Gearing Up for the 2012 Presidential Race

Clara Luper, Freedom's Classroom, and the Civil Rights MovementA Conversation with Marilyn Luper Hildreth Editorial note: The University of Oklahoma Press's new edition of Behold the Walls is forthcoming in August 2023. Click for larger view View full resolution Ebony Iman Dallas, Songs of Freedom (2021), acrylic and Ghanaian textiles on hand-carved birchwood / Portrait of activist and teacher Clara Luper singing with members of the NAACP Youth Council [End Page 14] BEARING WITNESS In his ongoing column, which appears in every other issue, Karlos K. Hill highlights the efforts of cultural figures doing works of essential good around issues of social justice. ON AUGUST 19, 1958, a high school history teacher named Clara Luper and thirteen members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Youth Council, ranging in age from seven to fifteen, organized a sit-in at a segregated Katz Drug Store in downtown Oklahoma City. Within two days, the Katz Drug Company had desegregated not just this one local store but more than fifty locations in states across the Midwest. One of the first sit-ins of the civil rights movement, this peaceful protest by a small group of young activists would galvanize future demonstrators in Oklahoma City and throughout the nation. Over the next six years, Clara Luper and her students organized sit-ins, layins, and boycotts that would eventually lead to the desegregation of white downtown stores and restaurants in advance of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By courageously fighting against injustice while simultaneously centering youth activism, Luper created an enduring legacy of nurturing social change through nonviolent civil disobedience. Clara Luper passed away in June 2011. On May 3, 2023, she would have turned one hundred years old. Additionally, August 19, 2023, will mark the sixty- fifth anniversary of the historic Katz Drug Store sit-in. In anticipation of these upcoming commemorations, I talked with Clara Luper's daughter, Marilyn Luper Hildreth, who participated in the Katz Drug Store sit-in, to help me understand its significance. Click for larger view View full resolution Karlos Hill: To start with a simple question, can you explain to readers who Clara Luper was to you? Marilyn Luper Hildreth: Clara Luper was my mother. And not only was she my mother, but she was a mother to many other children, both in our community and in our society. She would always make room for another child. Mom was a teacher before she became the Youth Council adviser, and she was really popular with her students. She enjoyed creating experiences for young people that they otherwise could never have had, and that was especially true in the classroom. She had a way of bringing history alive in her classes. For example, in order that they could better understand the functions of the government in Washington, DC, she had her students take part in mock elections, where they cast votes to elect fellow classmates as senators, members of the House of Representatives, and president. And for fifty years she took young people to the NAACP National Convention, including people who I call the "have-nots." They did not have a lot of money and did not have a lot of things, but she wanted to give them that opportunity, because she was able to see things in young people that others overlooked. [End Page 15] She believed that all children can learn, so she had to find out how best to teach those young people in order to motivate them to be the best that they could be. She remembered every one of her students for the rest of her life. She had a real concern for them and felt deeply committed to them, and they felt the same way about her. They knew that she would always be honest with them. Even when she was correcting them, they knew that she was trying to help guide them in the right direction. She tried to bring out the best in everyone she dealt with. Hill: Can you share a favorite story about your mother, perhaps a time when she helped to guide you in that same kind of way? Luper Hildreth: Mom...

Systemic racism and tobacco-industry targeting contribute to disparities in communities of color. However, understanding tobacco as a social justice issue and the industry's role in perpetuating inequities remains limited. This study explored youth and young adult awareness of tobacco marketing and perceptions of tobacco marketing as a social justice issue. Focus groups were conducted with youth and young adults in 2020 and 2021, including individuals who used tobacco and e-cigarettes and those who did not use either. Online surveys were conducted in 2021 with youth (n = 1227) and young adults (n = 2643) using AmeriSpeak's nationally representative panel, oversampling for black and Hispanic Americans and people who smoke. Perceptions of flavor bans, social justice, and industry marketing were assessed. Most (>80%) survey respondents agreed that tobacco companies target youth. However, only 20% saw tobacco as a social justice issue. Focus group participants regardless of their tobacco or e-cigarette use, reported higher prevalence of tobacco advertising in their communities relative to survey respondents but did not view it as targeting communities of color. Black non-Hispanic (20.9%) and Hispanic (21.4%) survey respondents perceived tobacco as a social justice issue more than white non-Hispanic (16.1%) respondents. The majority (>60%) of survey respondents supported bans on menthol and flavored tobacco, regardless of race or ethnicity. Respondents broadly supported menthol and flavored tobacco bans and recognized tobacco-industry influence on youth. Low awareness of tobacco as a social justice issue highlights the need to raise awareness of the underlying factors driving tobacco-related disparities. The majority of young people see the tobacco industry as targeting them. Most young people support bans on menthol and flavored tobacco bans, with support across racial and ethnic groups. While few young respondents perceived tobacco as a social justice issue, some perceived tobacco companies as targeting low-income and communities of color. Black non-Hispanic and Hispanic respondents were more likely to perceive tobacco as a social justice issue than white non-Hispanic respondents. Efforts to raise awareness among young people of tobacco as a social justice issue may be key in addressing tobacco disparities and advancing support for flavor tobacco bans.

