Transcript for Figure 1.18, Cultural Humility Edited YouTube Video

[Speaker 1]: One word to describe cultural humility for me is Love.

[Speaker 2]: Actually if I had to encapsulate cultural humility – the whole concept of cultural humility – it doesn’t do it justice, but the word that I think of it is Essence.

[Speaker 3]: Escuchar.

[Speaker 4]: Opening.

[Speaker 5]: Receive.

[Speaker 6]: Compassion.

[Speaker 7]: Love.

[Melanie Tervalon, physician, consultant and co-author of “Cultural Humility vs. Cultural Competence”]: The principles of cultural humility offer one more framework to contribute to what has got to be our ultimate goal – yes, our ultimate goal – is that there will be a sense of equity, a sense of equality, and a kind of respect that we are driving forward.

[Title screen with music. Cultural Humility: People, Principles & Practices | A Film by Vivian Chávez | Dedicated to the shared legacy of people who make a way out of no way from generation to generation.]

[Jan Murray-García, Nursing Professor at UC Davis and co-author of “Cultural Humility vs. Cultural Competence”]: Cultural humility is a multi-dimensional concept and certainly Melanie Tervalon and I conceptualized three dimensions.

[Tervalon]: The first is lifelong learning and critical self-reflection and in that critical self-reflection it is the understanding of how each of us – every single one of us – is a complicated multi-dimensional human being. Each of us comes with our own histories and stories, our heritage, our point of view. You’re looking at me now; I am very fair skinned. When I was a little girl, my hair was blonde, my eyes are blue. People often tried to call me anything but African American. I have a history. My identity is rooted in that history. My parents gave me the knowledge of my own social identity and my own experience in life has created that I get to say who I am.

[Murray-García]: The second tenet, after self-reflection and ongoing, lifelong learning and development, is this notion that we must mitigate the power imbalances to recognize and mitigate the power imbalances that are inherent often in our clinician patient or clinician client or service provider community dynamics.

[Tervalon]: And then finally the piece that I would offer that Jan and I feel people often either don’t read or don’t like, which is [that] the institution has to model these principles as well.

[Music]

[La’Shay Morris, Health Education student, San Francisco State University, reading an excerpt from “Cultural Humility vs. Cultural Competence”]: An African-American nurse is caring for a middle-aged Latino woman several hours after the patient had undergone surgery. A Latino physician on a consult service approached the bedside and, noting the moaning patient, commented to the nurse that the patient appeared to be in a great deal of post-operative pain.

[Morris]: The nurse summarily dismissed his perception, informing him that she took a course in nursing school in cross-cultural medicine and knew that Hispanic patients overexpress the pain that they’re feeling. The Latino physician had a difficult time influencing the perspective of this nurse, who focused on her self-proclaimed cultural expertise.

[Murray-García]: It was curious to this Latino physician who first of all was Latino – not like all, in his case, not like all Mexican Americans know everything there is to know about Mexican-American patients; that wasn’t it – but he might have been a resource for that African-American nurse in that moment that she didn’t feel like she needed, again because she had bought into this notion of competence, of cultural competence.

[Tervalon]: The distinction between cultural humility and cultural competence was that we were in a process and a relationship that had many other layers to it, and that we were less comfortable with even the term of competence. And a way that I think people understand well and that it implies especially for people who are providers and are trained in academia that you were then all knowing and all powerful and we felt like that was not what was happening for us as we were learning from community and understanding in a very practical way how families were coming to the hospital and feeling as if they really were not being heard from their own heritage and history. And how that impacted what they came to the hospital with that we didn’t know anything about, hadn’t even a clue about. For us, this is part of the humility piece of it. Getting to understand that – not trying to humiliate you, not trying to make you feel bad – trying to help us all understand that life is like this and to in a certain sense be really happy about not knowing.

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 1.18, Cultural Humility Edited YouTube Video

Transcript for “Cultural Humility Edited” by W B Jordan is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 1.29, Social Construction YouTube Video

Hi. I’m Kim Puttman. I’m a sociologist and author at Oregon Coast Community College.

Hi. I’m Liz Pearce. I teach in human development and family sciences at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Oregon.

These videos are being made for Open Oregon Educational Resources.

Rain is a fact of life. The storms roaring in from the ocean soak the forests and the yards. The brisk wind scours our beaches and our hearts. The gentle rain on the vineyards grows our grapes and brings us peace. This rain is real, but our experience of rain is socially constructed. That’s what we’re here to talk about today.

Social construction is a term introduced by Austrian-born American sociologist and Protestant theologian Peter Berger and American-Austrian sociologist Thomas Luckmann in 1966. These men wrote a book called “The Social Construction of Reality.” In it, they assert that our social world is constructed in the daily habits and patterns that people repeat regularly. Social constructions are shared understandings that are jointly accepted by large numbers of people in society or social groups. How we make sense of our world depends on shared social agreements. These agreements can change over time, and even when the agreements are made up, they are real in their consequences.

Let’s look at our example of rain to make sense of this. Clearly, if you go outside when it’s raining, you will get wet. Rain is physically real. However, even our language around rain is socially constructed. The word “rain” and the raindrops themselves don’t look at all alike. Also, our behavior in the rain is socially constructed. People in Chicago and people in Oregon deal with rain differently. In a very informal poll, the writers from “The Oregonian” asked people how often they use an umbrella. 66% of them said never. When they were asked why, most of the people said it was because they wanted their hands free. 8% of the people said they wouldn’t use them because they would be embarrassed. What? People get wet because they are embarrassed? Here we see social construction in action. Real Oregonians don’t use umbrellas, so if you want to be a real Oregonian, you follow the habit. The conversation in Chicago is really different. It’s not whether you use an umbrella, it’s how you find one that will actually work.

What else is socially constructed? Symbols are socially constructed. Symbols are gestures or objects that have meanings associated with them that are recognized by people who share a culture. One common symbol is a flag. In the US, when we use the symbol of the flag, we understand the cloth and colors to represent the United States. When we see pictures of people using the symbol of the flag to protest, it brings up emotions. We associate the cloth and colors with our country deeply, yet there are different socially constructed meanings related to the flag. Some believe that the flag is so important that it should only be displayed and treated in very respectful ways. Others believe that the flag is so important that burning it is the ultimate form of protest. Although we share the social construction of the symbol, not all of us share the same interpretation.

Another common symbol is money. We agree that this piece of paper can be exchanged for things that are worth a dollar, and as a society, we share this agreement. If you tried to convince a car salesperson that you could actually buy a car with this dollar, you wouldn’t get very far. Even something as common as color can be socially constructed. Think for a moment about what colors you associate with girls and women, and what colors you associate with boys and men. Many people in the US are likely to say blue for boys and pink for girls. Did you know that this designation is socially constructed? For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication “Earnshaw’s Infants Department” said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

Right now, in our society, it seems like if you think of a color for a boy — in a binary system, if you think of a color for boys, it would be blue, and a color for girls would be pink. And as you can see, we are not fitting into that social construction. And lots of people don’t, but, still, it’s the way that social construction exists right now.

And more recently, pink is being reclaimed as a color for men. The men’s magazine “GQ” declared in 2013 that “real men wear pink.”

Our behavior is also socially constructed. We see this when we look at who uses masks or face coverings. Before the Covid 19 pandemic, it was rare to see people in the United States using masks. However, this behavior has been present in Asia since 2002 with the advent of the SARS epidemic. Mask wearing during the pandemic was also more common in countries with a high degree of social trust. It will be interesting to see how this behavioral norm changes as the pandemic comes to an end. Another behavior that may seem universal but that is actually socially constructed is kissing. When you think of who kisses whom, the first image is the Hollywood movie version of the sexy embrace between a woman and man. However this version is not the only way that kissing is socially constructed. We might also expect that parents and children kiss within the context of the family. In some cultures, even strangers kiss. In Latin America and France, the air kiss to the cheek is common, even when you don’t know the person that well. In New Zealand, the Maoris share the hongi, a greeting in which they touch foreheads and breath together. This greeting acknowledges their interdependent connection with each other. The most famous interracial kiss on TV happened on Star Trek in 1968, only a year after the Supreme Court ruled that interracial marriage must be legalized in every state in the United States. In the times of Covid 19, we found that the kiss was quickly replaced by the ever-common elbow bump, and our understanding about who can kiss each other continues to evolve.

Even social categories that we might think of biological are socially constructed. When you consider gender, you may think that gender itself is fixed, that it’s the same as sex assigned at birth, that society consists of women and men with specific physical characteristics and associated gender roles. However, social scientists assert that gender is socially constructed also. People identify as nonbinary, neither male nor female, and transgender, expressing a gender other than sex assigned at birth, as well as male or female. In addition, how we do gender changes over time. Consider for a moment how what we wear signals our gender. Who traditionally wears pants? Who traditionally wears dresses or skirts? These norms are challenged in different cultures and in different times. In Scotland, the kilt is part of the national dress for men. Hillary Clinton was considered unfeminine when she wore pantsuits. And Billy Porter wears elegant gowns all over town.

Finally, even though language, symbols, and behaviors are socially constructed, they are real in their consequences. This will be discussed in other videos, but here are two examples. Your gender significantly predicts your access to wealth. Women and nonbinary people are more likely to be poor, and there is a consistent gender pay gap all around the world.

In the United States, the first time that married women could own their own property occurred in 1848 in New York State. Perhaps more surprisingly, until the mid-1970s, women could not get credit without having a male cosigner, usually their husband or their father. And women are still often charged with higher interest rates than men.

Women and nonbinary people are more likely to be poor, and there is a consistent gender pay gap all around the world. In the United States, the first time that married women could own their own property occurred in 1848 in New York State. Perhaps more surprisingly, until the mid-1970s, women could not get credit without having a male cosigner, usually their husband or their father. And women are still often charged with higher interest rates than men.

In a second example, some people believe that race is based on biological categories. However, scientists know that how we define race changes over time and place. In 1790, the US census used free white males, free white females, all other free persons, and slaves as racial categories. In 1970, the US census added a separate question related to being of Hispanic ethnicity. In 2020, the US census changed to allow people to select more than one race to describe their racial identification.

The social construction of race also continues to be hotly contested. For example, Barack Obama is known as our first Black president. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a successful Black Kenyan economist, and his mother, Ann Dunham, was an accomplished White American anthropologist. While he was running for president, some people said he wasn’t Black enough, while others said he wasn’t White enough. And beyond this exceptional example, scholars and people of color know that race matters.

Now we see that social constructions are shared understandings between groups of people. Social constructions can change over time or location, and they are real in their consequences. Because we create social constructions in our everyday interactions, we have hope for change. The next time you enjoy a walk in the rain, with or without your umbrella, think about it. [ Music ]

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 1.29, Social Construction YouTube Video

Transcript for “Social Construction (video)” by Elizabeth Pearce, Kimberly Puttman, and Colin Stapp, Open Oregon Educational Resources, is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

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Transcript for Figure 2.1, A Minute and Over: Critical Race Theory

[Music]

[Megan Paulson, Instructor, History and Social Science at Phillips Academy Andover]: The foundations of critical race theory comes out of the critical Legal Studies movement. That movement looked at the ways in which the law is not neutral. Critical Race Theory evolved from that in that we look at how race and concepts of race are central to the American experience. Through Critical Race Theory we’re seeing how the concept of whiteness and the concept of others are very much embedded in our founding documents, in our legal system, how we think and interact with each other.

One of the most important parts of it is how the kids make connections with each other in the class. They have to learn to trust each other and they’re sharing some really personal fundamental issues of identity which helped them get in touch with their empathy for others. They suddenly have language and terminology and theories to make sense of some of their experiences that they have in the outside world and it’s not simply a class for students of color. This is also for white students as well. One of the things that they learn in Critical Race Theory is that white is a race and it’s a race by design. What comes with whiteness needs to be examined and this class kind of points to whiteness and allows them to explore that and talk about it and ask questions where they might not have had the opportunity to do that. And if you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going, and so this class kind of has kids looking back not only at their own experiences but those of their families and that helps to kind of propel them forward.

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Transcript for “A Minute and Over: Critical Race Theory” by PhillipsAndover is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 2.16, Theories and Concepts

[Liz Pearce]: Hi there, I want to spend a few minutes helping you understand a few of the theories and concepts that you’ll be reading about in chapters one and two.

[Theories]

So, the theories I’m going to talk about are exchange, symbolic interaction, feminist, postmodern, all found in chapter one, and one that’s kind of an up and coming perspective called the life course theory, and you’ll find that at the end of chapter two.

[Exchange Theory]

So first, the exchange theory, which is sort of like what it sounds like. It’s the idea that many of us form relationships or look for family members with whom we can exchange costs and benefits. This theory basically assumes that we are rational beings and that we like to weigh the benefits and the costs and make some kind of even exchange in our relationships. It also assumes that relationships stay somewhat static.

One of the main examples of the exchange theory is the old breadwinner-homemaker model that used to be more common in the United States. The idea being basically that the man was the breadwinner and the woman was the homemaker, and that they exchanged those various services to each other and that both benefited.

Now, if you want to look more into the study I’m about to talk about, there’s a place you can click here and go to the actual study. What this study shows is kind of the difference between what people say they want and what people actually do. And I thought I’d use this example since we’re talking about breadwinner-homemaker dynamics. Basically, what this shows is that while many young adults favor dual-income marriages and seem to be more predisposed towards a more even exchange of income and homemaking duties, in reality, younger people are the ones who still choose the breadwinner-homemaker wife marriages more so than people who are older.

So, in this class quite a bit, we’ll talk about what people say they prefer and how that compares to what the actual data is. And that’s important because those things sometimes are different. It doesn’t mean someone’s good or bad because they say they want one thing and they do another, but it does illustrate that there are differences between what we say we prefer and what we actually do.

So, I’m just going to click here and take you to the Pew Research site. You can see there’s a little bit of an article and there are actually some more graphs to illustrate more. I really like this site. This is one you could use quite a bit for your weekly wonders and in your projects, your midterm, and your final project. So, I just wanted to show you this website too. It’s called Pew Research.

[Symbolic Interaction Theory]

Next theory, symbolic interaction theory. This theory, again, as it says, it’s kind of based on symbols and says that we make interpretations based on the symbols that we see and that from there follows our behavior. And of course, our biggest symbol system is words. And so, I’ve included this wordle for you. And part of the symbolic interaction theory says that basically, our words and our language are not keeping pace with how quickly families are changing. And if you just think about all the step relationships you might have, the half relationships, the exes, and the ex-exes, we don’t really have words to describe all those different relationships very clearly. In addition, it says that we make interpretations based on words or actions that then lead us to a certain behavior.

So, I just want to expand a little bit on the opening the door example Chirlin gives in the text. Of course, he gives the example that when men open the door for a woman, it kind of reinforces that gender belief or role of men being stronger than women. But the other side of that is, how does the woman interpret the door being open? Does she see that as a kindness, or does she see that as somehow insulting? Maybe one day she might take it as a kindness, maybe another day she might interpret it another way.

And so, part of the symbolic interaction theory, unlike the exchange theory where it assumes more things staying the same, is that the symbolic interaction theory says, you know, things change, the world is fragile, things change based on time and the individual and the group.

[Feminist Theory]

The feminist theory, this is probably the best well-known, kind of, out there in the common world as opposed to the academic world. I do want to make a couple of points about it. First of all, when we talk about feminism, we’re talking about a gender-based theory, not a sex-based theory. And we’ll get into gender and sex actually next week and the differences. But basically, the feminist theory has to do with male dominance, but specifically around the gender roles that are predominant in the society. And it doesn’t just pay attention to men being dominant but more how the entire culture reinforces that dominance. This is also a theory where there’s some activism associated with it, and that’s why it’s probably a little bit better known.

And I liked this image because it shows a little bit about the feminist theory over time and across culture. We often think of the feminist movement as having happened in the 60s and 70s, but really it’s been going on for hundreds of years.

[Postmodernism]

The post-modern perspective, and probably here’s our picture of Modern Family, a television show many of you know that kind of exemplifies part of the post-modern perspective, which says we have a lot of choices. The post-modern perspective is all about having choices not just about family but about career and about gender roles that, in the past, family life and work life was more prescriptive, and now, while we have a lot more choices, sometimes that can be overwhelming to the many different paths we can choose from. Postmodernism is also about individualism and our self-identity. I think of that old jingle, “Be all that you can be,” and it kind of reinforces, Chirlin talks about individualism earlier in the chapter, that sense of sort of meeting your full potential as an individual. Postmodernism also talks about reflexivity, meaning that personally, people are reflective, think about what they’re doing, consider, may change their path. Reflexivity is also bi-directional, meaning that while society changes us or changes the individual, the individual also changes society, so it’s an ongoing cycle.

This is another theory that sees more of the change in the world as opposed to things staying static. Again, gender roles: “we’ve got this,” “he can do it,” which I’m guessing many of you recognize as sort of a take off on the Rosie the Riveter poster. Family structure can change, it is quite different and then our work lives. I’ve got a picture here of Chris Soules who’s known for his appearances on The Bachelorette and The Bachelor. He’s kind of the reverse example of postmodernism in that he comes from a long line of farmers and he’s stayed in the farming business that’s not as common as it used to be used to be much more common for

people to always stay in the career or the business that their parents had founded and that’s that’s less common now.

Also in post-modernism we talk about the created kinship concept, being able to form kinship ties with people that we choose as opposed to the more traditional biological and legal examples of of kin.

[Early Adulthood]

Okay, so here’s one of the new theories. This one’s called early adulthood and life course. And probably one of the really interesting concepts from this theory is the emerging early adulthood time period. I think this is especially interesting to talk about in a college setting, and what it says is that basically, we take longer to go from that graduation of high school period to the full adulthood, whereas in the past, that might have happened in a period of two, three, four, maybe five years. Now, people are taking more like 10 years, and that means getting the degree, getting started in a career, finding a life partner, buying a home, maybe having children is what is talked about as sort of arriving at the early adulthood.

I mentioned that I’ll show you a picture here of a book and a fellow named Richard Setterston. He’s actually at OSU, and he is one of the founders of this theory, very well known. If you find this theory interesting, you could take a class from him about the theory, which is what I did in my graduate program.

The theory also concentrates on birth cohorts and specifically what are the effects on people during this certain time of their life, the adolescence and early adulthood, and grouping people by birth cohorts. So, we’re not talking about individual events like a parent dying or parents being divorced, or those kinds of things. We’re talking about big sociological societal events that affect the entire birth cohort. And that’s part of what this life course perspective says, is that those big, huge events really affect people.

So, I’m just going to give you an example from my early adulthood. I was an adolescent and a young adult in the ’70s. So, one of the big historical events that affected me was the Vietnam War. And not just the Vietnam War, but that it was the first war to be televised. And that we saw pictures and images and videos like this on television. And perhaps even more so, that there was a lot of controversy and protests about the war, and a lot of political discussion and debate.

And so, for someone like me who grew up in the ’70s, I grew up in a world where I saw the adults, who were very responsible adults, really being questioned by younger adults. And that had an effect on me and on my birth cohort. And that’s what the life course perspective would say, is that those effects are very important to human development.

[Theories and Concepts: Studying Theories in HDFS 201]

So basically what I want to say about these theories is or I want to ask you, do you think these theories work together? Can you believe in more than one of these theories, or do you see them as conflicting with each other? And that’s part of what you’ll explore in your weekly wonder too when you delve into one theory and see if maybe it does work well with another theory or if another theory kind of points out some of the weaknesses in the theory that you’re studying.

I think theories are really interesting because they really give us the why in HDFS 201. We’re not just going to learn a bunch of facts about what people did; we’re going to think about why did these things happen, how did the forces come together that cause changes in families. So the theories really help us understand that.

Okay, three more concepts: globalization, sociological imagination, and the sociological viewpoint.

[Globalization]

Globalization first. I think Chirlin explains this really well. I’m just drawing it to your attention because it’s such an important concept and it’s one we’ll come back to over and over and over again in this course. How much the world has changed and how connected we are to people from other countries and how much that affects our family and work lives.

[Sociological Imagination]

Sociological imagination is not something Chirlin mentions, so C. Wright Mills, who’s a sociologist, defined this as the vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and the wider society. And I want to pull this term in because I think this is important to your having a good experience in this class. Basically, as you are studying in this class, I want you to be able to look at experiences and try to see them from a variety of perspectives. Most of the things we’ll talk about in this class have no simple one right or wrong explanation. They’re usually very complicated. And really, part of what makes it intriguing is relating your own experience to wider society. I want you to think about your family life, the life you’ve had and the life you want to have, and also to consider the observations you’ve made about other people and other family members and how that all fits with the greater society. So we’ll be using this term a lot, and that’s what I’m thinking about when I use it.

[Sociological Viewpoint]

And finally, the sociological viewpoint. Now here’s a picture of our author of our book, Andrew Chirlin. Again, I think he explains this very well in the book and in fact, he explains it by using himself as an example.

Sociologists basically understand that there’s no way that we can be totally objective when studying the family. Each one of us is going to be subjective because part of being human is having our own unique experiences, influences, and those will affect how we look at families and at society. So what we need to do upfront is acknowledge our own experience and our own bias, still strive to be as objective as possible, absolutely, but recognize the reality, and I think Chirlin does a really nice job of sharing his personal viewpoint on a few things and letting you know that he’s aware that he sees the world this way. This is also part of critical thinking. Part of critical thinking is knowing that you have a bias and how that might affect your study.

