo also highlights the gap:
As students enter, please try to create a model of the median American based on what we have been learning:
UNNATURAL CAUSES is the acclaimed documentary series broadcast by PBS and now used by thousands of organizations around the country to tackle the root causes of our alarming socio-economic and racial inequities in health.
The four-hour series crisscrosses the nation uncovering startling new findings that suggest there is much more to our health than bad habits, health care, or unlucky genes. The social circumstances in which we are born, live, and work can actually get under our skin and disrupt our physiology as much as germs and viruses.
Among the clues:
• It's not CEOs dropping dead from heart attacks, but their subordinates.• Poor smokers are at higher risk of disease than rich smokers.• Recent Latino immigrants, though typically poorer, enjoy better health than the average American. But the longer they're here, the worse their health becomes.Furthermore, research has revealed a gradient to health. At each step down the class pyramid, people tend to be sicker and die sooner. Poor Americans die on average almost six years sooner than the rich. No surprise. But even middle class Americans die two years sooner than the rich. And at each step on that pyramid, African Americans, on average, fare worse than their white counterparts. In many cases, so do other peoples of color.But why? How can class and racism disrupt our physiology? Through what channels might inequities in housing, wealthy, jobs, and education, along with a lack of power and control over one's life, translate into bad health? What is it about our poor neighborhoods, especially neglected neighborhoods of color, that is so deadly? How are the behavioral choices we make (such as diet and exercise) constrained by the choices we have?
Growing up in poverty can have serious and long-lasting effects on children’s health, development, and overall well-being. The effects of poverty have a well-documented impact on young children’s developing brains. And children who grow up in poverty are more likely to experience harmful levels of stress, more likely to struggle in school, and more likely to have behavioral, social, and emotional problems than their peers.
Impoverished black children, for example, are twice as likely as poor Hispanic or white children to have levels of lead in their blood that is at least 2.5 micrograms per deciliter. Some researchers have found that even that small amount of lead is enough to cause cognitive impairment in children — especially the kind that impacts their reading ability.
from the National Institute of Health (NIH), Journal of Nutrition (2010);
Food insecurity was associated with self-reported hypertension and hyperlipidemia. Food insecurity was associated with laboratory or examination evidence of hypertension and diabetes. The association with laboratory evidence of diabetes did not reach significance in the fully adjusted model unless we used a stricter definition of food insecurity. These data show that food insecurity is associated with cardiovascular risk factors. Health policy discussions should focus increased attention on ability to afford high-quality foods for adults with or at risk for chronic disease.
from the NIH, journal of Current Cardiology Reviews (2009);
Once homeless, equitable access to both preventative and remedial health care is lacking and is associated with a higher than average burden of cardiovascular disease [CVD] risk factors, morbidity and mortality and is accompanied by disproportionately high health care costs.
Having a low-income presents a variety of problems for families and children, with access to health care being the most complex and prevalent. Although there are many challenges for low-income families to access adequate health care in the United States, the key barriers identified in this review of literature are a lack of education, complications with health insurance, and a distrust of health care providers. Each obstacle is influenced by a myriad of factors that affect vulnerable sub-groups of low-income families. Acknowledging the barriers that prevent access to health care for low-income families is the first step towards determining future sustainable solutions.
Ongoing research, however, is moving beyond correlation to test a causal relationship between growing up in poverty and development in key parts of the brain that govern learning and behavior. Findings suggest that aspects of poverty that affect brain development go beyond limited financial resources to include neighborhood violence, low-quality schools, environmental toxins, and unstable family life.
Low levels of household income are associated with several lifetime mental disorders and suicide attempts, and a decrease in income is associated with a higher risk for anxiety, substance use, and mood disorders, according to a new study.
The connection between poverty and diabetes including obesity and poor diet and sedentary lifestyle from the American Diabetes Association;
One reason may be that violence tracks with poverty, thereby preventing people from being active out-of-doors. Similarly, parks and sports facilities are less available to people living in poor counties (5), and people who live in poverty-dense regions may be less able to afford gym membership, sports clothing, and/or exercise equipment. There are multiple individual and environmental reasons to explain why poverty-dense counties may be more sedentary and bear greater obesity burdens.
Conditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play affect a wide range of health risks and outcomes.1 These conditions are known as social determinants of health (SDOH).We know that poverty limits access to healthy foods and safe neighborhoods and that more education is a predictor of better health.2,3,4 We also know that differences in health are striking in communities with poor SDOH such as unstable housing, low income, unsafe neighborhoods, or substandard education.
...early-life exposures to nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a marker of traffic-related pollution, and fine particulate matter (PM2.5), a mixture of industrial and other pollutants, are positively associated with subsequent childhood asthma diagnosis...