Book reviews

Issues of social justice have become increasingly important as an area for academic research in recent decades. This has also been the case for researchers operating in disciplines such as leisure. The purpose of this bibliometric analysis is to review, analyze and synthesize the current state of research focusing on issues of social justice in leisure studies and, in doing so, draw together a more coherent understanding of the different strands of social justice research that are currently being undertaken. Through a quantitative process of bibliometric analysis, emergent and existing trends in research patterns, authorship, and article or journal performance were analyzed to generate greater understanding of the emergence, development and intellectual structure of social justice research over time within leisure studies. A quantitative process of bibliometric analysis was therefore undertaken to generate and analyze a nascent dataset of peer reviewed journal articles that have examined issues of social justice within leisure studies. Analysis of this dataset provided opportunities to outline recommendations for future research directions and research agendas linked to issues of social justice and leisure. This includes recommendations for expansion of research agendas within leisure studies in areas linked to: (a) ‘race’, gender and human rights; (b) a ‘broadening’ of social justice research into other socio-cultural areas of investigation; (c) initiation and/or expansion of research agendas relating to the global south; (d) business, organisations and social justice within the leisure industry; (e) issues of policy, politics and social justice in leisure.

We examined the association between racial disparity in income and reported race-specific county-level bacterial sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the United States focusing on disparities between Blacks and Whites. Data are from the US 2000 decennial census. We defined 2 race-income county groups (high and low race-income disparity) on the basis of the difference between Black and White median household incomes. We used 2 approaches to examine disparities in STI rates across the groups. In the first approach, we computed and compared race-specific STI rates for the groups. In the second approach, we used spatial regression analyses to control for potential confounders. Consistent with the STI literature, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis rates for Blacks were substantially higher than were those for Whites. We also found that racial disparities in income were associated with racial disparities in chlamydia and gonorrhea rates and, to a lesser degree, syphilis rates. Racial disparities in household income may be a more important determinant of racial disparities in reported STI morbidity than are absolute levels of household income.

This paper contributes to accumulating the knowledge base about prospective elementary school teachers’ (PTs’) understanding of socio-critical modeling by exploring how PTs make connections to features of mathematical modeling and social justice while posing mathematical problems and reflecting on their problem-posing. We present a conceptual framework for posing problems that connect social justice issues with the features of mathematical modeling. Drawing on the analysis of 36 individual modeling problems generated by the PTs and 36 written reflections PTs completed throughout their problem-posing activity, we illustrate various ways in which PTs connect the multi-faceted features of mathematical modeling (i.e., realistic context, model development, and shareable process) and social justice (i.e., micro – and macro – level). The PT-posed problems were categorized as (a) modeling problems presenting micro – and macro-level social justice issues (27%), (b) modeling problems presenting micro-level social justice issues (22%), (c) contextualized mathematical problems presenting micro – and macro-level social justice issues (25%), and (d) contextualized mathematical problems presenting micro-level social justice issues (17%). Our work describing the complexity of posing social justice-oriented mathematical modeling (SJMM) problems and articulating decisions PTs make while posing SJMM problems set directions for future efforts and research in teacher preparation.