In closing, I’ll say that the points I’ve featured here are not the entire reading or the entire course content for this week, but these are things that I thought either needed a little more explanation or were extremely important and critical to your success in this course or that just were, I think, are a little more complicated and from having taught this course for many years are things that students have struggled with in the past. So I hope this helps you getting ready for your quizzes, your discussions, and your weekly wonders.

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 2.16, Theories and Concepts

Transcript for “Theories and Concepts” by Elizabeth B. Pearce is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

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Transcript for Figure 2.19, Social Construction of Difference

[Kim Puttman]: Hi, I’m Kim Puttman. I’m a sociologist and author at Oregon Coast Community College.

[Liz Pearce]: Hi, I’m Liz Pearce. I teach in human development and family sciences at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Oregon. These videos are being made for Open Oregon Educational Resources.

In this video, we will build on your understanding of social constructions and connect that understanding to what it means to say that difference is socially constructed. To review, social constructions are shared understandings that are jointly accepted by large numbers of people in a society or a social group. These understandings form a basis of shared assumptions about reality. Remember the examples about the value of money, the power of the flag, and the connection between gender and color. So when we talk about the social construction of difference, the difference part becomes notable when we name it, and we assign a value to it. What do I mean by we? “We” doesn’t have to include 100% of the people in a society. Social constructions can be powerful even if everyone in a given society or social group doesn’t believe them. Even when a social construction is not universally accepted, it still has power, it still has real consequences.

Here is a social identity wheel that focuses specifically on social characteristics, those that are usually defined by physical, social, or mental characteristics such as gender, sex, socioeconomic status, race, or ethnicity. When you combine these identities, it is called your social location, your unique location related to power and privilege. In an expanded view of the social identity wheel, we see that it not only contains the social characteristics, but also what we call roles and relationships in the outer ring of the wheel. And on the innermost wheel, our internal characteristics or what we might think of as our personality. This part of the wheel contains values, beliefs, and motivations.

Black author James Baldwin said, no one was White before he/she came to America. It took generations and a vast amount of coercion before this became a White country. White sociologist Allan Johnson quoted Baldwin’s work when explaining that we filter reality or what we think is real through a cultural lens. In the United States, we have a lens that defines the concept of race as both important and hierarchical. As an individual you may or may not be conscious of this. If you are White part of your privilege is that you don’t have to notice race. If you aren’t White, you can’t ignore it. Unless a culture defines a difference as significant, it is socially irrelevant. That’s the important part. When we assign hierarchies, we socially construct differences. For example, in talking about skin color, our society has assigned value to skin color over hundreds of years, privileging people with white skin and oppressing people with brown or black skin. This difference in assigned value has been codified into laws like slave codes or Jim Crow laws enforcing racial hierarchies with laws and violence. Difference has been embedded into policies such as redlining, the practice of not loaning money to buy houses in specific areas. Difference is also practiced when law enforcement uses racial profiling. People of color may refer to this as driving or more broadly living while Black. These ideas are embedded in our society and internalized in each of us. What makes this powerful is that we often don’t even recognize that these ideas exist. We may see these differences as reality rather than something that has been invented and reinforced over time. And it doesn’t take everyone sharing the same hierarchical thinking to have a very real effect on others. For example, discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity is expressed through laws, policies, and informal practices even though not everyone agrees that heterosexuality should be privileged.

Because the other part of social construction is that, that social constructions are also real in their consequences. Where do you see that realness playing out?

I’m just thinking about an example, like, you know, a friend of mine recently, she and her wife were celebrating their 25th anniversary, and she had an appointment, a long-standing appointment to get her makeup done for the party, and she was going to have rainbows, you know, done over her eyes and to match her rainbow-colored shoes. And the day of the appointment, when she explained exactly the makeup that she wanted and, you know, and mentioned her wife, the makeup artist told her she wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it. And so harm is not just about the laws that are out there, it’s really about how people treat one another and how they think about one another. So even though we can say it’s not real, like it’s not really true that, you know, someone who’s gay is less than or should have less rights than someone who’s heterosexual the consequences are real.

Some socially constructed differences may seem more subtle, such as the privileges experienced by tall people who are more likely to be men. Transportation designs, such as the height of seats on a bus, the grab straps for those standing on a train and airbags in newer cars are examples of designs modeled on the average man’s size and frame. These can put short people more likely to be women or children at risk. There is a continuum of power and privilege in the United States and many other places.

Socially constructed differences affect real life behaviors and outcomes. For example, if we take marital status in general, we would say that in our society, we value the institution of marriage and perceive people more positively who have stayed married than people who have divorced. That’s an example of assigning a value to a difference, which socially constructs a hierarchy in those behaviors. But we live in a society which creates laws that allow people to get married or prevents them from getting married. Laws are part of privilege. Take a look at the power and privilege wheel. You can see that both people who are heterosexual and people who are White have more power. For example, until 1967, it was illegal in some states for a couple from different races to get married. And until 2015, federal law prevented same-sex couples from getting married. Without a change in these laws these couples not only couldn’t get married, but they also faced restrictions on getting healthcare, adopting children together and receiving spousal benefits such as social security and other inheritances.

In addition to social structures, we often assign value to people of different groups unconsciously. Sociologist Allan Johnson talks about implicit bias as being the quick and unconscious judgments that people make about each other. These unconscious biases are based on assumptions or stereotypes that we may not consciously realize that we hold. For example, we are likely to assume people are straight if to us they appear to have typical characteristics unless we are provided with other information or knowledge. Let’s look at some other examples. When someone has light white skin, then they are considered White. For example, do you think Texas Senator Ted Cruz is White? He actually identifies as Hispanic. Someone who wears dresses and makeup, we may think of as feminine. Consider Demi Lovato. Would you think she identifies as a woman? She actually identifies as non-binary? Do you know someone who has a disability, but one that doesn’t always show on the outside, such as chronic fatigue syndrome or lupus? Invisible disabilities don’t show on the outside, but they are real nonetheless.

We don’t tend to question our assumptions about race, gender, sexual orientation, or ability unless we run into someone who doesn’t fit neatly into a category or are given explicit information that conflicts with what we have socially constructed in our heads. Socially constructed differences privilege some of us and oppress others. Any individual may experience both privilege and oppression based on their unique combination of social identities and the socially constructed differences that exist. Even though socially constructed differences are not a reality, they have real-life effects.

[Music.]

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 2.19, Social Construction of Difference

Transcript for “Social Construction of Difference [YouTube Video]” by Elizabeth Pearce, Kimberly Puttman, and Colin Stapp, Open Oregon Educational Resources, is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

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Transcript for Figure 3.12, Relationships Are Hard, But Why?

[Stan Tatkin at TEDxKC]: Relationships are difficult. Everybody knows that. Most people think it’s because of money, sex, kids, work, or who picks up the socks. Some people think it’s because we’re just not right for each other, or we don’t have enough in common. Look, it’s not just you, or him, or her. There’s actually nothing more difficult on the planet than another person. Think about that. We’re all difficult; we all come to each new relationship wanting easy, but we also come with our fair share of unresolved painful experiences from previous relationships.

Between love and work, love is by far, more complex and challenging. Much of the reason for this is based in our automatic neurobiological reflexes, so let me explain. Let’s start with that fancy neocortex of yours, the high cortical areas. For simplicity sake, let’s call them your ambassadors. Your ambassadors are very smart, deliberate, but slow; and they’re very expensive to run. They’re really good at planning, predicting, organizing, languaging and if I may be frank, they’re really good at making shit up. (Laughter)

When you think of logic and reason, think ambassadors. The subcortical areas of your brain, let’s call them your primitives; they’re very fast, memory-based, automatic, and very cheap to run. They’re involved in love and sex, but also threat detection by scanning for dangerous faces, voices, gestures, movements, as well as dangerous words and phrases. When you think fight or flight, think primitives. Thanks to your primitives, your day is 99% fully automatic. Your ambassadors love novelty, but they have to offload newness to your primitives in order to conserve resources. You can’t possibly run your day with your ambassadors in full gear; you would fry your brain. So the primitives use something called procedural memory, otherwise known as body memory, and it works like this: you learn to ride a bike; and in the beginning, your primitives and ambassadors are in full gear to learn this new skill, but very soon, your primitives are going to automate bike riding without much need for your ambassadors. It goes into procedural memory. Pretty neat, huh? Now you fall in love with someone, and again, your brain is lit up; you want to know everything about them. You want to touch them, taste them, smell them, you can’t get enough of them. You are high on drugs. (Laughter)

Nature’s drugs, not those! Dopamine for wanting more, noradrenaline for focus and attention, testosterone for you know what, and a distinct drop in serotonin so you can perseverate and obsess. You’re neurochemically addicted. You spend all your time together for weeks and months; you get serious, and this is when the fun begins, because very soon, your brain is going to automate this new person and theirs is going to automate you. This is supposed to happen, it’s what the brain does in order to function. It’ll make your relationship feel a lot easier and it will lead you to your first really big mistakes because you think you know each other already so you stop paying attention, you stop being fully present. Your primitives are relying on procedural memory to run your relationship, and that memory includes everyone and everything of an emotional importance in your life. That primitive brain of yours is going to read your partner’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions through that memory lens.

So it’s kind of like this, “Why are you giving me that look?” “I didn’t give you any look.” “Why are you using that tone of voice with me?” “What tone?” – “Stop it!” – “What?” – “That.” – “What?!” That’s the sound of two nervous systems misfiring, and that is our nature. (Laughter)

That will happen, and it will be a problem if you don’t understand your automatic brain. As a couple’s therapist, I can tell you that fighting in and of itself is inevitable. There is no relationship without conflict. In fact, if you are a conflict avoider, you will appear threatening to your partner. The real problem isn’t that you fight. It’s when you do, one or both of you threatens to leave the relationship. A relationship can survive fights, but what it cannot survive is loss of safety and security. Communication, memory, perception – all error-prone. Human communication, even on a good day, is terrible. We’re mostly misunderstanding each other much of the time; when we feel good, we don’t care that much, when we don’t feel good, we care a whole lot. (Laughter)

When stress goes up, human communication gets a whole lot worse. Memory is unreliable. Memory is faulty, folks, and in a fight for whose memory is right, you’re probably both wrong. Your perceptions are like fun house mirrors. Your perceptions are constantly being altered by your state of mind and your memory. They’re constantly playing tricks on you. If we assume our communication, our memory, our perception is the real truth, that’s hubris, and that will get us into trouble.

Before I go on, I want to be clear about threat: if you’re in an abusive relationship, you must get out. I’m not talking about big T threat; only small T threat, the kind that we have to deal with day in and day out as we bump up against each other, and we fight. But why do our fights spin out of control? It’s because real time is too fast, and when we feel threatened, we act, and react with our primitives. Our ambassadors actually have no idea how we got into this place. It’s what makes shit up! (Laughter) “I’m right, dammit, and here’s what sounds really good to prove my point.” (Laughter) You really have no idea what you’re talking about (Laughter) but you sound so confident. (Laughter)

I want to get to the fun part here. Since all of you literally carry around your own neurobiology lab with you, wherever you go; here’s a few experiments you can run in the comfort of your own home: the next time a relationship moment turns tense, change your position; go eye-to-eye and face-to-face, notice what happens. And by the way, if you tend to fight a lot while driving in the car, it’s because you’re side-to-side and glance; a glance is a threat trigger, that’s why you should never fight in the car, or on the phone, or while emailing, or while texting. We’re visual animals, and we need our eyes in order to regulate each other’s nervous systems.

I want you to understand that what I’m talking about here happens to everyone, regardless of personality, previous experience, and relationship experience, or trauma. No angels, no devils here; we’re all capable of becoming threatening, even to those we love, and we’re capable of making huge mistakes and errors in communication, memory, and perception; all of us. The decision to be in a relationship, the decision to be in a committed relationship – loving, secure functioning – means being in the foxhole together and protecting each other from the dangers out there. It’s not just about getting our own way. We’re supposed to have each other’s backs.

I’ve seen far too many relationships end before their time, because people cannot get this simple concept; our major job is to protect each other and make each other feel safe and secure. The world is a dangerous place, it’s always been so; and right now, it feels a little scary. If we don’t have each other’s backs, who will? Thank you and good luck with your relationships. (Applause)

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 3.12, Relationships Are Hard, But Why?

Transcript for “Relationships Are Hard, But Why?” by TEDx Talks is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 3.14, The Secret To A Successful Relationship

[Julian Huguet]: Relationships are terrifying. I mean, did you know half of all marriages last forever??

‘Ello loves, Julian here for DNews. All right, first of all the oft-quoted statistic that 50% of marriages fail is just plain wrong. The actual number for first marriages is closer to 20-25%, but that still begs the question; why do they fail? Why do people who have avowed themselves to one another for their whole lives not go the distance?

John and Julie Gottman have been pondering that question for decades. By the way, they’re both psychologists, and yes, they’re married. Feel free to “d’awwww” now. According to the Gottmans, you can actually predict with 94% certainty which relationships will be healthy and which will be festering quagmires of misery and stress simply by how they support each other.

Anyone who’s been in a relationship knows that sometimes you and your partner’s interests don’t align. Maybe you like hockey but they’re not so hot on it. Or maybe they like camping and you understandably think sleeping on the dirty ground in the woods with no wifi is a terrible way to spend a vacation. But when one person tries to share their interests with their significant other, that’s a bid for emotional support. How often they get that acknowledgment makes all the difference.

John Gottman conducted a study where they invited 130 newlywed couples to what looked like a bed and breakfast, but was actually a lab where they could observe the subjects. He was watching for how often one person would say something seemingly inconsequential, like, “hey check out that bird,” or, “I have the weirdest feeling we’re being watched right now.” Gottman called these “bids” for emotional support, and noted how often their partner would respond in a meaningful way.

Their findings show that couples stay together when they show bids of interest or support 9 out of 10 times, while couples who only support each other a third of the time split within six years.

Ignoring those bids for support and acceptance can have an actual physiological effect. The Gottmans and a team of researchers brought in newlyweds to interview them. They were asked some pretty tough questions on their relationships while electrodes monitored their heart rates, blood flow, and sweatiness. While across the board, everyone responded calmly to the questions, some couples showed higher heart rates, blood flow, and sweat production. In other words, their palms were sweaty, knees weak, arms were heavy. They’re nervous, but on the surface they look calm and ready. The stress of being in the same room as their spouse and talking about their relationship caused their sympathetic nervous system to kick in and they had a fight-or-flight response. Those couples were usually divorced within 6 years.

So if you want to have a healthy and less stressful relationship, it’s important you both work to actively support each other’s emotional bids, even if camping is just the worst.

If you want to learn another trick to keeping the fire lit, check out Anthony’s explanation of how texting can ruin a relationship. What do you think the key is to living happily ever after? Tell us your secret in the comments, and I’ll see you next time on DNews.

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 3.14, The Secret To A Successful Relationship

Transcript for “The Secret To A Successful Relationship” by Seeker is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 4.6, The Strange Situation – Mary Ainsworth

[Narrator]: But can the essential elements of home life be translated into a standard laboratory setting for controlled scientific study?

After conducting extensive observation of parents and children at home, a student of Bowlby’s, Mary Ainsworth, devised such a procedure, called “The Strange Situation,” which places the child under some stress. It has become the most widely-used, standardized way to assess the quality of a child’s attachment to their caregiver.

Here the researchers are recording how 14-month-old Lisa responds in this attractive but unfamiliar setting. How will she react to a stranger? What will happen when her mother leaves the room? And when she returns?

It’s Lisa’s behavior when her mother returns, what psychologists call “the reunion,” that they are particularly interested in.

[Psychologist]: Most importantly is to look for the type of balance that a child flags between an attachment need and on the other hand to explore the playing material.

[Narrator]: Once Lisa has settled down to play, a stranger enters the room, and sits in the chair reading a magazine. After a couple of minutes, the stranger attempts to interact with Lisa. Soon after, Lisbeth [Lisa’s mother] gets a cue to leave the room.

[Baby cries.]

The stranger tries to comfort Lisa, but in vain. Lisbeth comes back into the room, and the camera records how Lisa reacts. Now the first part of the procedure is over, and Lisbeth settles Lisa down again. The stranger leaves them alone together. And soon after, Lisbeth goes too. Lisa is on her own. Her distress is plain to see. Once again, the efforts of a stranger to console Lisa are to no avail.

[Baby cries.]

But Lisbeth manages to calm her almost at once, and shortly afterward, the observation ends. Lisa shows outward signs of what’s called secure attachment.

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 4.6, The Strange Situation – Mary Ainsworth

Transcript for “The Strange Situation – Mary Ainsworth” by thibs44 is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 4.8, Nature vs Nurture

Have you noticed that you’re different to your relations, parents or carers, your next-door neighbor, the kid who lives across the street and everyone else on the planet? In fact you’re unique.

But do you really know why you are different? Why are we all different to each other? Why does any organism have different characteristics to another organism?

The answer lies in a long running debate called ‘nature versus nurture’, or genetics versus environment, which is a little less catchy!

‘Nature’ refers to our genetics – the unique combination of genes that we have naturally inherited from our biological parents, from their DNA. Many characteristics are controlled by our genes, including our blood group, eye color or natural hair color. Some diseases are also caused by our genes, for example cystic fibrosis. The color of a flower or a fruit is controlled by genes in plants.

‘Nurture’ refers to the effect of the environment on characteristics, the word literally means care. Examples of characteristics that are determined by the environment are weight, or mass, which is dependent on your diet, or the presence of a scar. Some diseases may be caused by environmental influences, such as type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease.

Imagine that a plant has not received enough sunlight or water. This may influence the height of the plant or the number of fruits produced. We would say that the environment has influenced these characteristics too, or that a plant has been affected by nurture.

The effect of genetics and the environment on characteristics has been researched using identical twins. Can you think why this is? (Pause). Identical twins have identical DNA, so, in theory, should have identical characteristics. It follows that any differences between a pair of identical twins could be due to the influence of the environment on their characteristics. In fact, twins often grow up to have very different personalities and preferences beyond their physical similarities. These studies showed that many characteristics are influenced by both genetics and the environment. Some studies actually use twins identical genomes as a control to prove the effect of the environment on the body. For example, one study showed how skin aged differently by comparing smoker twins with non-smoker twins.

Remember that the characteristics of a living organism are influenced by its genetics and its interaction with the environment. So both nature and nurture are responsible.

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 4.8, Nature vs Nurture

Transcript for “Nature vs Nurture” by FuseSchool – Global Education, is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

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Transcript for Figure 4.14, Inside a Young Migrant’s Family Separation Nightmare

[Video call in Spanish from father in Huehuetenango, Guatemala to son in Florida]

[Narrator]: For the past three years, David and his son, Adelso, have communicated only by phone. Adelso is just one of about 5,500 children who was taken from a parent, as a result of the Trump administration’s family separation policy. They’re among more than 1,000 families who have been waiting for the Biden administration to follow through on a promise to reunify them. Now there is a new sense of hope as the Biden government starts to reunite a handful of families. But David and Adelso’s story — split between Guatemala and Florida — offers a firsthand look at the continuing psychological effects of separation … … and how the delay in reuniting families has in some cases encouraged people to make a desperate trek back to the U.S.

David and his son spoke with us on condition that we not use their full names and conceal their identities. Since he was jailed and deported, David has kept a low profile in the countryside, evading the gangs he says extorted the trucking business he worked for and threatened his family before they fled to the U.S. David was deported to Guatemala after serving 30 days in a U.S. prison for the crime of illegal reentry. Neither David, his wife or their other children have seen Adelso since.

[President Joe Biden]: “We can make America, once again, the leading force for good in the world.”

[Narrator]: Days after he took office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to reunify families separated under the Trump administration.

[President Joe Biden]: “The re-establishment of the interagency task force and the reunification of families.”

[Narrator]: This week, as migrant apprehensions approached the highest level in 20 years, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would bring four mothers to the U.S. to reunite with their children. The U.S. will reunify another 35 or so families in the coming weeks as part of a pilot project, which David and Adelso might be a part of. But this is just a start, and the process for reunifying all families could take months, and even years.

In David’s town of several thousand people, I found three other parents who were forcibly separated from their children under “zero tolerance.” Melvin Jacinto and his 14-year-old son tried to enter the U.S. to look for work that would pay for, among other things, his daughter’s hip surgery.

[Interview in Spanish with Melvin Jacinto when he talks about being separated from his son.]

[Narrator]: Melvin and his wife Marta’s son, Rosendo, now lives with a relative in Minneapolis. They, too, rely on video calls to stay connected.

[Video call in Spanish between Marta Camposeco and her son.]

[Interview in Spanish with Melvin Jacinto continues.]

[Video call in Spanish between Marta Camposeco and her son continues.]

[Interview in Spanish with Melvin Jacinto continues.]

[Narrator]: The reality is that work is really scarce here. Melvin takes what jobs he can find, but the family relies on money sent from Rosendo, their teenage son, who’s now working in the U.S. We visited the homes of two other fathers who were separated from their kids at the border and were told they’d already made the return trip to reunite with them.

[Interview in Spanish with Eusevia Quiñónez.]

[Narrator]: She allowed me to speak with her husband on her phone.

[Call in Spanish with Eusevia Quiñónez’s husband.]

[Narrator]: He said he reunited with his son in Fort Lauderdale, and was staying in a house with other migrants. We heard of other parents as well, deported to Guatemala and Honduras, who’d already made the perilous journey to reunite with their children.