...poor black children are more likely than poor white or Hispanic children to be diagnosed with asthma — another ailment that plagues poor children in Jacksonville and one that is linked to living in older, more industrialized areas. Poor white children, though, are more likely to be exposed to secondhand smoke, or to be born to mothers who smoked during pregnancy than poor black or Hispanic children. And poor Hispanic children, it found, are twice as likely to have no place to go for health care, as compared to poor white or black children.
In one of the richest countries on Earth it has effectively become a crime to be poor. For example, in Ferguson, Missouri, the U.S. Department of Justice didn’t just expose racially biased policing; it also exposed exorbitant fines and fees for minor crimes that mainly hit the city’s poor, African American population, resulting in jail by the thousands. As Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, in fact Ferguson is everywhere: the debtors’ prisons of the twenty-first century. The anti-tax revolution that began with the Reagan era led state and local governments, starved for revenues, to squeeze ordinary people, collect fines and fees to the tune of 10 million people who now owe $50 billion.
Nor is the criminalization of poverty confined to money. Schoolchildren are sent to court for playground skirmishes that previously sent them to the principal’s office. Women are evicted from their homes for calling the police too often to ask for protection from domestic violence. The homeless are arrested for sleeping in the park or urinating in public.
From the Prison Policy Initiative:
Far from offering people a "second chance," our criminal justice system frequently punishes those who never had a first chance: people in poverty. By focusing law enforcement on low-level offenses and subjecting criminal defendants to money bail and other fees, our country effectively punishes people for being poor.
Poverty is not only a predictor of involvement with the justice system: Too often, it is also the outcome. Criminal punishment subjects people to countless fines, fees, and other costs (often enriching private companies in the process). A criminal record, meanwhile, does lasting collateral damage.
POVERTY IN OUR JUSTICE SYSTEM IS TOO OFTEN TREATED AS A CRIMINAL OFFENSE.
Take driver’s licenses for instance: A driver with a busted tail light will be assessed a fine. For many living in poverty, they cannot afford to pay. If left unpaid, most states will eventually suspend the driver’s license.
Unless the person lives in a city with reliable public transportation, they will have to keep driving to stay employed – putting themselves at higher risk of punishment. Driving on a suspended license leads to additional suspension time and fines, a criminal record, and possible jail time. A simple lack of money can have devastating impacts on one’s livelihood.
The collateral consequences do not end there. Someone who can’t drive has a hard time staying employed or finding another job. A study in New Jersey showed that 42% of drivers who had suspended licenses lost their jobs and could not readily find another. Eligibility for public housing is restricted or denied if the applicant has a criminal record, including misdemeanors such as driving with a suspended license. Local public housing authorities can be even more restrictive and evict occupants if a member of their family or another person residing in commits a crime, such as a misdemeanor drug offense.
For someone with low income, having a busted tail light leads to criminal consequences, loss of employment, and even homelessness.
In the United States, wealth, not culpability, often shapes outcomes. From what is defined as criminal behavior to how penalties are decided, our legal system punishes people who are poor in America far more often and more harshly than the wealthy.
No person in America should be locked up because they are poor. Yet, every day we see homeless people arrested for sleeping outside; parents who can’t afford to purchase their release from jail; and people who cycle in and out of jail because they can’t afford to pay old fines as their debt grows from new ones. Meanwhile, cities and counties fill their coffers from the fines and fees that are imposed on people who are struggling just to survive. We need a criminal justice system that puts people over profit and helps to make vulnerable people more stable, not less stable.
Social science research demonstrates that the poor pay more for necessities like housing and food, and debt can have serious consequences beyond just financial. The poor pay significantly more for housing than others — sometimes 70% or 80% of their income. In 2018, low-income households paid over half their income for rent or lived in substandard housing. Further, landlords overcharge tenants in high poverty neighborhoods and those with higher concentrations of African Americans relative to the market value of the property. When families cannot afford basic needs they will make calculated tradeoffs to keep their housing, paying for rent instead of utilities to avoid eviction. Such tradeoffs often lead to compounded costs from late fees, and families living without water, electricity, or heat....Poor families tend to pay more for food, too....When poor people face fines and fees, their inability to pay or keep up with payments means they go further into debt. When these fees are part of the criminal justice system, failure to pay can also result in jail time.
The award-winning book Evicted from Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond shows how society profits off the poor and how lack of housing can lead families to spiral downward.In the contemporary United States, thinness is associated with high social status and taken as evidence of moral virtue. In contrast, fatness is linked to low status and seen as a sign of sloth and gluttony....news media in our sample typically discuss how a host of complex factors beyond individual control contribute to anorexia and bulimia. In that anorexics and bulimics are typically portrayed as young white women or girls, this reinforces cultural images of young white female victims. In contrast, the media predominantly attribute overweight to bad individual choices and tend to treat binge eating disorder as ordinary and blameworthy overeating. In that the poor and minorities are more likely to be heavy, such reporting reinforces social stereotypes of fat people, ethnic minorities, and the poor as out of control and lazy.