What Is Social and Global Justice to Bioethics or Bioethics to Social and Global Justice? Alex John London (bio) What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her? (Hamlet, II, ii) Justice has always been a value woven tightly into the bioethics agenda. Yet bioethics is also a pragmatic discipline. It has self-consciously cultivated methods of moral reflection that try to generate reasons for action without recapitulating longstanding theoretical divisions. It has also sought to facilitate change through direct engagement with the health care and research institutions most directly influencing relevant ethical issues. Although this blend of reflective engagement has been very successful, it has also generated an almost principled aversion to more institutionally diffuse or more philosophically foundational issues of social and distributive justice. In "Equity and Population Health: Toward a Broader Bioethics Agenda," Norman Daniels lays out an ambitious plan for expanding and deepening bioethics' engagement with some far-reaching issues of social and distributive justice. He notes the growing empirical evidence that racial, economic, and other disparities among social groups can have a bad effect on the health of people in the most disadvantaged groups, even when they have access to health care services. He then challenges bioethics to dedicate more time and energy to working out what the proper response to such inequalities should be from the standpoint of population health. He also prompts the field to focus more intently on the issue of intergenerational equity, which will only become more acute, especially in the developing world, with the aging of the world's population. Finally, he asks that bioethics devote more energy to questions about when inequalities between communities are unjust, what those of us in wealthy countries owe to the most burdened communities in the developing world, and the proper mechanisms to rectify these inequalities. This is an important agenda for bioethics. Here I simply want to note three respects in which it poses fundamental challenges to the discipline. First, bringing about social change in these areas will require bioethics to move outside of its familiar institutional bulwarks and engage a range of social and political institutions that are not traditionally associated with health care or scientific research. For example, if the social determinants of health have a profound influence on individual and community health, and if the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank play a crucial role in influencing the distribution of some of those determinants in the developing world, then bioethicists must become more engaged with these global institutions. Second, bioethicists must become proficient in some highly technical academic disciplines. In particular, the field will have to deepen its engagement with economics, not only at the level of application, but at the level of first principles. A recurring theme of Daniels's paper is the importance of either modifying or rethinking the framework of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) so that it will more robustly respond to issues of distribution and equity. Mathematically, alternative ways of comparing sets of benefits and their associated costs exist that are sensitive to important thresholds and give greater weight to benefits accruing to those who are worse off without making implausibly strong assumptions (common to most forms of CBA) about the commensurability of value. Although such models have been used in highly technical areas of finance, their implications for ethics and political philosophy remain almost entirely unexplored. In order to motivate their use in a broader policy context, bioethicists will need to understand their implications and demonstrate their relevance to issues of equity. If bioethicists cannot mount such a foundational engagement with the conceptual frameworks and analytical tools that are the stock and trade of global economic institutions, their ability to influence the analyses and decisions shaping the social and economic determinants of population health will likely remain limited. Finally, this agenda is rife with philosophical questions that sit squarely at the theoretical fault lines dividing competing philosophical traditions and animating partisan political movements. Here I suspect that the field's traditional emphasis on consensus will have to give way to a methodological orientation emphasizing action and policy in the face of unresolved social conflict. In...

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients’ and providers’ attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider–patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.

During the past several decades, a ‘perfect storm’, resulting from the political–economic changes accompanying globalization, dramatic demographic and cultural transformations in US society and rapid technological advances, has created unprecedented challenges for the social work profession and social work education. These challenges include the widening gap in income and wealth both within the US and between the Global North and South; growing racial and class disparities in health and mental health care, education, employment and housing; a shift within policymaking circles towards fiscal austerity and policies that emphasize market-oriented and individually-focused solutions; and the changing nature of universities, student populations and the educational process itself. Although the formal documents of major social work organizations continue to emphasize social justice themes, the actual practice of social work and the preparation of students for practice, teaching and research have diverged considerably from this rhetorical mission. This is reflected in a variety of ways including, but not limited to, the uncritical adoption of ‘evidence-based practice’ as a cornerstone of social work education and research; the growing stratification of social work faculty; the increased reliance on untested online methods of education; and the emphasis on quantitative ‘outcomes’ as indicators of educational success. At the same time, social work education in the US has been unable to respond effectively to the implications of demographic and cultural diversity, despite the demands of its accrediting body, the Council on Social Work Education. This article will provide an overview of the changing environment of social work and social work education during the past several decades. This will be followed by a discussion of the impact of these changes on social work education and a critique of the response—to date—of social work educators. Finally, it will suggest some potential educational responses to these challenges.

This article examines an ‘unstated’ belief that as the content of a given Quantitative Literacy course grows progressively more complex, the activities relating to social justice issues will surface at a higher cognitive level than those activities lacking social justice issues of social justice. Through the lens of the cognitive apprenticeship model and by means of a four-domain framework, an analysis was conducted of the contribution of the course materials to strengthening student awareness of social justice issues affecting their society. Results show that the expectation that activities relating to social justice outside the classroom would become more abundant as the course evolved over the semester did not materialise. Nonetheless, results did show that activities, which had a social justice agenda, were rated more highly on a cognitive level, than activities without social justice traits. This suggests that the course could thus still achieve its hidden aim of making students more aware of the societal issues in their communities. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p1190

Policy often focuses on reducing health care disparities through interventions at the patient and provider level. While unquestionably important, system-wide reforms to reduce uninsurance, improve geographic availability of services, increase workforce diversity, and promote clinical best practices are essential for progress in reducing disparities.