According to immigration lawyers, about 1,000 separated kids have yet to see their parents again. They’ve had to grow up fast, placed in the care of foster families or relatives. For the last three years, Adelso has been living with his aunt, Teresa Quiñónez, in Boca Raton, Fla. He’s been attending school, and plays soccer in his spare time, but he still struggles with the trauma of what happened in Guatemala and at the border.

[Interview in Spanish with Adelso.]

Unlike some of the separated kids, Adelso does have support.

[Teresa Quiñónez in a business office, on the phone]: “Yes, definitely, I would go there in the morning, too Yeah —”

[Narrator]: His aunt Teresa came to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor, and later became a legal resident. She stepped in to give Adelso the care she didn’t have when she came to the U.S. as a teenager.

[Teresa Quiñónez]: “I can say that I understand his pain, not being with mom and dad. Living with someone familiar, somehow — still, it’s not the same.”

[Narrator]: Once a month, Adelso talks with a child psychologist at Florida State University’s Center for Child Stress and Health. The service is paid through a government settlement for families separated under the “zero tolerance” policy. Adelso is one of several children affected by “zero tolerance” that Natalia Falcon now works with in South Florida.

[Phone call in Spanish with therapist.]

[Dr. Natalia Falcon, child psychologist]: “I’ve been working with Adelso and his family for a little bit over six months. We see a lot of sleeping issues. You know, they can’t sleep, they can’t fall asleep or the nightmares, right. We have to look at nightmares very delicately. Those recurring memories, flashbacks of that traumatic event as one of the main symptoms of P.T.S.D.”

[Narrator]: Studies show that childhood trauma, left unaddressed, can negatively affect health and relationships long into adulthood.

[Interview in Spanish with Adelso continues.]

[Teresa Quiñónez]: “I don’t want him to get depressed, taking him to that place, like, ‘Oh, I just want to be alone.’ That’s why I try to bring him out and do things with him.”

[Narrator]: After being separated from his dad, Adelso spent two months in a New York shelter with other separated kids before Teresa finally won his release.

[Teresa Quiñónez]: “I still remember seeing him coming out of the airport. His little face, like — it’s heartbreaking, and sometimes I see him now, he has grown so much in this, in this time that he came here, he has become so mature and that’s hard to see too because it’s like life pushing you to be that mature. You are not enjoying your being a child.”

[Narrator]: For now, Adelso and David continue to work with their lawyers and hope to be part of the first wave of reunions.

[Interview in Spanish with Adelso continues.]

As for David, he told us that he can only wait so long, and that he has also considered paying a smuggler to cross back into the U.S. and claim asylum again.

[Interview in Spanish with David.]

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 4.14, Inside a Young Migrant’s Family Separation Nightmare

Transcript for “Inside a Young Migrant’s Family Separation Nightmare” by The New York Times is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 5.13, Who Belongs?: Family Stories of Immigration

In this video, we will examine the social problem of belonging through the stories of students whose families may resonate with yours. Before we begin, take a moment to reflect on your own family and how it has evolved over time. Your family might resemble some of the narratives we explore, or it could be distinctly different. Who belongs when it comes to your family?

While all families are unique, the traditional American family is often portrayed as the nuclear family—a household with two parents and their children. The idealized image is of a middle-class, heterosexual, married couple, typically white, owning a house, and perhaps even having a dog and a white picket fence. Many laws, policies, and practices assume this family structure. However, societal changes have led to a decline in the prevalence of nuclear families.

As illustrated by the graph, the percentage of children living in families with two parents in their first marriage has decreased from over 70% in the 1960s to about 45% in 2014. Alternative family structures, such as single-parent households, remarried parents, or cohabitating parents, have become more common.

The issue of belonging doesn’t arise from the changing forms of families; rather, it stems from the fact that not all families receive the support they need to thrive. Mixed-status families, comprising members with different citizenship or immigration statuses, face unique challenges. Some family members may be undocumented, living with the constant fear of deportation, while others may have DACA or asylum status.

LGBTQIA+ families also encounter hurdles, such as homophobia and prejudice. Approximately 3.7 million children in the United States have a parent who identifies as LGBTQIA+, and these families navigate judgment and rejection from both their families of origin and societal institutions.

The video presents personal stories to shed light on these issues. Kevin, for example, shares the challenges faced by his DACA recipient family member, highlighting the impact of xenophobia and racism. In another story, Omar, Kevin, and Julian discuss their journey as a same-sex couple, emphasizing the legal challenges and societal shifts that have redefined the concept of marriage.

Both individual and collective actions are showcased as families strive to thrive. The power of social movements is evident, particularly in the case of LGBTQIA+ and undocumented individuals who fight for their rights and social justice. Belonging, as explored in this video, is not just a personal matter; it is a social justice imperative.

By expanding our definition of family in laws, policies, practices, and everyday life, we contribute to creating a world where all families belong. The pursuit of belonging is synonymous with the pursuit of social justice.

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 5.13, Who Belongs?: Family Stories of Immigration

Transcript for “Who Belongs?: Family Stories of Immigration” by Kimberly Puttman, Kevin Acosta, Omar Ruiz Garcia and Samantha Kuk, Open Oregon Educational Resources, is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0.

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Transcript for Figure 6.5, Why Does the Government Care about Race?

Every 10 years in the US folks celebrate a time honored tradition that most of us wish we could forgot and many of us do: the collection of the national census.

Because let’s face it: it only happens once every 10 years and filling out a questionnaire is hardly the highlight of the average person’s decade when compared to other major life events like graduations, deaths, newborn kids, buying a home, or avoiding social media spoilers for our favorite shows.

But if the census is supposed to be a relatively impartial record that keeps track of how many people are located in the country at a given time then why does the census ask us about our race Well the answers tells us about a history of voter disenfranchisement that stretches back to our country’s inception.

So stay tuned because this week Origin of Everything is getting very…civics-y.

Civic-ish?

Civics minded?

Let’s settle for the last one.

One thing I’ve heard repeated over and over again about the census is “why does the government need to know our race?”

The argument usually goes, “We’re all more than our race.

So, why is the federal government keeping track of this sensitive information?

And of course we all have many intersecting identities, among which race is one.

But while race became a major category that public and private institutions started tracking systematically throughout the 20th century, the federal census was preoccupied with race since the 18th century.

The first census conducted in 1790 included questions about, “gender, race, relationship to the head of household, name of the head of household, and the number of slaves, if any” according to the US Census Bureau, so the question of race has been baked into the cake since the census’s beginning.

But although the original census document was pretty short and sweet, it was actually a reflection of the limited scope of citizenship at the country’s beginning.

As more and more people were granted access to citizenship, residency, asylum, and government aid, the questions became more complex through time.

Now the census is as much about keeping track of folks as it is about preventing things like voter suppression and gerrymandering, and also allocating state and federal spending for infrastructure, housing, education, and healthcare.

It also allows us to measure life outcomes for different groups, track the efficacy of government programs, and determine how many representatives and electoral votes each state gets.

That’s right.

Filling in a bunch of bubbles can determine how many federal resources your state (and, indirectly, you) get every year, as well as how much your state matters in the next federal election.

Which means in some ways info we bubble in on the census can have as lasting an impact as the votes we cast.

So to get to the bottom of this question today we should first talk about how the census emerged and what exactly those early enumerators (no really that’s what census-takers are called) were even looking for.

Next we need to think about how it evolved from a 6 question survey to become a 50 plus question laundry list of information for the federal government before being whittled down to 10 questions again.

And the answer demonstrates how we went from recording 6 answers per household across 13 states, 3 districts and 1 territory to spreading to over 300 million people today.

And finally we’ll discuss why race (among other new questions) seems to be here to stay on this nationwide poll.

The early history of the census runs pretty much parallel to the history of the first US Presidency.

George Washington had been in office for 1 year when the first census was conducted in 1790.

And nearly every one of the original 6 questions was about race in one way or another, because the number of eligible voters was entirely determined by race and gender.

Census workers were asked to collect these answers from every household: Names of heads of families The number of free White males aged: under 16 years and of 16 years and upward Number of free White females Number of other free persons Number of slaves The 3 of the questions explicitly ask for the number of white residents in a household while the last two ask to record “other free persons” (other being the coded word here for “not white”) and number of slaves (with an understanding that the overwhelming majority of enslaved persons at this time were of African descent).

So the original census design was largely concerned with race.

But why?

Well keep in mind that only free, white men who owned property and were 21 or older could vote.

So the earliest purpose of recording race on the census wasn’t to evenly distribute voter rights, but to limit enfranchisement to all but one specific group.

And in order to guarantee that limitation, the federal government had to ask about race (since it was a prerequisite of voting).

But because voting rights were guaranteed to a relatively slim number of people, the early census didn’t require much more information outside of race, gender, age, legal status (in regards to slavery and freedom) and whether or not you were a property owner.

The founding fathers shared a belief that men who didn’t own land, poor people, white women, and all racial minorities were incapable of casting a decent vote or deciding the future of the country.

So the original reasons for recording race on the census were aimed at disenfranchisement, and limiting the rights of full citizenship to a small percentage of the overall population.

If that’s the case, then why did race as a category on the census stick around?

Well the answer comes down, again, to how we were voting or really who was being excluded from the voter rolls.

After 1790 and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, key pieces of legislation and historical shifts increased both the size of the country and the number of citizens eligible to vote.

That included people of color, emancipated slaves, all women, and men who didn’t own land.

But the road to a fairer census was still very fraught.

According to journalist Becky Little, by 1820 “all other free persons” was converted to “free colored males and females.” And in 1850, the census expanded to include the category of “mulatto” under the ranks of races that people could check off.

But that was because legislators saw the country pivoting toward the civil war, so they were thinking about which states would remain in the union, and about how to count millions of African Americans and people of color who were either enslaved or considered legally free but still largely barred from casting a ballot.

And Professor Melissa Nobles, a political scientist at MIT, noted that the 1850 designation of “mulatto” was added at the request of racial scientist Josiah Nott, who hoped to use this information to prove his false theories about biological differences between people based on the degree of African blood they have.

In 1890, for just one census cycle, categories like “mulatto” “quadroon” and “octoroon” were available on the census.

But by 1930 statisticians acknowledged these categories were subjective and largely insignificant and replaced these subcategories with “Negro” while also adding categories for people from South and East Asia, Native Americans, and Mexicans or Mexican Americans.

But the spread of Jim Crow from 1850 into the 1960s, meant that the census’ data collection on race was often tied to ensuring that certain people could not vote rather than providing an accurate and objective number on the population.

So race has been a contentious, and often very negative, category on the census for most of its history.

So why did it stick around to today?

Well, arguments by both the Census bureau and supporters of keeping race on the census point out that the issues with recording the race on the census (namely to gerrymandering or realigning congressional districts) can easily be flipped on its head.

Just as race has been used to redistrict certain areas that are largely populated by racial minorities and people with fewer financial resources, those same numbers can be used to raise cases in court against unfair redistricting lines that favor one party over another.

For example, people still live (either through social organizing or through economic stratification) in neighborhoods that can be racially or economically homogeneous, and race and class often align with people’s political affiliations.

So, census data can prevent congressional districts from being drawn in ways that guarantee one party or type of candidate will always win a certain district, even if the majority of voters living in that district support an opposing party or candidate.

And because as of today the census is mandatory (unlike voting) it gives a fuller scope of the number of people actually residing in a state than the turnout of voters on election day.

So the census is the federal government’s best chance to record the accurate number of people in each state, to make sure that everyone’s vote can count equally, and to determine how federal funds are spent based on population.

And recording race on the census helps support redistricting in states like North Carolina as recently as this year (where congressional lines were found by federal courts to disproportionately disadvantage minority voters).

It’s also been included as key evidence in a number of redistricting cases throughout 20th and 21st century.

So this seems to be the matter of same data with different objectives.

It doesn’t downplay that the history of recording race on the census was alarmingly negative, but rather says that the recording of race isn’t the inherent issue at hand but rather how lawmakers choose to use that information for the public good (or not).

And every time a new question is added to the census or removed, it sparks ongoing debate about what should be recorded and how that information is being used, whether it be for the public good or for more partisan efforts.

This debate is rearing its head yet again as we head towards the 2020 census.

Well there you have it.

The only two things that have stayed pretty much consistent in collecting data for the census is recording race…and calling census workers “enumerators.” And while that name comes across as pretty dry, the debate about how and why the government is recording race is anything but.

And while the history of race on the census is largely rooted in disenfranchisement, that same info has often been taken in the last several decades to fight disenfranchisement.

Because the questions that researchers ask are often just as critical if not more so than the information they collect.

Our personal perspectives and arguments influence, shape, and change the outcomes of studies just as much as the results themselves.

And that means there aren’t really any strictly objective questions because those questions are driven by very real, sometimes good and sometimes not so good, human motivations.

So what do you think?

Anything to add on how recording race on the census impacts your vote?

Any other information to share?

Be sure to drop all of those comments, questions, and debates down below, subscribe to Origin

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 6.5, Why Does the Government Care about Race?

Transcript for “Why Does the Government Care about Race?” by PBS Origins is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 6.6, The 2020 Census is about Money and Power

[Speaker 1]: What’s different about the 2020 census is this is the first year folks will be able to self respond online, on the phone, or by mail.

[Speaker 2]: Which, for a mom like me, with two kids 5 and under, is really important.

[Speaker 3, in Spanish.]

[Speaker 4]: The census is important because it’s about power and money.

[Speaker 5]: There’s 7 trillion dollars at stake over the next decade.

[Speaker 1]: And that’s so important and critical for Oregon because that funds programs like Head Start, hospitals, roads, and Medicaid.

[Speaker 6]: Black and indigenous women of color are at the forefront of this movement.

[Speaker 4]: It’s a chance for us as communities of color to show who we are.

[Speaker 7]: Because we’ve experienced what it’s like to be left out, what it’s like to be undercounted. And women of color, and our families, deserve better services.

[Speaker 8]: This census, we’re right on the cusp of getting a sixth Congressional seat, which means that we could have an additional voice representing us in Congress.

[Speaker 9]: The census is safe. I know that there are a lot of concerns for different communities.

[Speaker 10, in Spanish.]

[Speaker 8]: It’s so important that every single Oregonian take the census.

[Speaker 9]: So with that being said, I hope that everyone plays their part in making sure every individual is counted in the 2020 census.

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 6.6, The 2020 Census is about Money and Power

Transcript for “The 2020 Census is about Money and Power” by Dancing Hearts Consulting is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 6.13, Who Leads Us?

Have you ever wondered what does America actually look like? Let’s zoom out from the people we see in the media and the people we talk to every day and look at the big picture. About three hundred and fourteen million of us live in the United States. Fifty-one percent of us are women and 49 percent of us are men. Sixty-three percent of us are white; 37 percent of us are people of color. Our country is changing fast, but are the people who represent us from City Council to Congress keeping up with that change?

Do we live in a reflective democracy? We did some research, and here’s what we found. We studied 42,000 elected officials who represent us from the county level all the way up to Congress. If they reflected America’s population, our elected officials should look like this, but it actually looks like this: 71 percent of elected officials are men; 90 percent are white, and 65 percent are white men. That means men have three times as much power as women, and white Americans also have three times as much power as people of color. White men have eight times as much power as women of color.

When 31% of the population controls 65 percent of elected offices, is it a surprise that most Americans feel our democracy is broken?

To learn more about the data we’ve collected, visit us at who leads us and share the data with your friends. Then tell us at who leads us how you think we can become a more reflective democracy.

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Transcript for “Who Leads Us?” by Who Leads Us? is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 6.21, Dr Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 6.21, Dr Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream

Introducing speaker:

I have the pleasure to present to you Dr. Martin Luther King.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. **We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: “For Whites Only.”** We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest — quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”2

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day — this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Transcript for “Dr Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream” by Martin Luther King, Jr. is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 6.25, Social Identities

Hi. I’m Kim Puttman. I’m a sociologist and author at Oregon Coast Community College.

Hi, I’m Liz Pearce. I teach in human development and family sciences at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Oregon. These videos are being made for Open Oregon Educational Resources.

In this video, we will focus on the social characteristics or social identities that we all possess as part of identity. We will clarify the distinctions between race, ethnicity, and culture, and between sex, gender, and sexuality. We will also discuss intersectionality and identity.

Before we get to the social characteristics, let’s take a brief look at the other main aspects of identity. The inner ring of the wheel explores internal characteristics. Internal characteristics include your values, beliefs, commitments, motivations, and personality characteristics. I have unique motivations and beliefs. I am motivated to make a difference in the world for the better. I believe that we can make the United States a more equitable place.

I am motivated to create communities of respect and belonging. I believe that the personal is the political, changing the world through my everyday interactions.

Let’s look at the outer ring of the identity wheel, roles and relationships. My identity also includes the roles I play and the relationships I have. For example, I would describe myself this way. I’m a teacher. I’m a mother. I’m a hiker.

I am also a teacher. I am a writer and an activist, an interfaith minister, a wife, and most recently a grandmother and great aunt.

Now let’s look at those social characteristics in the middle ring. Your social identity includes all of who you are. It is the combination of your social identities or the intersections of these characteristics. Many of us identify with a couple aspects of our social identity more strongly than others. Although we define our own identities, the ways that others perceive our identities shape us as well. How we see ourselves is important. We are complicated and we can’t be reduced to just one characteristic. We aren’t just gay or male or Muslim or that person in the wheelchair. We live in the intersection of all of our identities.

Let’s review a little bit for you. We have body size, whether bigger or smaller than is typical or considered typical, age, religion, the first language you learn to speak, geography, your physical location, both whether you live in a rural, suburban, or urban setting, as well as what part of the country or world you live in. Nationality, whether you identify with a country you were born in, the country your parents are born in, or the country in which you reside. Socioeconomic status, SES, sometimes called social class, but SES refers to your income, your career status, and your education level all together. Health, the robustness or vulnerability of your physical or mental health. Ability, whether you see yourself as disabled or able-bodied or as more people are saying temporarily-abled, which describes the reality that most of us will experience some form of disability in our lives. And neuro-diversity, whether the way you think and learn is considered to be typical or if and how it diverges in some way.

You might have noticed that a few social identities in this wheel were skipped. We will look at these next because they are highly related to one another, overlap with each other, and sometimes are confused.

Let’s provide a little bit more of an explanation about sex, gender or gender identity, and sexuality and how they relate to one another. The basic definition of sex is based on biology. Typically, that means that sex assigned at birth and might be seen as the best guess based on a baby’s physical characteristics at birth. Gender identity is the way we socially express our sex identification. Some theorists say that people do gender in their everyday interactions. Stereotypical feminine characteristics include wearing dresses and high heels or speaking more softly. Stereotypical masculine characteristics include taking up more space or talking more. However, gender expression goes beyond female and male. People are exploring new ways of expressing their gender and new language to label it.

Cisgender means that you express your gender in the way that reflects your sex assigned at birth in the way that society typically expects you to. Transgender refers to identifying with a gender other than the one assigned to you at birth. Gender nonconformity rejects the binary system of gender and sees it as more of a continuum. You may not know other language that helps you or others define gender identity. Sexuality is about your sexual orientation. It’s not just who you have sex with but who you’re attracted to, who you have feelings for, what your capacities and interests are related to sexuality. There are many ways of identifying yourself authentically and labels for that experience.

LGBTQIA plus is a common acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersexual, and asexual and more. This acronym mixes gender identity and sexual identity. And while it contains some of the identity options around sexuality, there are new ones emerging all the time. Heterosexual or straight, are the most common terms for people who are attracted to opposite sex partners. Labels for sexuality continue to evolve. Even if we describe the most recent term for sexuality here, it will have changed by the time you see this video. What is the most recent label you have heard of?

Now let’s look at the relationships between race, ethnicity, and culture. Just as a reminder, race is a social construction, a construction that is based on physical characteristics. It still divides people into groups and it affects how people are treated. Race is a social identity.

When we talk about ethnicity, we mean a social group that shares language and behavior and often shares a geography or ancestry. Some people identify as Irish even if they don’t live in Ireland. Although their race is most commonly White, their ethnicity might be Irish if they share Irish culture, identify as Catholic or Protestant, celebrate Irish holidays, or, in some cases, speak Gaelic. In fact, more Irish people live outside of Ireland than within that country. Similarly, Hispanic or Latinx is an ethnicity not a race because people who identify as Hispanic or Latinx can be of any race. However, people in this group are often from South and Central America and speak Spanish or Portuguese. They share customs and experiences. Sometimes people confuse ethnicity and culture. Irish and Hispanic or Latinx people have their own distinct cultures. However, the concept of culture is much broader than that. Culture is shared beliefs, values, and practices which are socially transmitted. Culture focuses more on behaviors and interactions that are shared and learned through socialization. A culture can be shared not only through ethnicity but through religion, geographic location, or any community or social group.

All of these are social characteristics or social identities. Every person has all of these identities, but we typically identify more and less strongly with a few of them. Our identities contain overlapping privileges and oppressions known as intersectionality. Intersectionality is defined as overlapping social identities which produce unique inequities that influence the lives of people and groups. Kimberly Crenshaw created the term intersectionality to clarify the experience of Black women. They were excluded from the experience of women, which traditionally included White women. They were excluded from the experiences of Black, which traditionally included Black men. Instead, they had their own unique relationship with power and privilege as Black women. This initial specific definition of intersectionality is now being more widely applied to many constellations of identities which experience oppression.

We all have overlapping identities that contribute to our unique selves, but not all of us have intersectional identities. If you have several identities that typically face discrimination or oppression, you have an intersectional social identity. Our intersectional identities contribute to how much privilege we experience and how much oppression we experience. For example, I identify as a cisgendered woman who is gay. Both of these identities have less privilege than the identities of being male and heterosexual. So those are intersectional for me. I am also part of more privileged identities being White and middle class. I may not notice that I have a race and a class because I am part of the typical or more privileged group. But I’m more aware of being gay and being a woman and the discrimination that can come with each of these identities.

Similarly, I am White, middle class, and educated. However, I am also Buddhist, queer, and female. I actively resist the oppression I experience as a non-Christian, woman-loving woman. It is more challenging to notice the privilege I experience as White, middle class, and educated. These privileges helped me to thrive despite oppression.

Social identity is an essential way that we experience the world. Take some time to consider the overlapping identities that contribute to your overall unique identity and experience with the world. Consider the ways that intersectionality affects others, especially those that have different social identities than you have. Understanding social identities is a way to better understand yourself and the world around you.

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 6.25, Social Identities

Transcript for “Social Identities Video” by Elizabeth Pearce, Kimberly Puttman and Colin Stapp, Open Oregon Educational Resources, is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

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Transcript for Figure 7.2, Stigma – Social and self

[Voiceover]: Social stigma is the really extreme disapproval and discrediting of an individual by society. But actually, stigma comes in two different forms. The first is social stigma, and the second is self-stigma.

Now, when we mention social stigma, what are we talking about? Well, social stigma can be fueled or associated with several other key concepts, and these include stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination. One of the challenges is that the degree of overlap between stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination, and stigma is not entirely clear and appears to be somewhat variable depending on the source.

We commonly encounter social stigma when we are looking at conditions such as medical or mental health conditions, or other issues such as sexual orientation or criminality. A stigma against mental health is a major challenge. So let’s try to look at that a little bit more closely in this example.

In this example, many individuals may believe that the mentally ill are violent. This is an example of a stereotype, in that it involves a belief or a cognition that is generalized to a population. If this cognition subsequently leads to a negative emotion or a negative affect being associated with it, then this, then, would be an example of a prejudice. In our example, if I start to become scared of the mentally ill, that would be a prejudice. Finally, if, through stereotypes and prejudices, we actually have a change in our behavior, this can lead to discrimination. A discriminatory behavior would be if we are scared of the mentally ill, we may not want to live close to them or, for example, hire them in our workplace.

Social stigma and the components of social stigma can vary a great deal by the sociopolitical context. Sexual orientation, for example. Now that we’ve mentioned social stigma, let us look at self-stigma.

And one of the things that can happen with an individual is that they can really internalize all the negative stereotypes, prejudices, and discriminatory experiences that they have. As they internalize these negative stereotypes, prejudices, and discriminatory behaviors, they may feel rejected by society, they may feel like they need to avoid interacting with society, they may really struggle to come to grips with their condition. For example, someone who has HIV or AIDS and really feels the social stigma may go into denial and deny to themselves that they have the condition, and not receive medical follow-up. They may also experience hits on their self-esteem or suffer from other mental health conditions, such as depression, and then, they themselves may display behaviors that really isolate them from society and stop them from even attempting to take part in education, vocation, thereby further isolating them.

So it appears that not only is the stigma directed from society and other groups towards an individual important, but also the stigma that’s directed by the individual towards him or herself is also important. Let us also consider studying stigma by using these concentric circles. In the middle, I’m going to label the first circle as ‘self,’ representing the individual who is stigmatized. The second circle shall represent the family or the close social group. The third circle shall represent wider society, and finally, the fourth circle shall represent things external to society but that are very important, such as the media.

One thing that we should appreciate is that there are bi-directional relationships between all of these groups, such as the self and the family, the self and society, the self and the media, and also in between all of these groups, such as society and family, such as the media and society.

So let’s have a closer look at these groups as we peel off the concentric circles. Let’s start by looking at the influence of the media. The media is a major source of stigma because it can have depictions of various conditions as being violent, dangerous, or representing moral failings, as is commonly the case when we encounter representations of mental illness in the media, but it can also be encountered in other conditions that are depicted in the media, such as HIV and AIDS, obesity, and people who have substance use problems.

A useful intervention at this point is the development of guidelines for journalists to try and decrease the amount of stigma that is present in the media, and there are several different sets of guidelines and suggestions in order to do this. And when we mention media, we know that social media is also a huge component.

Now, let’s move on to society. Society is also very important because this is where the interactions between the self and society involve things like education, employment, healthcare. Stigmatizing views by employers, by healthcare providers can really diminish the access of individuals to earning an income, to getting the proper level of healthcare, to even turning up for a screening, getting follow-up, and an important intervention at this point is the use of legislation and anti-discrimination laws.

Now, let’s consider the family. Now, the interesting thing here is that the family can not only be shunned by society if they have somebody with a stigmatizing condition, but the family may also shun the individual themselves. In this example, we may often see somebody in the family who has a stigmatizing condition to be hidden, kept away from the family, to really be isolated and almost kept as a secret within the family. So if we look at our concentric circles, the family can be stigmatized by society but can also stigmatize the individual, so this also may be detrimental to personal or intimate relationships.

So at this point, interventions such as therapy and education are also very important. Finally, we reach the very core of the structure, which is the individual with the condition or the self. And in this case, we know that all these different interactions, media, society, and the family, the individual can internalize a lot of this different stigma, and that can lead to them avoiding situations, denying the existence of their condition, suffering from mental health conditions, and no longer really participating in society. Useful interventions at this point would be to educate the patient, to give them access to resources, support groups, and these resources would really help them to understand that they’re not alone.

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 7.2, Stigma – Social and self

Transcript for “Stigma – Social and self” by Arshya Vahabzadeh for Khan Academy Medicine is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 7.5, Aletha Maybank, MD, MPH, Discusses COVID-19 and Health Equity

[Todd Unger]: American Medical Association’s COVID-19 update. Today we’re discussing health equity as it relates to the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m joined today by Dr. Aletha Maybank, the AMA’s chief health equity officer, talking to us from New York City. I’m Todd Unger, AMA’s chief experience officer in Chicago. Dr. Maybank, the initial data coming out of the states is painting a pretty alarming picture in terms of health disparities. Can you tell us what you’re seeing?

[Dr. Aletha Maybank]: Hi, Todd. Good afternoon. Good to be with you. We have been seeing, and I think our alarms had been triggered over a month ago when we recognized, when the data was coming out as a relates to cases and deaths, that a lot of the data was not reporting out on or the states weren’t reporting out, CDC was not reporting out on race and ethnicity.

And for us who are in the equity space, just overall, not even just health equity, that was really concerning because what we understand, historically in our country and also just what we understand even in recent history, that for the most part, if our health as black and brown communities shows that it’s worse, we have lower life expectancies, there was this realization and awareness and curiosity about, so what’s happening as it relates to COVID?

There really were somewhat predictions by folks who are in the health equity space that this was going to definitely impact the black community, but other racially marginalized groups, potentially, immigrants, Latinx, Native Americans. Part of this is from experience of knowing what has happened in previous disasters such as Katrina and the disproportionate impact that it had on black folks. Also, H1N1 of the data as it relates to that as well. So, there was an organizing that started to happen across the country, where health equity leaders started to really voice the concern. You saw the Twitter flow, putting out the message. Then you started to see op-eds from many different folks and leaders across disciplines about the importance of reporting out on this data. We put out a New York Times op-ed about two weeks ago now.

Also, calling upon Health and Human Services [HHS] and its sub-agencies to release the data as well as state and local health departments. We sent a letter to HHS in partnership with the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Family Physicians, the National Medical Association, National Hispanic Medical Association, the Association of Indian Physicians and the National Council of Asian-Pacific Islander Physicians as well. That letter definitely generated a lot of attention and response back from HHS, to really see that physician organizations were paying attention to this. They definitely heard advocacy from other folks even before us, but I think the physician letter also sparked something else.

[Unger]: Let me ask you a question.

[Dr. Maybank]: Sure.

[Unger]: What’s the obstacle in getting that data? Why are we in this position where you’re having to be so vocal about getting it in the first place?

[Dr. Maybank]: Yeah, I think it’s a great question. There are many factors that are prohibiting us from having that data just even before, pre-COVID. Really not all systems have been consistently collecting racial and ethnicity data. They’re not standardized necessarily to collect it in consistent ways, even though there’s guidance and there are other opportunities to follow the path of how this data is collected. I think the other part, there is a central form that CDC has, but folks also are not necessarily taking the time out to fill out race and ethnicity data, and what also makes it harder usually, is that you’re supposed to ask the individual, what is their race and ethnicity? They’re supposed to be able to self-report and self-identify, not have somebody else identify.

So, you can imagine a time of emergency, if you have not thought about how to do that beforehand, it’s not going to be the default for folks to fill out that information.

Then this weekend, we have some family members that have tested positive for COVID, even passed away and we felt it was important that several of us, including myself, go for testing. We called the state up earlier in the week, got an appointment for a drive through tests, and I’m paying attention to every aspect of what it’s like to go through this testing center.

It was very clear, there’s nothing and no way for them to have collected race and ethnicity data information, right. There are gaps at many levels. Then, the other reality is, even if all those pieces were perfect that I’ve mentioned, there are gaps with black and brown folks being able to actually access testing.

One, there’s just, there’s not enough testing. Two, we’re not clear what’s happening when folks are going to the health care institutions and getting turned away. Oftentimes across the country, the public health messaging has been to stay home. If you have symptoms, and they’re mild, you stay home. If they’re severe enough you go to the emergency room. So, there are many people who are probably staying home for sure, that we’re going to have under-counting.

But in addition to that, there have been several stories over the last – news stories over the last week – highlighting black folks going back to the ER three to four times and getting sent back home, even when they have symptoms, and dying in their homes. So, there are things related to clearly institutional racism and bias that has always existed and still exist to this day, and it just really exacerbates itself, really shines a light during this time.

[Unger]: When you think about getting the data that you need, why is that so important about going forward? What are you going to do with that, and how do we help solve these health disparities?

[Dr. Maybank]: Yeah, I think with data—I mean, most folks in public health and in health care would say, you can’t really address what you can’t measure and we need the data in order to have complete comprehensive public health responses and approaches and strategies on how to help promote the health, how to help set up an emergency preparedness system, but response systems, not just for the folks that it’s really obvious for, for those who are marginalized in our communities in our society.

We need that data in order to track trends over time, to see what’s happening. Data, as we know in the census, is a prime example of this is an important part of where funding goes, how funding is distributed and redistributed. If we don’t have the data, there’s a chance that we won’t be able to figure out where funding needs to go, and how it needs to be allocated to the communities that are suffering the greatest burden from COVID in the country.

[Unger]: Well, we are already seeing a lot of disparities in some of what would be considered the underlying conditions associated with really bad outcomes in COVID. Going forward, how do we address those disparities in whether it’s hypertension or diabetes and other ones along those lines?

[Dr. Maybank]: Sure. That’s the messaging out there and what the science is telling us and what the data is telling us, right? That those who have these underlying conditions that you just mentioned are more likely to have severe consequences of COVID. Fortunately, we’re working on hypertension and chronic diseases at the AMA. We have some large efforts around that, but again, this is a framing, and narrative issue that I think is absolutely important for where we go for policy and advocacy, as well as how that advocacy also leads to funding.

What I mean is underlying conditions in terms of health and physical health of those that are mentioned are absolutely important and critical to know, so we’re clear that black people in this country are more likely to suffer from those particular underlying conditions. But we also have to look at the underlying conditions of the communities in which they live, the realities of them having to be frontline workers and essential workers often at disposal. We have to look at the situations around housing and how in many of our urban areas, housing is overcrowded, right?

All of these conditions, these are also underlying conditions that contribute to the severity and the experience that black people are going through, are all a result of structures, policies, laws that had been put in place. So that, when we think of solutions, our solutions can’t just be at the downstream parts of this in terms of COVID and what’s happening in the health care system. It’s important. I’m not saying it’s not important. It’s critical. We have to focus on the health care system.

[Unger]: Yeah. Would you say that a lot of these concepts around social distancing are just not practical?

[Dr. Maybank]: Yeah, they are. I mean it doesn’t, social distancing, physical distancing. I’ve talked about wearing the face masks and the challenges of that, based on the experience of many black men and their experience with police. There are already stories of where folks had been arrested for having them on as folks have been arrested for not having them on. There’s that. There’s hand-washing, the quality of water in certain communities isn’t great. In Native American communities, they don’t even have running water in some places. We’ve heard, and actually in some public housing developments across the country that running water’s shut off. So, the ability to wash your hands becomes very difficult, and the ability to stay home.

All these really important public health measures, really have to be nuanced for communities so that they have a sense of what they do and have some sense of power to do something for their own lives and their own realities and not be ignored and not be invisible and made invisible by many of our system structures and messaging.

[Unger]: What are you hearing from physicians of color, many of whom are treating vulnerable populations, about their experience during this pandemic?

[Dr. Maybank]: We had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with some of the groups that I mentioned earlier, and also talking to physicians within my network. I mean, the reality is, as you mentioned, more likely to see patients who are racially marginalized and so they’re dealing with that kind of reality and how to address their concerns, how to address the social needs within the context of all that. How do families grieve and dealing with the emotional aspects of going through COVID and being ignored? They’re also then dealing with their own realities, of being many first-generation physicians of color who may not have the backbone or the foundation of wealth that many other physicians that are white have, as well as medical students have, in terms of having generational wealth and being able to figure out ways to potentially survive easier during this time.

I’m not saying this experience is easy for anybody. It’s not, when you have to expose and put yourself at risk every single day on the front line. But there are conditions, as I mentioned before, that are underlying that actually help these physicians feel the weight of COVID even further. We know that there are, the Native American physicians especially, are very stretched, stretched pretty thinly across reservations, and there’s a great burden of disease on Native American reservations that is really not talked about that much at all.

For Latino physicians and black physicians, the private practice, solo practice is the backbone of physician work in the community. Many folks are having to lay off, having to shut down or lay off their staff, and they’re just figuring out how to survive and support their staff as well as still support their patients, as well as still support themselves and their own families.

[Unger]: Well, Dr. Maybank, thank you very much for your insights and your continued work in health equity. That’s it for today’s COVID-19 update.

For more information and resources about COVID-19, like our new Health Equity Resource Center, please go to ama-assn.org/COVID-19. Thanks for being with us today.

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 7.5, Aletha Maybank, MD, MPH, Discusses COVID-19 and Health Equity

Transcript for “Aletha Maybank, MD, MPH, Discusses COVID-19 and Health Equity” by American Medical Association (AMA) is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 7.16, 2017 Income, Poverty and Health Insurance – Health Insurance Presentation

Health insurance coverage is an important measure of our nation’s overall well-being. Whether it’s illness, injury, or preventative needs, health insurance provides greater access to medical care, protection from high unexpected costs, and more economic stability.

Each year, the Census Bureau provides data on health insurance coverage. We look at who is and isn’t covered, where they live, and what type of insurance they have. Policymakers use this information to make data-driven decisions.

The health insurance estimates released today come from two surveys. The Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement ask people about their health insurance coverage at any time in the previous calendar year. Most of the national-level results presented today come from this survey. The American Community Survey asks people about their coverage at the time of the interview. Due to its larger sample size, the American Community Survey is the recommended source of health insurance statistics for smaller populations and levels of geography.

Let me begin by summarizing the main findings. This year, an estimated 8.8% of the population, or about 28.5 million people, did not have health insurance coverage at any point in 2017. The uninsured rate and the number of uninsured in 2017 were not statistically different from 2016.

Between 2016 and 2017, the percentage of people uninsured at the time of their interview decreased in three states and increased in 14 states.

In 2017, most people (91.2%) had health insurance coverage at some point during the calendar year, with more people having private health insurance (67.2%) than government coverage (37.7%).

Looking at subtypes of health insurance, employer-based insurance was the most common, covering 56% of the population, followed by Medicaid, Medicare, direct purchase (which includes health insurance exchanges), and military health care.

The larger sample size of the American Community Survey allows us to observe characteristics in greater detail, and because the survey asks about current coverage, we have the opportunity to examine how health insurance status varies by single year of age.

In 2017, 26-year-olds had the highest uninsured rate at 17.8%. Three notable sharp differences exist between single age years: specifically between 18 and 19-year-olds, between 25 and 26-year-olds, and between 64 and 65-year-olds. These differences correspond to common age-related eligibility thresholds for coverage, including CHIP, dependent coverage, and Medicare.

Over time, changes in the rate of health insurance coverage and the distribution of coverage types may reflect economic trends, shifts in the demographic composition of the population, and policy changes that affect access to care. Several such policy changes occurred in 2014 when many provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act went into effect.

This chart shows the change in percentages of people with health insurance coverage between 2016 and 2017 on the left and between 2013 and 2017 on the right. The percentage of people covered by any type of health insurance for at least some time during 2017 was 91.2%.

Starting with the left side of the chart, we see that the overall coverage rate is not statistically different from the rate in 2016. Between 2016 and 2017, the rate of Medicare coverage increased by 0.6 percentage points to cover 17.2% of people for part or all of 2017. This increase was partly due to an increase in the number of people aged 65 and over. The military coverage rate increased by 0.2 percentage points to 4.8% during this time. Between 2016 and 2017, there was no statistically significant change for any other subtype of health insurance shown here.

Moving to the right side of the chart, we see the change in health insurance coverage rates since 2013, the baseline year before many provisions of the Affordable Care Act went into effect. The uninsured rate decreased by 4.5 percentage points between 2013 and 2017. The rate of private coverage increased by 3 percentage points in this period. Of the two subtypes of private coverage, only direct purchase health insurance significantly changed during this period. The government coverage rate increased by 3.2 percentage points. The coverage rate increased for all of the subtypes of government coverage: Medicare, Medicaid, and military health care.

Variation in the uninsured rate at the sub-national level may be related to whether the state expanded Medicaid eligibility as part of the Affordable Care Act. This chart categorizes states into two groups: those that expanded eligibility and those that did not. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia expanded Medicaid eligibility on or before January 1, 2017. 9.4% of the population aged 19 to 64 living in expansion states had no health insurance coverage at any time in 2017, not statistically different from the percentage in 2016. In non-expansion states, 16.7% of the population had no health insurance coverage during 2017, up from 16.1% in 2016. In both expansion states and non-expansion states, the uninsured rate for working-age adults in 2017 was lower than in 2013.

While it is useful to look at the states grouped by expansion status, there’s more to the story. The American Community Survey allows us to examine uninsured rates at the state level. On this map, the darkest blue shading is applied to states where the percentage of people uninsured at the time of interview was 14% or higher. Lighter shades represent lower uninsured rates, with the lightest blue category representing an uninsured rate of less than 8%. Two states, Oklahoma and Texas, are in the darkest shade of blue for 2017, and 25 states and the District of Columbia are in the lightest shade of blue.

This map presents the change in uninsured rates between 2016 and 2017. The percentage of people without health insurance coverage decreased in three states and increased in 14 states. Statistically significant decreases ranged from 0.2 to 1.9 percentage points, and increases ranged from 0.32 to 1 percentage point.

More information is available in our reports and online.

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Transcript for “2017 Income, Poverty and Health Insurance – Health Insurance Presentation” by U.S. Census Bureau is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 7.23, Sleep Is Your Superpower

Thank you very much.

Well, I would like to start with testicles.

Men who sleep five hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep seven hours or more. In addition, men who routinely sleep just four to five hours a night will have a level of testosterone which is that of someone 10 years their senior.

So a lack of sleep will age a man by a decade in terms of that critical aspect of wellness. And we see equivalent impairments in female reproductive health caused by a lack of sleep. This is the best news that I have for you today.

From this point, it may only get worse. Not only will I tell you about the wonderfully good things that happen when you get sleep, but the alarmingly bad things that happen when you don’t get enough, both for your brain and for your body.

Let me start with the brain and the functions of learning and memory, because what we’ve discovered over the past 10 or so years is that you need sleep after learning to essentially hit the save button on those new memories so that you don’t forget.

But recently, we discovered that you also need sleep before learning to actually prepare your brain, almost like a dry sponge ready to initially soak up new information. And without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain essentially become waterlogged, as it were, and you can’t absorb new memories. So let me show you the data.

Here in this study, we decided to test the hypothesis that pulling the all-nighter was a good idea. So we took a group of individuals and we assigned them to one of two experimental groups: a sleep group and a sleep deprivation group.

Now the sleep group, they’re going to get a full eight hours of slumber, but the deprivation group, we’re going to keep them awake in the laboratory, under full supervision. There’s no naps or caffeine, by the way, so it’s miserable for everyone involved.

And then the next day, we’re going to place those participants inside an MRI scanner and we’re going to have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we’re taking snapshots of brain activity.

And then we’re going to test them to see how effective that learning has been. And that’s what you’re looking at here on the vertical axis. And when you put those two groups head to head, what you find is a quite significant, 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep.

I think this should be concerning, considering what we know is happening to sleep in our education populations right now. In fact, to put that in context, it would be the difference in a child acing an exam versus failing it miserably – 40%.

And we’ve gone on to discover what goes wrong within your brain to produce these types of learning disabilities. And there’s a structure that sits on the left and the right side of your brain, called the hippocampus.

And you can think of the hippocampus almost like the informational inbox of your brain. It’s very good at receiving new memory files and then holding on to them. And when you look at this structure in those people who’d had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity.

Yet in those people who were sleep-deprived, we actually couldn’t find any significant signal whatsoever. So it’s almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox, and any new incoming files — they were just being bounced. You couldn’t effectively commit new experiences to memory.