“In contrast to patients’ trust in clinicians, clinicians’ trust in patients has not been investigated.” So write Moskowitz et al., whose study, published in this issue of JGIM1 is the first to show that primary care providers’ trust in their patients (indigent patients with HIV who were part of a longitudinal study of pain) was lower for non-whites than whites, despite the fact that there were no actual racial differences in patient characteristics that might be expected to affect trust, such as patients’ self-reported illicit drug use and misuse of opioids. Trust in this study was assessed using a scale that asked providers to indicate how confident they were that the patient would engage in various behaviors indicating that the patient could be trusted (e.g., “will not manipulate the office visit for secondary gain” such as “inappropriate disability certification or prescription of controlled substances”; “will follow the treatment plan you recommend.”) Notably, in multivariate analyses, non-white race was the largest predictor of provider mistrust, followed by providers’ number of years in practice and patients’ current drug use, while patients’ reports of opioid analgesic misuse and lifetime alcohol abuse/dependence were not significant predictors.

Purpose Children and youth who belong to a racially minoritized group commonly experience multiple and complex forms of discrimination and health disparities. The purpose of this review was to explore racial disparities in health care and health outcomes among children and youth with physical disabilities. Methods Six international databases (Ovid Medline, Healthstar, Embase, PsycINFO, Scopus, and Web of Science) were searched and screened for inclusion. A narrative synthesis was used to identify the common trends. Results Thirty-seven articles met the inclusion criteria, which involved 218 555 children and youth with various types of physical disabilities spanning over 29 years. We noted the following trends: (1) racial disparities in accessing or receiving care; (2) racial disparities in health outcomes and mortality rates; and (3) factors affecting racial disparities. Most studies reported at least one finding indicating that racially minoritized youth had differential access to care and/or disparities in health outcomes compared to white youth. Conclusions Our findings highlight the concerning racial disparities among children and youth with physical disabilities within health care. There is an urgent need for advocacy and interventions at multiple levels to address the perpetual racism and racial disparities that racially minoritized youth with physical disabilities experience. Implications for rehabilitation There is an urgent need for health care leaders and health care providers to address the systemic health inequalities in rehabilitation for racially minoritized children and youth with physical disabilities. Health care leaders and clinicians should recognize the racial disparities that racially minoritized youth with physical disabilities encounter in accessing or receiving care in addition to health outcomes. Health care leaders and decision-makers should advocate for policy change to optimize equitable and inclusive health care to enhance the well-being of racially minoritized children with disabilities. Health care providers should engage in training to understand how to recognize and address how intersectional forms of a child’s identity such as disability, race, and socio-economic status can influence health care experiences and health outcomes.

This research aims to explore and analyze the raciolinguistic dynamics that influence teaching and learning experiences, as well as educational access, within global EFL contexts. Through an in-depth review of current literature, this research explores how language biases and hierarchies influence educational structures, create inequalities and affect social mobility. The study not only highlights the issues of raciolinguistic but also expands critical understanding of the role of language in reproducing or undermining social injustice. The research shows how raciolinguistic ideas have been globalized and adapted to a variety of circumstances by utilizing bibliometric analysis of the Scopus database and applying it to a wide range of previously published works. It also highlights the need for educational practices that bring these ideas into play to solve racial and linguistic disparities. The results show that racialolinguistic ideas are not only globally spread, but also adapted in various educational contexts, reflecting how language policies and pedagogical practices can reinforce or challenge social injustice. Using a cross-country survey and case studies, this study identifies adaptive strategies used in EFL teaching to deal with linguistic and racial challenges. In addition, the findings emphasize the importance of policy-based approaches and more inclusive pedagogies to reduce language and racial disparities in education. By cross-national surveys and case studies, the study emphasizes the significance of adaptive techniques and the complex interactions between language and race in EFL classroom.

Performance incentive programs – also known as pay-for-performance, public reporting, and value-based purchasing programs – continue to receive national attention. Although these programs have become even more diverse, their basic features have not changed and the potential mechanisms by which these programs may impact racial and ethnic disparities in health care in a neutral, narrowing, or widening manner remain the same. We repeated the systematic search of the literature for the 4 intervening years since the last edition of this book. We found that although hundreds of articles continue to be written on this subject each year, there were no additions to the empirical evidence regarding the impact of performance incentive program on disparities. While the 2009 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will significantly alter the American healthcare landscape, recommendations regarding particular aspects of program design should be approached with disparity-reducing goals in mind that also remain unchanged and may be somewhat more achievable. Given the changing landscape, it is even more important that incentive programs are evaluated for their intended effect, as well as for their unintended effect on racial/ethnic disparities in health care.