So that’s the bad that can happen if I were to take sleep away from you, but let me just come back to that control group for a second.

Do you remember those folks that got a full eight hours of sleep? Well, we can ask a very different question: What is it about the physiological quality of your sleep when you do get it that restores and enhances your memory and learning ability each and every day?

And by placing electrodes all over the head, what we’ve discovered is that there are big, powerful brainwaves that happen during the very deepest stages of sleep that have riding on top of them these spectacular bursts of electrical activity that we call sleep spindles.

And it’s the combined quality of these deep-sleep brainwaves that acts like a file-transfer mechanism at night, shifting memories from a short-term vulnerable reservoir to a more permanent long-term storage site within the brain, and therefore protecting them, making them safe.

And it is important that we understand what during sleep actually transacts these memory benefits, because there are real medical and societal implications. And let me just tell you about one area that we’ve moved this work out into, clinically, which is the context of aging and dementia.

Because it’s of course no secret that, as we get older, our learning and memory abilities begin to fade and decline. But what we’ve also discovered is that a physiological signature of aging is that your sleep gets worse, especially that deep quality of sleep that I was just discussing.

And only last year, we finally published evidence that these two things, they’re not simply co-occurring, they are significantly interrelated. And it suggests that the disruption of deep sleep is an underappreciated factor that is contributing to cognitive decline or memory decline in aging, and most recently we’ve discovered, in Alzheimer’s disease as well.

Now, I know this is remarkably depressing news. It’s in the mail. It’s coming at you. But there’s a potential silver lining here.

Unlike many of the other factors that we know are associated with aging, for example changes in the physical structure of the brain, that’s fiendishly difficult to treat. But that sleep is a missing piece in the explanatory puzzle of aging and Alzheimer’s is exciting because we may be able to do something about it.

And one way that we are approaching this at my sleep center is not by using sleeping pills, by the way. Unfortunately, they are blunt instruments that do not produce naturalistic sleep.

Instead, we’re actually developing a method based on this. It’s called direct current brain stimulation. You insert a small amount of voltage into the brain, so small you typically don’t feel it, but it has a measurable impact.

Now if you apply this stimulation during sleep in young, healthy adults, as if you’re sort of singing in time with those deep-sleep brainwaves, not only can you amplify the size of those deep-sleep brainwaves, but in doing so, we can almost double the amount of memory benefit that you get from sleep.

The question now is whether we can translate this same affordable, potentially portable piece of technology into older adults and those with dementia.

Can we restore back some healthy quality of deep sleep, and in doing so, can we salvage aspects of their learning and memory function? That is my real hope now. That’s one of our moon-shot goals, as it were. So that’s an example of sleep for your brain, but sleep is just as essential for your body.

We’ve already spoken about sleep loss and your reproductive system. Or I could tell you about sleep loss and your cardiovascular system, and that all it takes is one hour.

Because there is a global experiment performed on 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year, and it’s called daylight saving time.

Now, in the spring, when we lose one hour of sleep, we see a subsequent 24% increase in heart attacks that following day. In the autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, we see a 21% reduction in heart attacks. Isn’t that incredible?

And you see exactly the same profile for car crashes, road traffic accidents, even suicide rates.

But as a deeper dive, I want to focus on this: sleep loss and your immune system. And here, I’ll introduce these delightful blue elements in the image. They are called natural killer cells, and you can think of natural killer cells almost like the secret service agents of your immune system. They are very good at identifying dangerous, unwanted elements and eliminating them.

In fact, what they’re doing here is destroying a cancerous tumor mass. So what you wish for is a virile set of these immune assassins at all times, and tragically, that’s what you don’t have if you’re not sleeping enough.

So here in this experiment, you’re not going to have your sleep deprived for an entire night, you’re simply going to have your sleep restricted to four hours for one single night, and then we’re going to look to see what’s the percent reduction in immune cell activity that you suffer. And it’s not small — it’s not 10%, it’s not 20%. There was a 70% drop in natural killer cell activity.

That’s a concerning state of immune deficiency, and you can perhaps understand why we’re now finding significant links between short sleep duration and your risk for the development of numerous forms of cancer.

Currently, that list includes cancer of the bowel, cancer of the prostate and cancer of the breast. In fact, the link between a lack of sleep and cancer is now so strong that the World Health Organization has classified any form of nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen, because of a disruption of your sleep-wake rhythms.

So you may have heard of that old maxim that you can sleep when you’re dead. Well, I’m being quite serious now — it is mortally unwise advice. We know this from epidemiological studies across millions of individuals.

There’s a simple truth: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all-cause mortality. And if increasing your risk for the development of cancer or even Alzheimer’s disease were not sufficiently disquieting, we have since discovered that a lack of sleep will even erode the very fabric of biological life itself, your DNA genetic code.

So here in this study, they took a group of healthy adults and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week, and then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hours of sleep a night. And there were two critical findings.

First, a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity, caused by a lack of sleep. The second result was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity. The other half were decreased.

Now those genes that were switched off by a lack of sleep were genes associated with your immune system, so once again, you can see that immune deficiency. In contrast, those genes that were actually upregulated or increased by way of a lack of sleep, were genes associated with the promotion of tumors, genes associated with long-term chronic inflammation within the body, and genes associated with stress, and, as a consequence, cardiovascular disease.

There is simply no aspect of your wellness that can retreat at the sign of sleep deprivation and get away unscathed. It’s rather like a broken water pipe in your home.

Sleep loss will leak down into every nook and cranny of your physiology, even tampering with the very DNA nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative.

And at this point, you may be thinking, “Oh my goodness, how do I start to get better sleep? What are your tips for good sleep?”

Well, beyond avoiding the damaging and harmful impact of alcohol and caffeine on sleep, and if you’re struggling with sleep at night, avoiding naps during the day, I have two pieces of advice for you.

The first is regularity. Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, no matter whether it’s the weekday or the weekend. Regularity is king, and it will anchor your sleep and improve the quantity and the quality of that sleep.

The second is keep it cool. Your body needs to drop its core temperature by about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleep and then to stay asleep, and it’s the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that’s too cold than too hot.

So aim for a bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees, or about 18 degrees Celsius. That’s going to be optimal for the sleep of most people.

The first is regularity. Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, no matter whether it’s the weekday or the weekend. Regularity is king, and it will anchor your sleep and improve the quantity and the quality of that sleep.

The second is keep it cool. Your body needs to drop its core temperature by about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleep and then to stay asleep, and it’s the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that’s too cold than too hot.

So aim for a bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees, or about 18 degrees Celsius. That’s going to be optimal for the sleep of most people.

I believe it is now time for us to reclaim our right to a full night of sleep, and without embarrassment or that unfortunate stigma of laziness. And in doing so, we can be reunited with the most powerful elixir of life, the Swiss Army knife of health, as it were.

And with that soapbox rant over, I will simply say, good night, good luck, and above all…I do hope you sleep well.

Thank you very much indeed.

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Transcript for “Sleep Is Your Superpower” by Matt Walker for TED is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 8.10, Housing Segregation and Redlining in America: A Short History

[SOUNDBITE OF COMEDY SPECIAL, “BRING THE PAIN”]

[Chris Rock]: You know what’s so sad, man, you know what’s wild? Martin Luther King stood for nonviolence. Now what’s Martin Luther King? A street. And I don’t give a fuck where you are in America, if you’re on Martin Luther King Boulevard, there’s some violence going down.

[Gene Demby, NPR]: That, of course, is Chris Rock’s famous joke about streets named for Martin Luther King, Jr., which tend to be in, let’s say, distressed areas. And he’s not wrong, because if you look at the way housing segregation works in America, you can see how things ended up this way. Once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it.

OK, let’s look at MLK Blvd. in Baltimore. I want to show you how to see housing segregation in schools, in health, in family wealth, in policing. But first, an explanatory comma.

It’s the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression. FDR is president. He wants to bring economic relief to millions of Americans through a collection of federal programs and projects called The New Deal. One part of that “New Deal” was The National Housing Act of 1934, which introduced ideas like the 30-year mortgage and low, fixed interest rates. So now you have all these lower-income people who can afford homes. But how do you make sure they don’t default on their new mortgages? Enter the Home Owners Loan Corporation. The HOLC created residential security maps. And these maps? They’re where the term “redlining” comes from.

Green meant “best area, best people,” aka businessmen.

Blue meant “good people,” like white-collar families.

Yellow meant “a declining area,” with working class families.

And red meant “detrimental influences, hazardous” like “foreign-born” people, “low-class whites,” and – most significantly – “Negroes.”

Again and again on these HOLC maps, one of the most consistent criteria for redline neighborhoods is the presence of black and brown people.

Let’s be clear. Studies show that people who lived in redlined areas were not necessarily more likely to default on their mortgages. But redlining made it difficult – if not impossible – to buy or refinance. So landlords abandon their properties. City services become unreliable. In most places, crime increases. And property values drop.

All of these conditions fester for 30 years as white people flee to the brand new suburbs popping up all over the country. Many of those suburbs institute rules, called covenants, that explicitly forbid selling homes to black people.

And all of this was perfectly legal.

Now, it’s 1968, and MLK is assassinated.

[News broadcasts with headlines about MLK’s death.]

In the aftermath, Congress passes the Fair Housing Act of 1968. It’s a policy meant to encourage equal housing opportunities regardless of race, or religion, or national origin, and it offers protections for future homeowners and renters, but it does little to fix the damage already done. Over the next 50 years, the Fair Housing Act is rarely enforced.

So you can still see housing segregation and its effects in Baltimore and often along any MLK Boulevard in any U.S. city.

Like its effects on wealth. So, home ownership is the major way Americans create wealth, right? Well, discrimination in housing is the major reason that black families up and down the income scale have a tiny fraction of the family wealth that white families do – even white families with less education and lower incomes. For almost 30 years, 98 percent of FHA loans were handed out to white borrowers.

Not only were black neighborhoods redlined, and not only was the Fair Housing Act selectively enforced, if at all, but it is still, today, much harder for a black person to get a mortgage or home loan than it is for a white person.

[John P. Comer, Architects for Justice]: Families are fearful of speaking up about a basic human right that should be afforded to everyone in the world, but definitely in the richest country in the world.

[Gene]: And housing segregation in schools. The primary way that Americans pay for public schools is by paying property taxes. People who live in more valuable homes have better funded local schools, better paid teachers, better school facilities and more resources.

Here’s a feedback loop: The better the schools in a neighborhood, the more the homes in that neighborhood are worth. And the higher the property values of those homes, the more money there is for schools. And so on and so on.

And housing segregation in health. Because of urban planning that benefited those richer, whiter neighborhoods, people of color are more likely to live near industrial plants that spew toxic fumes; they’re more likely to live far away from grocery stores with fresh food; and in places where the water isn’t drinkable. They’re more likely to live in neighborhoods with crumbling infrastructure, and in homes with toxic paint.

[Karen Holliday, Baltimore resident]: When you’re living with rats, roaches, and things like that – that’s deplorable. You cannot have that kind of stuff with children running around in a building, a building that may be full of lead.

[Gene]: And not coincidentally, people of color have higher incidences of certain cancers, asthma, and heart disease.

And housing segregation in policing. Housing segregation means we are having vastly different experiences with crime and vastly different experiences with policing. Because our neighborhoods are so segregated, sometimes racial profiling can be camouflaged as spatial profiling – where living in certain areas can make you more likely to be stopped by the police.

And it means that people have a lot of unnecessary contact with the criminal justice system just because of where they live.

[Reggie Greene and Keith Murchison, Baltimore residents]: The problem in our city? The police and the citizens are fighting. They keep targeting my brothers and sisters who don’t really have nothing.

[Gene]: And that heavy, aggressive kind of policing that you see in black neighborhoods in particular makes people feel like they can’t trust the police. And when people don’t trust the police, crimes go unsolved and people have to find other ways to keep themselves safe.

But of course, it’s not just Baltimore. Because housing segregation and discrimination fundamentally shape the lives of people in nearly every major American city. It really is in everything.

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Transcript for Figure 8.18, How to Revive a Neighborhood: with Imagination, Beauty, and Art

[Theaster Gates]: I’m a potter, which seems like a fairly humble vocation. I know a lot about pots. I’ve spent about 15 years making them. One of the things that really excites me in my artistic practice and being trained as a potter is that you very quickly learn how to make great things out of nothing; that I spent a lot of time at my wheel with mounds of clay trying stuff; and that the limitations of my capacity, my ability, was based on my hands and my imagination; that if I wanted to make a really nice bowl and I didn’t know how to make a foot yet, I would have to learn how to make a foot; that that process of learning has been very, very helpful to my life. I feel like, as a potter, you also start to learn how to shape the world.

There have been times in my artistic capacity that I wanted to reflect on other really important moments in the history of the U.S., the history of the world where tough things happened, but how do you talk about tough ideas without separating people from that content? Could I use art like these old, discontinued firehoses from Alabama, to talk about the complexities of a moment of civil rights in the ’60s? Is it possible to talk about my father and I doing labor projects? My dad was a roofer, construction guy, he owned small businesses, and at 80, he was ready to retire and his tar kettle was my inheritance. Now, a tar kettle doesn’t sound like much of an inheritance. It wasn’t. It was stinky and it took up a lot of space in my studio, but I asked my dad if he would be willing to make some art with me, if we could reimagine this kind of nothing material as something very special. And by elevating the material and my dad’s skill, could we start to think about tar just like clay, in a new way, shaping it differently, helping us to imagine what was possible?

After clay, I was then kind of turned on to lots of different kinds of materials, and my studio grew a lot because I thought, well, it’s not really about the material, it’s about our capacity to shape things. I became more and more interested in ideas and more and more things that were happening just outside my studio. Just to give you a little bit of context, I live in Chicago. I live on the South Side now. I’m a West Sider. For those of you who are not Chicagoans, that won’t mean anything, but if I didn’t mention that I was a West Sider, there would be a lot of people in the city that would be very upset.

The neighborhood that I live in is Grand Crossing. It’s a neighborhood that has seen better days. It is not a gated community by far. There is lots of abandonment in my neighborhood, and while I was kind of busy making pots and busy making art and having a good art career, there was all of this stuff that was happening just outside my studio. All of us know about failing housing markets and the challenges of blight, and I feel like we talk about it with some of our cities more than others, but I think a lot of our U.S. cities and beyond have the challenge of blight, abandoned buildings that people no longer know what to do anything with. And so I thought, is there a way that I could start to think about these buildings as an extension or an expansion of my artistic practice? And that if I was thinking along with other creatives — architects, engineers, real estate finance people — that us together might be able to kind of think in more complicated ways about the reshaping of cities.

And so I bought a building. The building was really affordable. We tricked it out. We made it as beautiful as we could to try to just get some activity happening on my block. Once I bought the building for about 18,000 dollars, I didn’t have any money left. So I started sweeping the building as a kind of performance. This is performance art, and people would come over, and I would start sweeping. Because the broom was free and sweeping was free. It worked out. (Laughter) But we would use the building, then, to stage exhibitions, small dinners, and we found that that building on my block, Dorchester — we now referred to the block as Dorchester projects — that in a way that building became a kind of gathering site for lots of different kinds of activity. We turned the building into what we called now the Archive House. The Archive House would do all of these amazing things. Very significant people in the city and beyond would find themselves in the middle of the hood. And that’s when I felt like maybe there was a relationship between my history with clay and this new thing that was starting to develop, that we were slowly starting to reshape how people imagined the South Side of the city.

One house turned into a few houses, and we always tried to suggest that not only is creating a beautiful vessel important, but the contents of what happens in those buildings is also very important. So we were not only thinking about development, but we were thinking about the program, thinking about the kind of connections that could happen between one house and another, between one neighbor and another. This building became what we call the Listening House, and it has a collection of discarded books from the Johnson Publishing Corporation, and other books from an old bookstore that was going out of business. I was actually just wanting to activate these buildings as much as I could with whatever and whoever would join me.

In Chicago, there’s amazing building stock. This building, which had been the former crack house on the block, and when the building became abandoned, it became a great opportunity to really imagine what else could happen there. So this space we converted into what we call Black Cinema House. Black Cinema House was an opportunity in the hood to screen films that were important and relevant to the folk who lived around me, that if we wanted to show an old Melvin Van Peebles film, we could. If we wanted to show “Car Wash,” we could. That would be awesome. The building we soon outgrew, and we had to move to a larger space. Black Cinema House, which was made from just a small piece of clay, had to grow into a much larger piece of clay, which is now my studio.

What I realized was that for those of you who are zoning junkies, that some of the things that I was doing in these buildings that had been left behind, they were not the uses by which the buildings were built, and that there are city policies that say, “Hey, a house that is residential needs to stay residential.” But what do you do in neighborhoods when ain’t nobody interested in living there? That the people who have the means to leave have already left? What do we do with these abandoned buildings? And so I was trying to wake them up using culture.

We found that that was so exciting for folk, and people were so responsive to the work, that we had to then find bigger buildings. By the time we found bigger buildings, there was, in part, the resources necessary to think about those things. In this bank that we called the Arts Bank, it was in pretty bad shape. There was about six feet of standing water. It was a difficult project to finance, because banks weren’t interested in the neighborhood because people weren’t interested in the neighborhood because nothing had happened there. It was dirt. It was nothing. It was nowhere. And so we just started imagining, what else could happen in this building? (Applause)

And so now that the rumor of my block has spread, and lots of people are starting to visit, we’ve found that the bank can now be a center for exhibition, archives, music performance, and that there are people who are now interested in being adjacent to those buildings because we brought some heat, that we kind of made a fire.

One of the archives that we’ll have there is this Johnson Publishing Corporation. We’ve also started to collect memorabilia from American history, from people who live or have lived in that neighborhood. Some of these images are degraded images of black people, kind of histories of very challenging content, and where better than a neighborhood with young people who are constantly asking themselves about their identity to talk about some of the complexities of race and class?

In some ways, the bank represents a hub, that we’re trying to create a pretty hardcore node of cultural activity, and that if we could start to make multiple hubs and connect some cool green stuff around there, that the buildings that we’ve purchased and rehabbed, which is now around 60 or 70 units, that if we could land miniature Versailles on top of that, and connect these buildings by a beautiful greenbelt — (Applause) — that this place where people never wanted to be would become an important destination for folk from all over the country and world.

In some ways, it feels very much like I’m a potter, that we tackle the things that are at our wheel, we try with the skill that we have to think about this next bowl that I want to make. And it went from a bowl to a singular house to a block to a neighborhood to a cultural district to thinking about the city, and at every point, there were things that I didn’t know that I had to learn. I’ve never learned so much about zoning law in my life. I never thought I’d have to. But as a result of that, I’m finding that there’s not just room for my own artistic practice, there’s room for a lot of other artistic practices.

So people started asking us, “Well, Theaster, how are you going to go to scale?” and, “What’s your sustainability plan?” (Laughter) (Applause)

And what I found was that I couldn’t export myself, that what seems necessary in cities like Akron, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana, is that there are people in those places who already believe in those places, that are already dying to make those places beautiful, and that often, those people who are passionate about a place are disconnected from the resources necessary to make cool things happen, or disconnected from a contingency of people that could help make things happen. So now, we’re starting to give advice around the country on how to start with what you got, how to start with the things that are in front of you, how to make something out of nothing, how to reshape your world at a wheel or at your block or at the scale of the city.

Thank you so much. (Applause)

[June Cohen]: Thank you. So I think many people watching this will be asking themselves the question you just raised at the end: How can they do this in their own city? You can’t export yourself. Give us a few pages out of your playbook about what someone who is inspired about their city can do to take on projects like yours?

[Gates]: One of the things I’ve found that’s really important is giving thought to not just the kind of individual project, like an old house, but what’s the relationship between an old house, a local school, a small bodega, and is there some kind of synergy between those things? Can you get those folk talking? I’ve found that in cases where neighborhoods have failed, they still often have a pulse. How do you identify the pulse in that place, the passionate people, and then how do you get folk who have been fighting, slogging for 20 years, reenergized about the place that they live? And so someone has to do that work. If I were a traditional developer, I would be talking about buildings alone, and then putting a “For Lease” sign in the window. I think that you actually have to curate more than that, that there’s a way in which you have to be mindful about, what are the businesses that I want to grow here? And then, are there people who live in this place who want to grow those businesses with me? Because I think it’s not just a cultural space or housing; there has to be the recreation of an economic core. So thinking about those things together feels right.

[Cohen]: It’s hard to get people to create the spark again when people have been slogging for 20 years. Are there any methods you’ve found that have helped break through?

[Gates]: Yeah, I think that now there are lots of examples of folk who are doing amazing work, but those methods are sometimes like, when the media is constantly saying that only violent things happen in a place, then based on your skill set and the particular context, what are the things that you can do in your neighborhood to kind of fight some of that? So I’ve found that if you’re a theater person, you have outdoor street theater festivals. In some cases, we don’t have the resources in certain neighborhoods to do things that are a certain kind of splashy, but if we can then find ways of making sure that people who are local to a place, plus people who could be supportive of the things that are happening locally, when those people get together, I think really amazing things can happen.

[Cohen]: So interesting. And how can you make sure that the projects you’re creating are actually for the disadvantaged and not just for the sort of vegetarian indie movie crowd that might move in to take advantage of them.

[Gates]: Right on. So I think this is where it starts to get into the thick weeds.

[Cohen]: Let’s go there.

[Gates]: Right now, Grand Crossing is 99 percent black, or at least living, and we know that maybe who owns property in a place is different from who walks the streets every day. So it’s reasonable to say that Grand Crossing is already in the process of being something different than it is today. But are there ways to think about housing trusts or land trusts or a mission-based development that starts to protect some of the space that happens, because when you have 7,500 empty lots in a city, you want something to happen there, but you need entities that are not just interested in the development piece, but entities that are interested in the stabilization piece, and I feel like often the developer piece is really motivated, but the other work of a kind of neighborhood consciousness, that part doesn’t live anymore. So how do you start to grow up important watchdogs that ensure that the resources that are made available to new folk that are coming in are also distributed to folk who have lived in a place for a long time.

[Cohen]: That makes so much sense. One more question: You make such a compelling case for beauty and the importance of beauty and the arts. There would be others who would argue that funds would be better spent on basic services for the disadvantaged. How do you combat that viewpoint, or come against it?

[Gates]: I believe that beauty is a basic service. (Applause) Often what I have found is that when there are resources that have not been made available to certain under-resourced cities or neighborhoods or communities, that sometimes culture is the thing that helps to ignite, and that I can’t do everything, but I think that there’s a way in which if you can start with culture and get people kind of reinvested in their place, other kinds of adjacent amenities start to grow, and then people can make a demand that’s a poetic demand, and the political demands that are necessary to wake up our cities, they also become very poetic.

[Cohen]: It makes perfect sense to me. Theaster, thank you so much for being here with us today. Thank you. Theaster Gates. (Applause)

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 8.18, How to Revive a Neighborhood: with Imagination, Beauty, and Art

Transcript for “How to Revive a Neighborhood: with Imagination, Beauty, and Art” by Theaster Gates for TED is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 8.20, Surviving The Echo Mountain Fire

“You know, kind of walk me through you guys’s story.”

“Okay.”

“You know, a little bit.”

“Um, so, Guy and I, Guy saw some flames, and so we called–um, yeah, actually, it was 911, to report this. We called a couple of times because it really seemed like it might be a problem. Then we got a phone call, and luckily it came into my work phone. It did not come in on my personal phone. And so I had my work phone next to me, and if I would not have woken up and heard that, then it would have been a problem. And so we had to get out right away, and I think that happened to other people.”

“My name is Bethany Grace Howe, and I am the executive director of Echo Mountain Fire Relief. Echo Mountain Fire Relief was actually started by a volunteer fireman who was working the fire, also a resident of the Otis area. And, knowing how these things unfolded, he, literally within days of the fire starting, under a week, started a nonprofit. Just sent out the paperwork and got it up and going.”

“We decided to just get a travel trailer. And I got the last spot at KOA. That was–there was nowhere else. Everybody, you know, who even had a travel trailer, maybe somewhere else, but there were no places left.”

Many had lived in manufactured houses and had little or no insurance.

“We’re not getting any insurance money for this. Even those of us who were insured are only getting 5,000 bucks, and that’s, that basically covers your ash and your asbestos. That’s it, nothing else.”

“They made changes to their home and their insurance wasn’t updated, or, other people, were, ‘yeah, I’m fully insured, I have replacement cost insurance, I got it all covered.’ What people don’t realize is, that’s replacement cost on the day of the fire. As everybody knows, everything’s gotten more expensive. So there are people that thought they were fully insured, and they are still coming out with 20 to 30 percent, 40 percent losses, because the cost of everything went through the ceiling.”

“So we had a budget, which means we had to use all of our insurance money to replace our home, and that’s it. So all of the other, my gardening, outbuildings, you know, just everything that we built–my greenhouse, the outdoor kitchen. So these things we can rebuild at some point, but the home is what was most important to us. Getting to spend time in a disaster, not just thinking about ourselves, but looking at what’s happening in our neighborhood, and having more resources coming in, that’s part of our decision. The people who are gonna need it the most will be in that open space with beds and things. We were able to be somewhere more comfortable and not take up space for someone who doesn’t have any other choices.”

“If you were sitting across the table from a survivor, and a lot of our team does that, you know, we’re in Kentucky with tornado survivors and stuff, what would you tell them–let’s say we’re a week past it?”

“I would probably tell them that this is an unimaginable situation, and it is a situation. And wondering about, what do you have within yourself that tells you that you can get through this, or, you know, with lots of support?”

“The vast majority of other people: insured, uninsured, wealthy, not wealthy, renters, homeowners–they all eventually reached a point where it was, ‘for me to get back to my life, I need help.’”

“Toasters, tents, and therapy resources are all things that survivors of the Echo Mountain Complex Fire can find at Salmon River Grange in Otis. While following up on the community’s response after the fire, KOIN6 News found out about the Grange and the support it’s giving. People who lost their homes in the fire can visit the Grange and take whatever they need.”

“–Team helping properties that look like this, look a little more like this.”

“That cleanup put on by the Cascade Relief Team.”

“When leaders of Reach Out Worldwide in Cascade Relief Team learned of the damage, they knew they needed to step in.”

“People don’t wanna wait on, you know, the government to come in and help them out, or the county or city to help them out. That could be a 12-18 month process with FEMA.”

“But what’s happening with this response to the fire is the most important part of looking at preparedness. What went well and what didn’t? And, in my opinion as an employee of the county public health, and someone who survived this, the county was very lacking in response.”

“Where would you say the number one place you felt the lacking was?”

“Um, knowing what to do.”

“I think when the fires hit, Oregon didn’t really have policies, and I don’t think they’d thought about this much. And, you know, I have more insider information on the government than I should, and what I would say is, is that there is a feeling that this state got caught with its pants down, and that we were not ready. And we weren’t, but at the same time, how could we have been?”

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Transcript for “Surviving The Echo Mountain Fire [YouTube Video]” by Marc Brooks and Samantha Kuk is all rights reserved and included with permission.

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Transcript for Figure 9.8, Why domestic violence victims don’t leave

00:04

I’m here today to talk about a disturbing question, which has an equally disturbing answer. My topic is the secrets of domestic violence, and the question I’m going to tackle is the one question everyone always asks: Why does she stay? Why would anyone stay with a man who beats her? I’m not a psychiatrist, a social worker or an expert in domestic violence. I’m just one woman with a story to tell.

00:35

I was 22. I had just graduated from Harvard College. I had moved to New York City for my first job as a writer and editor at Seventeen magazine. I had my first apartment, my first little green American Express card, and I had a very big secret. My secret was that I had this gun loaded with hollow-point bullets pointed at my head by the man who I thought was my soulmate, many, many times. The man who I loved more than anybody on Earth held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me more times than I can even remember. I’m here to tell you the story of crazy love, a psychological trap disguised as love, one that millions of women and even a few men fall into every year. It may even be your story.

01:31

I don’t look like a typical domestic violence survivor. I have a B.A. in English from Harvard College, an MBA in marketing from Wharton Business School. I’ve spent most of my career working for Fortune 500 companies including Johnson & Johnson, Leo Burnett and The Washington Post. I’ve been married for almost 20 years to my second husband and we have three kids together. My dog is a black lab, and I drive a Honda Odyssey minivan. (Laughter)

02:00

So my first message for you is that domestic violence happens to everyone — all races, all religions, all income and education levels. It’s everywhere. And my second message is that everyone thinks domestic violence happens to women, that it’s a women’s issue. Not exactly. Over 85 percent of abusers are men, and domestic abuse happens only in intimate, interdependent, long-term relationships, in other words, in families, the last place we would want or expect to find violence, which is one reason domestic abuse is so confusing.

02:41

I would have told you myself that I was the last person on Earth who would stay with a man who beats me, but in fact I was a very typical victim because of my age. I was 22, and in the United States, women ages 16 to 24 are three times as likely to be domestic violence victims as women of other ages, and over 500 women and girls this age are killed every year by abusive partners, boyfriends, and husbands in the United States.

03:14

I was also a very typical victim because I knew nothing about domestic violence, its warning signs or its patterns.

03:22

I met Conor on a cold, rainy January night. He sat next to me on the New York City subway, and he started chatting me up. He told me two things. One was that he, too, had just graduated from an Ivy League school, and that he worked at a very impressive Wall Street bank. But what made the biggest impression on me that first meeting was that he was smart and funny and he looked like a farm boy. He had these big cheeks, these big apple cheeks and this wheat-blond hair, and he seemed so sweet.

03:58

One of the smartest things Conor did, from the very beginning, was to create the illusion that I was the dominant partner in the relationship. He did this especially at the beginning by idolizing me. We started dating, and he loved everything about me, that I was smart, that I’d gone to Harvard, that I was passionate about helping teenage girls, and my job. He wanted to know everything about my family and my childhood and my hopes and dreams. Conor believed in me, as a writer and a woman, in a way that no one else ever had. And he also created a magical atmosphere of trust between us by confessing his secret, which was that, as a very young boy starting at age four, he had been savagely and repeatedly physically abused by his stepfather, and the abuse had gotten so bad that he had had to drop out of school in eighth grade, even though he was very smart, and he’d spent almost 20 years rebuilding his life. Which is why that Ivy League degree and the Wall Street job and his bright shiny future meant so much to him. If you had told me that this smart, funny, sensitive man who adored me would one day dictate whether or not I wore makeup, how short my skirts were, where I lived, what jobs I took, who my friends were and where I spent Christmas, I would have laughed at you, because there was not a hint of violence or control or anger in Conor at the beginning. I didn’t know that the first stage in any domestic violence relationship is to seduce and charm the victim.

05:44

I also didn’t know that the second step is to isolate the victim. Now, Conor did not come home one day and announce, “You know, hey, all this Romeo and Juliet stuff has been great, but I need to move into the next phase where I isolate you and I abuse you” — (Laughter) — “so I need to get you out of this apartment where the neighbors can hear you scream and out of this city where you have friends and family and coworkers who can see the bruises.” Instead, Conor came home one Friday evening and he told me that he had quit his job that day, his dream job, and he said that he had quit his job because of me, because I had made him feel so safe and loved that he didn’t need to prove himself on Wall Street anymore, and he just wanted to get out of the city and away from his abusive, dysfunctional family, and move to a tiny town in New England where he could start his life over with me by his side. Now, the last thing I wanted to do was leave New York, and my dream job, but I thought you made sacrifices for your soulmate, so I agreed, and I quit my job, and Conor and I left Manhattan together. I had no idea I was falling into crazy love, that I was walking headfirst into a carefully laid physical, financial and psychological trap.

07:12

The next step in the domestic violence pattern is to introduce the threat of violence and see how she reacts. And here’s where those guns come in. As soon as we moved to New England — you know, that place where Connor was supposed to feel so safe — he bought three guns. He kept one in the glove compartment of our car. He kept one under the pillows on our bed, and the third one he kept in his pocket at all times. And he said that he needed those guns because of the trauma he’d experienced as a young boy. He needed them to feel protected. But those guns were really a message for me, and even though he hadn’t raised a hand to me, my life was already in grave danger every minute of every day.

08:00

Conor first physically attacked me five days before our wedding. It was 7 a.m. I still had on my nightgown. I was working on my computer trying to finish a freelance writing assignment, and I got frustrated, and Conor used my anger as an excuse to put both of his hands around my neck and to squeeze so tightly that I could not breathe or scream, and he used the chokehold to hit my head repeatedly against the wall. Five days later, the ten bruises on my neck had just faded, and I put on my mother’s wedding dress, and I married him.

08:43

Despite what had happened, I was sure we were going to live happily ever after, because I loved him, and he loved me so much. And he was very, very sorry. He had just been really stressed out by the wedding and by becoming a family with me. It was an isolated incident, and he was never going to hurt me again.

09:07

It happened twice more on the honeymoon. The first time, I was driving to find a secret beach and I got lost, and he punched me in the side of my head so hard that the other side of my head repeatedly hit the driver’s side window. And then a few days later, driving home from our honeymoon, he got frustrated by traffic, and he threw a cold Big Mac in my face. Conor proceeded to beat me once or twice a week for the next two and a half years of our marriage.

09:38

I was mistaken in thinking that I was unique and alone in this situation. One in three American women experiences domestic violence or stalking at some point in her life, and the CDC reports that 15 million children are abused every year, 15 million. So actually, I was in very good company.

10:02

Back to my question: Why did I stay? The answer is easy. I didn’t know he was abusing me. Even though he held those loaded guns to my head, pushed me down stairs, threatened to kill our dog, pulled the key out of the car ignition as I drove down the highway, poured coffee grinds on my head as I dressed for a job interview, I never once thought of myself as a battered wife. Instead, I was a very strong woman in love with a deeply troubled man, and I was the only person on Earth who could help Conor face his demons.

10:44

The other question everybody asks is, why doesn’t she just leave? Why didn’t I walk out? I could have left any time. To me, this is the saddest and most painful question that people ask, because we victims know something you usually don’t: It’s incredibly dangerous to leave an abuser. Because the final step in the domestic violence pattern is kill her. Over 70 percent of domestic violence murders happen after the victim has ended the relationship, after she’s gotten out, because then the abuser has nothing left to lose. Other outcomes include long-term stalking, even after the abuser remarries; denial of financial resources; and manipulation of the family court system to terrify the victim and her children, who are regularly forced by family court judges to spend unsupervised time with the man who beat their mother. And still we ask, why doesn’t she just leave?

11:52

I was able to leave, because of one final, sadistic beating that broke through my denial. I realized that the man who I loved so much was going to kill me if I let him. So I broke the silence. I told everyone: the police, my neighbors, my friends and family, total strangers, and I’m here today because you all helped me.

12:26

We tend to stereotype victims as grisly headlines, self-destructive women, damaged goods. The question, “Why does she stay?” is code for some people for, “It’s her fault for staying,” as if victims intentionally choose to fall in love with men intent upon destroying us.

12:49

But since publishing “Crazy Love,” I have heard hundreds of stories from men and women who also got out, who learned an invaluable life lesson from what happened, and who rebuilt lives — joyous, happy lives — as employees, wives and mothers, lives completely free of violence, like me. Because it turns out that I’m actually a very typical domestic violence victim and a typical domestic violence survivor. I remarried a kind and gentle man, and we have those three kids. I have that black lab, and I have that minivan. What I will never have again, ever, is a loaded gun held to my head by someone who says that he loves me.

13:43

Right now, maybe you’re thinking, “Wow, this is fascinating,” or, “Wow, how stupid was she,” but this whole time, I’ve actually been talking about you. I promise you there are several people listening to me right now who are currently being abused or who were abused as children or who are abusers themselves. Abuse could be affecting your daughter, your sister, your best friend right now.

14:18

I was able to end my own crazy love story by breaking the silence. I’m still breaking the silence today. It’s my way of helping other victims, and it’s my final request of you. Talk about what you heard here. Abuse thrives only in silence. You have the power to end domestic violence simply by shining a spotlight on it. We victims need everyone. We need every one of you to understand the secrets of domestic violence. Show abuse the light of day by talking about it with your children, your coworkers, your friends and family. Recast survivors as wonderful, lovable people with full futures. Recognize the early signs of violence and conscientiously intervene, deescalate it, show victims a safe way out. Together we can make our beds, our dinner tables and our families the safe and peaceful oases they should be.

15:32

Thank you.

15:34

(Applause)

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 9.8, Why domestic violence victims don’t leave

Transcript for “Why domestic violence victims don’t leave” by Leslie Morgan Steiner for TED is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 9.9, How Childhood Trauma Affects Health across a Lifetime

In the mid-’90s, the CDC and Kaiser Permanente discovered an exposure that dramatically increased the risk for seven out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the United States. In high doses, it affects brain development, the immune system, hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed. Folks who are exposed in very high doses have triple the lifetime risk of heart disease and lung cancer and a 20-year difference in life expectancy. And yet, doctors today are not trained in routine screening or treatment. Now, the exposure I’m talking about is not a pesticide or a packaging chemical. It’s childhood trauma.

Okay. What kind of trauma am I talking about here? I’m not talking about failing a test or losing a basketball game. I am talking about threats that are so severe or pervasive that they literally get under our skin and change our physiology: things like abuse or neglect, or growing up with a parent who struggles with mental illness or substance dependence.

Now, for a long time, I viewed these things in the way I was trained to view them, either as a social problem — refer to social services — or as a mental health problem — refer to mental health services. And then something happened to make me rethink my entire approach. When I finished my residency, I wanted to go someplace where I felt really needed, someplace where I could make a difference. So I came to work for California Pacific Medical Center, one of the best private hospitals in Northern California, and together, we opened a clinic in Bayview-Hunters Point, one of the poorest, most underserved neighborhoods in San Francisco. Now, prior to that point, there had been only one pediatrician in all of Bayview to serve more than 10,000 children, so we hung a shingle, and we were able to provide top-quality care regardless of ability to pay. It was so cool. We targeted the typical health disparities: access to care, immunization rates, asthma hospitalization rates, and we hit all of our numbers. We felt very proud of ourselves.

But then I started noticing a disturbing trend. A lot of kids were being referred to me for ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, but when I actually did a thorough history and physical, what I found was that for most of my patients, I couldn’t make a diagnosis of ADHD. Most of the kids I was seeing had experienced such severe trauma that it felt like something else was going on. Somehow I was missing something important.

Now, before I did my residency, I did a master’s degree in public health, and one of the things that they teach you in public health school is that if you’re a doctor and you see 100 kids that all drink from the same well, and 98 of them develop diarrhea, you can go ahead and write that prescription for dose after dose after dose of antibiotics, or you can walk over and say, “What the hell is in this well?” So I began reading everything that I could get my hands on about how exposure to adversity affects the developing brains and bodies of children.

And then one day, my colleague walked into my office, and he said, “Dr. Burke, have you seen this?” In his hand was a copy of a research study called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. That day changed my clinical practice and ultimately my career.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study is something that everybody needs to know about. It was done by Dr. Vince Felitti at Kaiser and Dr. Bob Anda at the CDC, and together, they asked 17,500 adults about their history of exposure to what they called “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs. Those include physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; physical or emotional neglect; parental mental illness, substance dependence, incarceration; parental separation or divorce; or domestic violence. For every yes, you would get a point on your ACE score. And then what they did was they correlated these ACE scores against health outcomes. What they found was striking. Two things: Number one, ACEs are incredibly common. Sixty-seven percent of the population had at least one ACE, and 12.6 percent, one in eight, had four or more ACEs. The second thing that they found was that there was a dose-response relationship between ACEs and health outcomes: the higher your ACE score, the worse your health outcomes. For a person with an ACE score of four or more, their relative risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease was two and a half times that of someone with an ACE score of zero. For hepatitis, it was also two and a half times. For depression, it was four and a half times. For suicidality, it was 12 times. A person with an ACE score of seven or more had triple the lifetime risk of lung cancer and three and a half times the risk of ischemic heart disease, the number one killer in the United States of America.

Well, of course this makes sense. Some people looked at this data and they said, “Come on. You have a rough childhood, you’re more likely to drink and smoke and do all these things that are going to ruin your health. This isn’t science. This is just bad behavior.”

It turns out this is exactly where the science comes in. We now understand better than we ever have before how exposure to early adversity affects the developing brains and bodies of children. It affects areas like the nucleus accumbens, the pleasure and reward center of the brain that is implicated in substance dependence. It inhibits the prefrontal cortex, which is necessary for impulse control and executive function, a critical area for learning. And on MRI scans, we see measurable differences in the amygdala, the brain’s fear response center. So there are real neurologic reasons why folks exposed to high doses of adversity are more likely to engage in high-risk behavior, and that’s important to know.

But it turns out that even if you don’t engage in any high-risk behavior, you’re still more likely to develop heart disease or cancer. The reason for this has to do with the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, the brain’s and body’s stress response system that governs our fight-or-flight response. How does it work? Well, imagine you’re walking in the forest and you see a bear. Immediately, your hypothalamus sends a signal to your pituitary, which sends a signal to your adrenal gland that says, “Release stress hormones! Adrenaline! Cortisol!” And so your heart starts to pound, Your pupils dilate, your airways open up, and you are ready to either fight that bear or run from the bear. And that is wonderful if you’re in a forest and there’s a bear. (Laughter) But the problem is what happens when the bear comes home every night, and this system is activated over and over and over again, and it goes from being adaptive, or life-saving, to maladaptive, or health-damaging. Children are especially sensitive to this repeated stress activation, because their brains and bodies are just developing. High doses of adversity not only affect brain structure and function, they affect the developing immune system, developing hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed.

So for me, this information threw my old training out the window, because when we understand the mechanism of a disease, when we know not only which pathways are disrupted, but how, then as doctors, it is our job to use this science for prevention and treatment. That’s what we do.

So in San Francisco, we created the Center for Youth Wellness to prevent, screen and heal the impacts of ACEs and toxic stress. We started simply with routine screening of every one of our kids at their regular physical, because I know that if my patient has an ACE score of 4, she’s two and a half times as likely to develop hepatitis or COPD, she’s four and half times as likely to become depressed, and she’s 12 times as likely to attempt to take her own life as my patient with zero ACEs. I know that when she’s in my exam room. For our patients who do screen positive, we have a multidisciplinary treatment team that works to reduce the dose of adversity and treat symptoms using best practices, including home visits, care coordination, mental health care, nutrition, holistic interventions, and yes, medication when necessary. But we also educate parents about the impacts of ACEs and toxic stress the same way you would for covering electrical outlets, or lead poisoning, and we tailor the care of our asthmatics and our diabetics in a way that recognizes that they may need more aggressive treatment, given the changes to their hormonal and immune systems.

So the other thing that happens when you understand this science is that you want to shout it from the rooftops, because this isn’t just an issue for kids in Bayview. I figured the minute that everybody else heard about this, it would be routine screening, multi-disciplinary treatment teams, and it would be a race to the most effective clinical treatment protocols. Yeah. That did not happen. And that was a huge learning for me. What I had thought of as simply best clinical practice I now understand to be a movement. In the words of Dr. Robert Block, the former President of the American Academy of Pediatrics, “Adverse childhood experiences are the single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing our nation today.” And for a lot of people, that’s a terrifying prospect. The scope and scale of the problem seems so large that it feels overwhelming to think about how we might approach it. But for me, that’s actually where the hopes lies, because when we have the right framework, when we recognize this to be a public health crisis, then we can begin to use the right tool kit to come up with solutions. From tobacco to lead poisoning to HIV/AIDS, the United States actually has quite a strong track record with addressing public health problems, but replicating those successes with ACEs and toxic stress is going to take determination and commitment, and when I look at what our nation’s response has been so far, I wonder, why haven’t we taken this more seriously?

You know, at first I thought that we marginalized the issue because it doesn’t apply to us. That’s an issue for those kids in those neighborhoods. Which is weird, because the data doesn’t bear that out. The original ACEs study was done in a population that was 70 percent Caucasian, 70 percent college-educated. But then, the more I talked to folks, I’m beginning to think that maybe I had it completely backwards. If I were to ask how many people in this room grew up with a family member who suffered from mental illness, I bet a few hands would go up. And then if I were to ask how many folks had a parent who maybe drank too much, or who really believed that if you spare the rod, you spoil the child, I bet a few more hands would go up. Even in this room, this is an issue that touches many of us, and I am beginning to believe that we marginalize the issue because it does apply to us. Maybe it’s easier to see in other zip codes because we don’t want to look at it. We’d rather be sick.

Fortunately, scientific advances and, frankly, economic realities make that option less viable every day. The science is clear: Early adversity dramatically affects health across a lifetime. Today, we are beginning to understand how to interrupt the progression from early adversity to disease and early death, and 30 years from now, the child who has a high ACE score and whose behavioral symptoms go unrecognized, whose asthma management is not connected, and who goes on to develop high blood pressure and early heart disease or cancer will be just as anomalous as a six-month mortality from HIV/AIDS. People will look at that situation and say, “What the heck happened there?” This is treatable. This is beatable. The single most important thing that we need today is the courage to look this problem in the face and say, this is real and this is all of us. I believe that we are the movement.

Thank you. (Applause)

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Transcript for “How Childhood Trauma Affects Health across a Lifetime” by Nadine Burke Harris for TED is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 10.15, A Brief History of Environmental Justice

Nationally, the facilities where we dump our garbage and process dangerous chemicals tend to be located in poor and minority communities. The people who live there have little or no protection from the industries around them. And things could get worse.

So, there’s this idea of environmental justice. It’s pretty simple: Communities shouldn’t be forced to deal with more pollution because they belong to a certain race, national origin, or income bracket. Yet, America has struggled over the years to implement any serious policy that actually protects these communities. So, let’s lay out the ways the government has failed them.

“The fight for environmental justice took off in 1982 when residents of Warren County, North Carolina mounted mass demonstrations against a plan to dump contaminated soil in a landfill in their community.”

“The EPA investigated four similar landfills in southern states and found that they were all located in black or low-income neighborhoods. In 1987, the United Church of Christ Racial Justice Commission found that around the country, hazardous waste facilities were more likely to be located in mostly minority communities.”

“Amid mounting proof, the federal government was forced to act. So, in 1992 President George H.W. Bush founded the Office of Environmental Justice inside the EPA. Two years later, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to consider environmental justice in all of their policies, as well as extending civil rights protection to environmental discrimination.”

“But Congress never passed a bill to make Clinton’s executive order law. Then came George W. Bush. His administration shifted the focus of the Office of Environmental Justice from protecting low-income and minority communities to ‘all people,’ leaving vulnerable populations without a federal environmental advocate.”

“Under Bush, many environmental civil rights claims were rejected or delayed for years. In 2009, after President Barack Obama’s election, his administration recommitted to environmental justice.”

“Generally speaking, in this country, a lot of environmentally problematic facilities tend to be located in places where poor folks live. Yet, during the two years Democrats controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House, they didn’t file a single bill focused on strengthening environmental justice protections.”

“Passing major environmental legislation faded further when Republicans took control of Congress in the 2010 midterm elections. Now, President Donald J. Trump is making good on his vow to weaken the EPA.”

“This budget–a 31% cut to the EPA, $2.6 billion cut away from the EPA, that’s what the president wants. As the EPA loses funding and regulations are rolled back, vulnerable communities may very likely fall through the cracks.”

“I’m Talia Buford. I’ll be covering these communities and digging into systemic environmental injustice. If you have something to tell me, email me at Talia.Buford@ProPublica.org.”

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Transcript for “A Brief History of Environmental Justice” by ProPublica is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

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Transcript for Figure 10.17, How Black Americans Were Robbed of Their Land

[Willena Scott-White]: My dad’s land was taken, and that’s how I see it.

[Vann R. Newkirk II, writer for The Atlantic]: Over the course of the entire 20th century, we know that black farmers have lost about 12 million acres of land total.

[Isaac Daniel Scott, Sr.]: We are just being forced out. They’re trying to force us out.

[Newkirk]: These cases of dispossession can only be called theft.

[Scott-White]: Mound Bayou is a historic all-black town. Formed many years ago in the 1800s by two former slaves. We don’t have the overt racism that we used to have against people out in the public. Now we deal with it with employment, economics, banks. We still deal with it and until we overcome all of that The Delta will forever struggle, is my belief.

[Isaac Daniel Scott, Sr. directs the loading of pipe]

[Scott-White]: I’ve been doing this all of my life. As a kid, we went to the field until it was dark. Either cotton chopping or cotton picking.

[Newkirk]: The Mississippi Delta is this area between these rivers in the northwest of Mississippi that has some of the most fertile land in the United States, in the continent really. If you go out there, you will see rows and rows of cotton, of soybeans, every single type of crop you can imagine.

But in the early 20th century, almost all the land was owned by white folks. It was homesteaded out by the federal government but was otherwise inaccessible to black folks.

[Scott-White]: My grandpapa, Ed Scott Sr., started purchasing land back in 1938. They came from Hale County, Alabama and they moved to Mississippi in 1919 before my dad was born. My grandmama hated it here, but in Alabama, black people could only sharecrop, no one would sell them land. Very few could get that historic 40 acres and a mule.

[Newkirk]: Ed Scott Sr. was almost supernaturally gifted at farming. He knows exactly how to rotate the crops, how to plant things in a way that gets the highest yield. And that gave him his own economic gravity that local white businessmen could not ignore. Eventually a plantation owner decides to sell Ed Scott Sr. a plot of land.

[Scott-White]: When he passed in 1957, the family had acquired acres and acres of land.

[Newkirk]: Ed Scott’s son, Ed Scott Jr., takes over the farm. He is part of the generation of men that goes off to war during World War II. And when this generation of black men comes back, their white peers are granted so many free things from the GI bill. They get free education. Lots of them get free homes. They get things they can pass onto their children. But the black men among that number are denied many of those opportunities.

[Scott-White]: My dad went to World War II and when he came back, his dad wanted him to go and finish school. But farming was in his blood.

[Ed Scott Jr.]: You had to know what you were doing to make a living here. My daddy used to bale hay and sell chicken and turkey. He used to take turkey to Greenwood down there to white people, and sell them.

[Isaac Daniel Scott Sr.]: My dad was the smartest one of his siblings and the hardest worker of his siblings. Every now and then he would say “God ain’t going to make no more land, so you better hold what you got.”

[Newkirk]: When Ed Scott Jr. takes over the farm, he’s operating it through one of the most turbulent times in American history. In 1953, the first bus boycotts. 1954, Brown v. Board. 1955, Emmett Till is lynched.

[Ed Scott Jr.]: You know, I left here and went to Selma, Alabama when they had that march from Selma to Montgomery. It was rough back there then. But you had to have some guts to stand up and just be rough with them.

[Scott-White]: When he owned his land, he actually had 57 families who lived on his land and worked with him. And it was like a community. Whatever we needed was on our farm. We would put up peaches, we would put up peas and butter beans. And everybody got their share to carry them across the winter. It was like a utopia.

[Newkirk]: Modern farming requires debt in order to grow your crops and in order to collect a harvest. Over the last hundred years, the federal government has become more and more of a player in providing the credit to those farmers. Much of the administration of this federal money was done by locally elected committees. And what do we know about voting in the south at that time? We know black people could not vote. The people who ended up controlling all that were the great grandchildren of the plantation owners, and why would they ever give a black farmer money to start his own farm? And so, between 1950 and 1969, black farmers lose something on the order of 6 million acres of land across the country. But the Scotts were able to hold on to most of their land until the farm crisis of the 1970s and 1980s.

[News anchor]: Rising fuel costs, increasing cost of production, new taxes: these changes will have a significant impact on the well-being of family farmers. Federal legislators are slashing farm programs to pay for the deficit.

[Newkirk]: As farming in America collapses in the 70s and 80s, there’s a lifeline in the Mississippi Delta: Catfish. The federal government, they pour a whole bunch of federal money into taking these poor white farmers who are struggling, and getting them into catfish. The people who are left out of that are the black farmers.

Ed Scott Jr sees what’s happening. He sees catfish as a way out. He converts most of his farms into eight giant catfish ponds with no help from the federal government. He digs them himself. He builds the very first catfish plant owned and operated by an African American in the United States. And it becomes this inspirational story across the south of a black person who has literally beat all the odds to create something new.

[Scott-White]: My dad loved clothes and he loved to dress. Even on a daily basis he wore what we call khaki suits which would have been a khaki shirt with matching pants. And they had to be starched and ironed. He always had a nice new car but he kept it closed up in a shed so no one would know he had it. He did not commingle. Meaning, what white people would call “staying in your place.” Wasn’t no blacks supposed to have a car.

[Newkirk]: There’s gonna come a time when they think you’re uppity. And that’s exactly what happened to the Scotts.

[Isaac Daniel Scott Sr.]: It wasn’t just because we were black, it’s because we were doing so well. We were doing so well.

[Scott-White]: Blacks were never successful at getting enough money to farm with from USDA. So when they went in to get the money for the crop, they gave them half of what they need. Which was the way of keeping blacks from being successful. Because if you’re going to grow beans and you say, “I need this much for fertilizer, I need this much for crop protection, I need this much for seeds and I need this much for watering,” and you only get half of that, there’s no way for you to produce a good crop.

[Ed Scott Jr.]: It ain’t easy trying to buy no land in Mississippi. You’ll never own no land in Mississippi. The white people ain’t gonna let you own no land in Mississippi. That’s what the county agent’s going to tell you.

[Newkirk]: It’s documented. They did not offer him the same loan terms. They regularly offered him much smaller loans than they did white farmers in the area.

[Scott-White]: The county agent, he refused to give him a loan. So he could not feed his fish, could not water his crops. They foreclosed on his land.

[Newkirk]: At its peak, the Scotts’ farm spanned across 1000 acres. Now it was down to just 300.

[Farmers protesting.]

[Newkirk]: In 1997, thousands of black farmers sued the USDA for discrimination. What’s known as the black farmer’s lawsuit is actually called Pigford v. Glickman. One of the largest class action lawsuits filed on behalf of black farmers against the USDA and the federal government.

[John Boyd Jr., President, National Black Farmers Association]: There is a wide disparity in the way the department of agriculture treats black farmers versus white farmers.

[Philip Hainey, Vice President, National Black Farmers Association]: Because of the practices, the discriminatory practices of the USDA, I was put out of business. My family was destroyed, and basically they just destroyed my life.

[Newkirk]: The Scotts become one of the marquee families in this lawsuit.

[Scott-White]: OK, this is just where we were working on the lawsuit, and I had to go back and show where my daddy had taken out promissory notes with USDA as the backer. I tried to keep everything I could.

[Anderson Cooper, news announcer]: Now the government, the U.S. Department of Agriculture in this case, admits they discriminated against black farmers, unfairly denying them federal loans for instance.

[Speaker on news segment]: I’m very pleased the judge approved the settlement so we can begin to process these cases and black farmers can begin to receive their long overdue settlements.

[Newkirk]: The federal government paid out just north of $2 billion and upwards of 70,000 successful claims were made by black farmers in the south.

The Scotts received one of the largest settlements out of this lawsuit because, unlike lots of people, they had the documents to show exactly the ways in which the federal government discriminated against them. Most farmers were lucky to get $20,000.

[Scott-White]: I’ll give you an exact figure later but it was a little over 7 million dollars. He was blind but we made sure that he signed the documents to buy his land back. And he presented the check to the same man who was instrumental in taking this land. He was still in office.

[Newkirk]: It took the Scott family nearly 30 years, the space of a generation, to buy their land back. Land Hunger, as W.E.B. Dubois describes it, is this almost mystical drive to seek and to own something in this United States among people who were once property themselves.

If you look at the Scotts, you look at what the land meant to them. It wasn’t just money. It was destiny, it was something to hold onto. It was a purpose and something that held their family together through generations.

[Scott-White]: It grieves me that we were denied a history and that’s how I see it. And I’m going to try not to cry. It’s dear to me that my children know what my ancestors went through for us to be where we are and who we are. And for my dad, having the land and keeping the land, that was his dream. That was the heritage. The land was a heritage.

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Transcript for “How Black Americans Were Robbed of Their Land” by Vann R. Newkirk II for The Atlantic is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 10.19, Sustainable Farming – TechKnow

[Kyle Hill]: At first glance this might look like your typical dairy farm in the heartland of America.

[Gary Corbett, CEO, Fair Oaks Farm]: We probably have 32,000 acres that we own. We milk on 11 sites, we have 11 parlors and we’re milking right now probably a little over 36,000 cows.

[Hill]: But what makes this Indiana farm unique isn’t what you see, it’s what you smell.

These cows are full of it and it’s not just milk. So you don’t just have all these cows here for producing milk.

[Mark Stoermann, Fair Oaks Farm]: It’s actually a really great story. We take two products, milk and manure. They are both separated from the cow. The manure in the barns, the milk in the milking parlor. They come together as renewable natural gas on a tanker truck that then is able to deliver that milk all over the upper Midwest.

[Hill]: What you see behind me is Fair Oaks Farm’s $19 million investment in sustainability. Each year they produce over 2 million gallons of clean natural gas fuel. To put this into perspective, that’s enough to fully fuel 35 747s. It’s even enough to fuel a whole fleet of Fair Oak Farms milk trucks, which they do every day on the farm.

This new future of green energy lies in this innovation: A highly efficient anaerobic digester which converts the manure into compressed natural gas.

[Mark]: We produce about 500,000 gallons of liquid manure from the areas that go into the central digester.

[Hill]: How do you deal with all the manure they’re producing constantly every day?

[Mark]: We use a vacuum tanker, so every time the cows go in to be milked – three times a day – we vacuum all the manure out of the aisles, collect it and take it to the digester. And that’s where the technology for cleaning the gas comes in.

[Hill]: Manure is poured into the digester and heated. Microbes break it down, creating a biogas that is captured and piped as renewable natural gas. The leftover liquid is used as fertilizer.

[Corbett]: We’re taking something that potentially could be a contaminant to the environment, totally taking that out of the picture. We are taking cow manure and making rocket science. And we feel pretty good about that.

[Hill]: So what have we got here?

[Corbett]: We got the future. The future’s laying right in front of you. This is a little heifer calf that was born in the last 45 minutes. And that’s what it’s about.

[Hill]: How many of these little guys are born every day?

[Corbett]: Right now with our new barn open, probably about 140 to 150.

[Hill]: This isn’t just the cycle of life. This is the start of the cycle you’ve got going on here. The crops from the manure, which makes the milk, which makes the methane and into the crops to feed the little guy like this one.

[Corbett]: It is a perfect circle with virtually no waste.

[Hill]: Right here is the start of the whole process.

[Mark]: This is the start of the process. The feed, the farms, that’s the start of the process.

[Hill]: Mark gave me an up-close look at the amazing technology which makes it all possible.

[Mark]: Basically now we are standing on top of the 6.2-million-gallon digester.

[Hill]: So this whole thing is basically like a giant cow gut.

[Mark]: The same bacteria, the same enzymes that are in her gut breaking down organic material and producing gas do so in the tank except this time we capture it instead of her belching it.

[Hill]: And then what comes out, you reuse. It’s also part of your sustainability, right?

[Mark]: Yes, actually, all the nutrients stay in the liquid. That gets returned to the land like we’ve always used it for fertilizer in the dairy industry.

[Mark Maloney, AMP Americas]: I see a lot of farms having the ability to replicate this model and turn their byproducts into real energy, and help save the planet.

[Hill]: Does it feel any different than any other diesel engine?

[Truck driver]: No. It’s obviously cleaner, I see no difference as far as pulling loads or anything like that.

[Hill]: Can you show me?

[Driver]: Sure.

[Music.]

[Hill]: In the face of climate change nearly every major industry is going to have to adapt and evolve. It’s inspiring to see sustainability on such a large scale right here in the heartland of America.

[Corbett]: Sustainability has always been a part of our farming operations. We just keep taking it to different levels. Because to survive in the 21st century you’re going to need sustainability, creativity, technology, innovation to get us there.

[Hill]:You guys want some ice cream?

[Children]: Yes.

[Hill]: And this grass to glass thinking has made this farm, and its ice cream, famous.

What flavors do you want?

[Children]: Strawberry.

[Hill]: Have you guys seen any cows on the farm?

[Children]: Yes.

[Hill]: What were they doing?

[Children]: Pooping.

[Hill]: I’ve been seeing cows poop on this farm all day today!

[Child]: This is better.

[Hill]: This is better than any ice cream you’ve ever had?

[Child]: Uh-huh.

[Hill]: Is this kind of one of your proudest achievements in farming? You’ve been farming for years and years. Is this something that you really just take pride in?

[Corbett]: Oh yeah, how can you not? The opportunity one, just to interact with people like we are to create this edutainment center if you will, the things we’re doing with the environment, the things we’re doing with our animals… this is just a nirvana for anything that’s involved in farming and agriculture, it’s terrific.

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Transcript for Figure 10.20, Vertical Farming – TechKnow

[Kosta Grammatis]: For over 8,000 years, we’ve been plowing dirt to grow our food. In fact, we’ve got so good at it that over 80% of the world’s farmable land is already in use. By 2050, we can expect another 3 billion people on planet Earth to join us for dinner, another China and India. On average, in the United States, produce travels 1500 miles from farm to plate, losing valuable taste and nutrients along the way. So how can we continue to grow food to feed the hungry masses? One answer is vertical farming.

Summerland, California, known for its eclectic shops and restaurants, has another new addition to its main street, a thriving vertical farm.

[Alex Thompson]: I’m Alex Thompson, owner and operator, Montecito Urban Farms.

[Grammatis]: Alex set up 60 tower gardens in a former parking lot that today produce a wide variety of crops. From seedlings to harvested vegetables, his farm delivers fresh vegetables to seven local restaurants every day.

[Grammatis]: This is a tower garden. Can you tell us how it works?

[Thompson]: It is a vertical aeroponic system. There is a simple fountain pump at the bottom that pumps the water to the top where there’s a shower cap. The water is essentially misting and raining down through the center column and getting all the root systems. It would be easier if I show you. How about if I pull this out? Look at how healthy and strong these root systems are. And the water every 15 minutes is just washing over these roots.

[Grammatis]: Is it ready to be harvested?

[Thompson]: Yeah, this is ready to be either fully harvested for a restaurant or you could start harvesting it and eating it.

[Grammatis]: Delicious.

[Thompson]: We have one restaurant here that’s garden to mouth in 50 feet.

[Grammatis]: I want to check this out.

We are here in Cafe Luna. What kind of different produce do you buy?

[Cafe Luna owner]: We buy kale, arugula, chives.

[Grammatis]: Did you get more customers when you made the switch?

[Cafe Luna owner]: Absolutely, yes.

[Grammatis]: What are your customers saying?

[Cafe Luna owner]: They say that things really pop, they taste just fabulous.

[Grammatis]: I heard you have a really good smoothie. I’d love to try it.

[Cafe Luna owner]: We do, it’s made with kale that is from directly next door.

[Grammatis]: Tell me how it works. How do you do this?

[Cafe Luna smoothie maker]: We’re going to start with the almond milk, tear off some kale, same amount of spinach, an entire banana, protein powder. That is health in a glass.

[Grammatis]: Delicious.

[Travels to O’Hare.]

[Grammatis]: I just landed here in O’Hare International Airport and I’m starving. There is a rumor that there’s a vertical garden that serves 10,000 people every year. Let’s go find it.

It’s like a secret garden in the middle of an airport. Totally amazing.

How many towers do we have growing here?

[Vertical Gardener]: We have 26 towers in this garden and each tower has 44 plants. So we’re growing lots and lots of different herbs, you can see we’ve got basil, we’ve got cilantro, and then we have lots of sage over here. We’re providing locally grown produce for restaurants that operate at the airport.

[Grammatis]: We just picked some fresh produce and now we are going to go to Wicker Park and make some sushi.

[Grammatis]: I’m Kosta Grammatis.

[Brad Maher, director of food and beverage, HMS Host]: Hi, Kosta, I’m Brad. Nice to meet you.

[Grammatis]: Nice to meet you. I picked some stuff upstairs, can we make something with it?

[Maher]: What we’ll do in the morning is we’ll go through the garden and select what needs to be harvested for the day.

[Grammatis]: Do people notice the taste? Does it taste different?

[Maher]: Absolutely. This roll is produced with some of the chives and lettuces that we harvested from the garden earlier. Like it?

[Grammatis]: Mmm. Super fresh, so good.

[Maher]: Go ahead and help yourself. I know you’re hungry.

[Grammatis]: I’m going to eat it all.

[Walks to preschool facility in Santa Barbara, California.]

[Grammatis]: Tower Gardens are so new, it’s hard to determine what kind of impact it can have on a nationwide scale, when it comes to feeding our country. But here at this preschool, kids have been eating from tower gardens for the last few months.

[Kids singing]: I like to eat, eat, eat kale from our garden.

[Cheri Diaz, Director of Hope 4 Kids Preschool]: Hope 4 Kids Preschool is the first preschool ever to have a commercial tower garden farm.

[Teacher]: Do you know what these are?

[Children]: Tower gardens.

[Grammatis]: I want to know what everyone’s favorite vegetable is?

[Child 1]: Mine is lettuce.

[Child 2]: Carrots.

[Child 3]: Tomatoes.

[Teacher]: Yours is tomatoes. Gracie, what do you want to pick? Arugula? Let’s pick some right here.

[Hildy Medina, Gracie’s mom]: One day we’re at the supermarket and this was after the tower gardens appeared. She grabbed a sugar pea and started eating it and I thought wow, I can’t believe she’s doing this.

[Teacher]: Did you eat snap peas off our tower garden?

[Gracie Crill, preschooler]: No.

[Teacher]: You didn’t eat the snap peas off the tower garden?

[Gracie]: No, we ate them all.

[Diaz]: They’ll ask if they can have some kale, or some lettuce, or some cilantro, and the teacher will go up and they’ll say sure, I’d love to. They’ll help them pull it off and they go wash it, and off they go, running to the sandbox with a piece of kale sticking out of their mouth.

[Grammatis]: What’s your favorite?

[Child]: Arugula!

[Child]: Eating the aphids.

[Teacher]: It’s eating the aphids!

[Grammatis]: Aphids!

[Grammatis]: What do you think the global impact would be if every kid had access to this at school?

[Diaz]: I believe it would seriously shut down fast food as we know it. People would learn the value of eating healthy.

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Transcript for Figure 12.14, Shame and Prejudice: Artist Kent Monkman’s Story of Resilience

[Kent Monkman]: What is the function of art and what is the purpose of art? Is it only just to show beauty or pleasure? I don’t believe so. I believe that art has to be challenging and it has to take us sometimes to dark places or to challenging places. I felt like at this moment in time it was important to have a critical perspective on Canada.

[Music]

Was it meant for indigenous people over these last hundred fifty years? What does colonization mean? And this exhibition reflects on the intergenerational trauma of these cycles of abuse, effects of colonialism in our communities.

I grew up in Winnipeg, I lived near my Cree relatives, my grandmother had been a student at residential school. At the time, you know, growing up I didn’t really know much about what had happened to her, she didn’t really talk about it. I realized that many of the things that happened to her had an impact on our family.

In the Urban Red series, there’s quite a bit of tension between the predator and prey, the idea that indigenous women are preyed upon. There’s a theme that runs through that body of work that reflects on missing and murdered indigenous women, and that ties back to the violence against the female nude. So I’m using the Cubist kind of violent depiction of the female nude to talk about that violence.

But I’m also in those paintings establishing a kind of tension between mythology, so indigenous spirituality and mythology in an urban environment, you know, and the tension or conflict between Christian beliefs and the tension between the colonial policies that have been institutionalized indigenous people in many ways, whether it’s incarcerating indigenous people or the beginning of the reserve system, residential schools, and so forth. So those themes run throughout various chapters in this exhibition.

[Music]

Canada is going to be celebrated this year for being 150 years old, but I think it’s important for Canadians to acknowledge the experience of indigenous people. That’s how we get reconciliation. It means that every Canadian should understand and should learn something more about the indigenous experience because our foundational myths are flawed unless they incorporate these experiences into them, into our national mythology.

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Transcript for Figure 12.19, Rosie Perez on Roles for Women of Color

Women of color, if you’re over 40 and you get fat, you will work. But if you’re hot and over 40 and a woman of color, they don’t know what to do with you.

Tell me what woman of color, whether she be Asian, black, Latin, Native American – ooh, they get the worst of it, right? – that is hot, got body going on, the hair’s still sparkling, how many leads do you see them have?

You have this big, fat, blubbery male actor having a love scene with like a 20-year-old and you’re like, for real? For real? But are you going to do that for us, too? It doesn’t happen. Put on the weight, welcome to Big Mama’s House. [Laughs.]

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Transcript for Figure 12.20, Does Ethnicity Prevent Actors From Booking Work?

So do you feel that your ethnicity prevents you from certain roles?

[Bea Reyes]: Sometimes. Because I mean, like, there’s a lot of people that are saying like, “Oh, Asians are getting more in.” But then you have to remember, there’s such a big wide range of Asians. You have Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Filipino, that’s a lot. But I mean, like, you can’t just put it to one. There’s so, so many different types. But I mean, like, I hope like I have it in just because a lot of Filipinos do look Mexican and sometimes they do look for that Mexican role. So I mean, like, I think I probably have a better chance than, I mean, Filipinos have a better chance than other Asians. But at the same time, you have to weigh it out because they also want Chinese, you know? I mean, they always want the Chinese triad family role too. So I think having this ethnicity that I have is a bit difficult to get in like acting and everything.

[West Liang]: But just as an example, I’ve had meetings with agents or have had managers tell me that agents won’t see me because they already have an Asian guy. You know, that’s just one example where you’re allowed to have all kinds of different white women and white men, but you’re allowed to have one Asian girl and one Asian guy. You know? And my manager has tried to convince agents to say, “Hey, listen, he’s a little bit different or he’s this and that.” But they’re like, “Well, we already have an Asian guy and that Asian guy can pretty much do everything, you know?” So finding representation has been really kind of an interesting journey. So that’s similar to casting, you know? I do a lot of theater and that’s certainly been the case where they talk about diversity casting. But, you know, signing the check is a different animal, you know, to get them to actually like sign on the dotted line to say, “I want to cast you.” That’s a bigger decision. So they’re all very, a lot of them are very interested in meeting you and seeing your shows, um, but to actually, you know, cast an Asian American lead in a role that’s not written for an Asian American or in a play that’s not about the, you know, um, is an identity-driven piece. It’s a different, it’s a different dialogue, you know, because, you know, it’s like if you have, I mean, it’s if you have, you have a show that’s like four different, you know, white men and women and you have one minority, then it’s like, okay, well, that’s good. But then if you suddenly have, you know, three minorities and one white guy, then it’s like, is this, is this story about race? Is it a story about black people or Asian people? You know? Um, I think that lingers in the back of a lot of people’s minds. I don’t think they’re, it’s as on the surface, but as a minority, I certainly see kind of hints of that, you know, that they’re almost afraid to make things too ethnic or too cultural, um, as opposed to no, it’s just an American story.

[Josephine Von Oswald]: Yes. Um, especially in the non-union section of work just because a lot of like student films and low-budget movies always look for the all-American type, which is either black or white, and I’m neither. So it’s like really hard to go out for that or actually not hard, I can’t just go out for that role because it’s just like, you know, we need a white, blonde, skinny female, or we need, you know, the typical ghetto black girl. And it’s just like, you know, I can’t do. So yeah, um, yes, I do think that, uh, I’m kind of limited in my roles.

[Tierney Dale]: As African-American, and as a female, you’re not going to have a lot of roles that are just written for you. I get a lot of that. And so I’m like, well, how do I break into the industry, you know? I’m African-American, I’m young, and I’m a female. No, no, no. Well, what’s the yes? So I’ve been focusing on that, and I feel like there are roles for me, and I’ve been seeing a lot more roles come out for me. And it’s not necessarily the main character, but I’m here doing what I love to do. So it’s not about being the main character for me. It’s about, you know, doing what I love to do, making a living out of it, and just enjoying my job.

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Transcript for Figure 12.24, Depictions of Transgender “Deception” in Media

[Rantasmo]: So a couple of years ago, Seth Macfarlane spoke to thebacklot.com, which was then called afterelton.com, about an upcoming episode of “Family Guy” featuring a transgender character. This is what he said: “I can safely say that the transsexual community will be very, very happy with the ‘Quagmire’ episode that we have coming up in a couple of months. It’s probably the most sympathetic portrayal of a transsexual character that has ever been on television, dare I say.” This is the episode that he was describing.

[Brian]: I had sex with her!

[Continuous retching.]

[Prolonged sigh.]

[Music]

[Rantasmo]: As much as I would dearly love to blame all of life’s problems on Seth Macfarlane, this isn’t a trope that he invented. Transgender characters, particularly trans women, have an unfortunate history of being portrayed not only as objects of disgust, but of deceit. Their identities are used as plot twists, and in the most malicious examples, they’re portrayed as traps that straight, cisgender men fall into. And, for some reason, immediately barf? Seriously, guys, what is with all the barfing?

Perhaps the most iconic example of this particular trope is in “The Crying Game”, a thriller from 1992 about a member of the Irish Republican Army, Fergus, who becomes involved with a deceased British soldier’s girlfriend, Dil, who is later revealed to be transgender. By which I mean they’re about to have sex, and then we get a close-up of her business. I actually feel like this is probably the most sympathetic example of this trope to date. Like, yeah, Fergus does the barfing thing, but he gets over it relatively quickly, and he even ends up staying in the relationship in spite of some much more dangerous complications. The whole thing’s framed as more of a misunderstanding than an outright deception.

[Fergus]: [retching]

[Dil]: I’m sorry! I thought you knew!

[Rantasmo]: But “The Crying Game” also came at a time when it was a lot more common for people to conflate transgender women with gay men. And it doesn’t do a great job of making that distinction.

[Fergus]: Thing is, Dil, you’re not a girl!

[Dil]: Details, baby, details.

[Rantasmo]: In fact, there are a lot of reviews from ’92 calling Dil a transvestite or a gay man in drag. And I can’t even unequivocally say that she’s not that, because the movie never quite makes it clear. I’m not even sure it knows the difference, because as far as the narrative’s concerned, the difference doesn’t matter. That’s a trait it shares with other movies, where the reveal of a character’s sex is little more than a cheap gag at the expense of trans people.

Is the murderous Einhorn from “Ace Ventura” a trans woman, or a man in disguise? Who cares, look how gross she is! Ew! Hell, this has even happened on reality dating shows.

[Miriam]: I’m not a woman.

[Men]: [Laughing.]

[Miriam]: I was born as a man.

[Men]: [Laughing.] Aw, man!

[Rantasmo]: Well, uh…at least they’re not barfing. Using transgender identity as a shocking plot twist or a wacky misunderstanding wouldn’t be that big a deal if it happened in a vacuum. But we’re talking about a demographic that’s still practically invisible in the media. So it sucks that so much of what little transgender representation actually exists frames them as some sort of hazard designed to elicit horror or ridicule. Especially since “trans panic” has been used in courtrooms to defend actual, real violence against trans people.

What’s more, this tripe gives the impression that trans people are somehow lying by not disclosing their quote-unquote “real” gender. Speaking as a cisgender guy, I’m in no way an authority here, but it seems to me that trans people are under no more obligation to disclose the details of their gender history than I am to tell guys on the first date what my genitalia looks like.

“Hey, you didn’t tell me your d*ck was made of amethyst!” Personally, I’d like to see more stories framed from a transgender point of view. A big problem with the “trap” trope is that it reinforces the cisgender male gaze. And one way of fixing that is giving trans characters more agency in the narrative outside of just being a spectacle for us to react to. There have been a few examples of this, but we could really use more. Because truth told, transphobia is what really makes me wanna barf.

[Music]

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Transcript for Figure 13.4, Systemic Racism Explained

Introduction

This is Jamal. Jamal is a boy who lives in a poor neighborhood. He has a friend named Kevin who lives in a wealthy neighborhood. All of Jamal’s neighbors are African-American, and all of Kevin’s neighbors are white. Because Jamal’s school district is mostly funded by property taxes, his school is not very well funded. His classrooms are overcrowded, his teachers are underpaid, and he doesn’t have access to high-quality tutors or extracurricular activities. Kevin’s school district is also funded by property taxes, so his school is very well funded. His classrooms are never crowded, his teachers are very well paid, and he has access to high-quality tutors and lots of extracurricular activities.

Kevin and Redlining

Jamal lives only a few streets away from Kevin, so how come they’re growing up in such different worlds with such different opportunities for success? The answer has to do with America’s history of systemic racism. To understand it better, let’s look at what life was like for Kevin and Jamal’s grandparents. Decades after the Civil War, many government agencies started to draw maps dividing cities into sections that were either desirable or undesirable for investment. This practice was called redlining, and it usually blocked off entire Black neighborhoods from access to private and public investment. Banks and insurance companies used these maps for decades to deny Black people loans and other services based purely on race.

Historically speaking, owning a home and getting a college education is the easiest way for an American family to build wealth. But when Jamal’s grandparents wanted to buy a house, the banks refused because they lived in a neighborhood that was redlined. So Jamal’s grandparents were not able to buy a home, and because colleges could prevent them from attending through legal segregation, their options for higher education were really scarce. Kevin’s grandparents, on the other hand, got a low-interest loan to buy their first house and got accepted into a handful of top universities, which traditionally only accepted white students. This opened up a wealth of opportunities that they were able to pass on to their kids and grandkids. Even as late as the 1980s, an investigation into the Atlanta real estate market showed that banks were more willing to lend to low-income white families than to middle or upper-income African-American families.

As a result, today, for every hundred dollars of wealth held by a white family, black families have five dollars and four cents. A 2017 study confirms that redlining is still affecting home values in major cities like Chicago today. This explains how Kevin and Jamal inherited vastly different circumstances.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there. A big part of systemic racism is implicit bias—prejudices in society that people are not aware that they have. Let’s go back to Kevin and Jamal.

Kevin and Jamal

Against all odds, Jamal manages to be the only student from his high school to get accepted into a great university, the same one that Kevin and his high school friends are attending. But after Kevin and Jamal both graduate, Jamal notices that his resume isn’t drawn as much interest as Kevin’s, even though they graduated from the same program with the exact same GPA. Unfortunately for Jamal, studies show that resumes with white-sounding names get twice as many callbacks as identical resumes with black-sounding names. Implicit bias is one of the reasons why the black unemployment rate is twice the rate of white unemployment, even among college graduates.

Systemic Racism

You can see evidence of systemic racism in every area of life. The disparities in family wealth, incarceration rates, political representation, and education are all examples of systemic racism. Unfortunately, the biggest challenge with systemic racism is that there’s no single person or entity responsible for it, which makes it very hard to solve.

What Can You Do?

What can you do? The first thing you can do is work towards becoming more aware of your own implicit biases. What are some prejudices that you might hold that you’re not aware of? Second, let’s acknowledge that the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow laws are still affecting access to opportunity today. As a result, we should support systemic changes that create more equal opportunities for everyone. Increasing public school funding and making it independent from property taxes would be a great start so that poor and wealthy districts can receive equal access to resources. Systemic problems require systemic solutions. Luckily, we’re all part of the system, which means that we all have a role to play in making it better.

Peace.

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Transcript for Figure 13.5, What is Neurodiversity?

[Stephen Munt, counseling psychologist and psychotherapist]: What I mean by neurodiversity is that all brains are different.

[Jacinta Powell]: Growing up, I felt different to other people, and I sort of viewed myself as an outsider. And actually, that was okay, that was alright. I just sort of, somewhere in my heart, accepted that I was different. I don’t think it made me feel very good or very well, but it was just who and what I was.

[Munt]: The term neurodiversity actually came into being in the context of the autism disability movement, for want of a better expression, where people with autism were saying, “Actually, you shouldn’t see us as people having something wrong with us. We haven’t got a disease, we’re not broken, we are just different. We are towards the ends of a spectrum on which everybody is located.”

[Powell]: I just thought I was a bit of a freak, to be honest with you. You know, I was like, “Well, why can’t I cope with situations like family members or close friends? Why do I struggle in being around so many people?” Or yeah, it used to happen quite a lot in, well, social situations. And I would say that I was better on a one-to-one basis, but it would sort of impact me more when there were more than, you know, two people there.

[Munt]: What I’m trying to talk about is that if you are significantly different from the average person, and if we think about the average person as being in the middle of the bell curve—you know what I mean by that—so most of us are in the middle section. But of course, there are some of us who are towards the ends, aren’t there? Just as a matter of probability, that is bound to be the case. And because we probably exist on many, many, and maybe millions of different dimensions, it’s likely that all of us, in some respects, are outliers rather than average people who are the ones who are ascribed, described as normal.

[Powell]: I think one way I dealt with, I suppose, my difference, which I wasn’t aware of growing up, was I was very shy, and I feel quite emotional saying this, but I think I sort of isolated myself from other people. And I’ve always had friends, but if I reflect how it was, it wasn’t a very, you know, especially when I was a lot younger, pleasant experience for me. And it was almost like I sort of had, it would happen—I can write now when I think of it, it’s like having an out-of-body experience. I sort of, yeah, and actually, maybe that is what happened, is that I used to sort of, you know, maybe dissociate or leave my body to deal with it because it was too stimulating for me.

[Munt]: The human world, of necessity, is created for the majority. That’s just practical sense. If you’re not, in certain respects, like the majority, if you’re a bit different, adapting to that world can be very difficult, fitting into it can be very difficult. If you can’t sit still and you’re very distractible and you find it hard to attend to rather dull material, and if you struggle with learning to read and write, you’re going to find it very difficult to do well at school. And that can have all four consequences.

[Powell]: If ADHD was something that was diagnosed when I was at school, I probably would have been, you know, not labeled, diagnosed for that. And the proof’s in the pudding, is in my school reports. You know, it’s so interesting, I found them recently, actually, and I’m so ashamed about them that I actually chucked them in. And that’s a really sad thing, but I always got really good grades, but it was, it was my behavior. And it was, um, just, I can’t sit still, just, since I can’t stop talking. And so, I was always in trouble at school, but it was like something that I couldn’t help and I wasn’t aware of it at all. But that really, I think, you can see, with my emotion, it really dented my confidence because I was ten years old, having awful school reports and my parents having to go in and be told that I’m this disruptive person. And as a child, you know, you have no bad intentions, but you’re being told there’s something wrong with you, I suppose. So that was really, really challenging for me.

[Munt]: I think it’s important to consider the matter of context as well, actually. If you’ve got what is often referred to as dyslexia, that’s thought of as a disorder, but I prefer to call it difficulties with reading, learning to read and write. Actually, it only becomes salient in a literate society. In a preliterate society, it wouldn’t exist, it wouldn’t be noticed. The problem arises when somebody who is not well adapted to functioning in a particular required way has to try and behave in that required way.

[Powell]: Now, I remember working in TV, and one of the things that we had to do were write character profiles, and I was always two or three behind. And this was before, I think, I was diagnosed with dyslexia, so it was years and years of not understanding myself or how I’m different. And that really sort of impacted when I was a boy, it really impacted on my self-esteem.

[Munt]: Something I haven’t talked about is the impact on other people. And that’s part of what I talked about in, when I’m counseling somebody who I think has this sort of individual difference, that very often it’s actually difficult for other people as well.

[Powell]: I was probably a bit of a loose cannon with my, with my, my rational self-body. I was properly sort of reacting quite a lot to my environment, but that’s not to say that my emotions weren’t coming out with a frightened center as well.

[Munt]: I think there’s a tendency to think that people who are normal are all the same, and that people who are abnormal within their disorder categories, if you see what I mean, within their diagnostic categories, that they’re all the same as well, and that there’s a kind of cutoff between, you know, those who are normal and those who are abnormal. And what I’m thinking about is a much finer gradation of difference on a very large number of spectra or dimensions.

[Powell]: Probably the most helpful thing for me in terms of my neurodiversity and where I am on the spectrum, or you know, how I vary to others, has been just the simple thing of — it was a counselor that reflected – my huge, my huge empathic quality. That was key, that was fundamental. Understanding that I was very emotionally sensitive, understanding that I had huge emotional sensitivity, and then not reacting to it, and just sort of loving myself within it, holding myself really and centering myself, and becoming more into my zone than other people’s zones, that was sort of, and that is the process that I’m still in, really, that sort of when. So that’s been so, so helpful.

[Munt]: The neurodiversity movement within the autism conversation has talked about invisible disability, and the political part of it is saying, “Well, you know, if other forms of disability are granted special consideration in terms of access and things like that, then perhaps we should get this too.” And I think I’ve got a lot of sympathy for that.

[Powell]: Since understanding who I am and my sensitivities more, and I’ve been able to sort of center myself and find methods to calm myself down, whether it’s, you know, my emotions coming up or maybe there’s a lot going on in the environment and that’s overstimulating me, so you know, I’ve realized that spending a lot, a lot of time on my own, centering myself, is actually key to my overall well-being. So I walk a lot, I love being in nature, and that makes me feel really present and held and safe. And that gives me time to really be with my inner self and my, you know, inner child. You know, there’s lots of different ways of describing that.

[Munt]: The temptation for the therapist could be, if they weren’t alive to this, it could be to assure the person that there’s nothing wrong with them. Now obviously, there’s a problem with saying there’s something wrong with you. And I’m not saying there’s something wrong, I’m saying actually, you have some significant individual differences from the norm which make life in certain situations a lot more challenging and difficult than they are for most people. And actually, we need to recognize that. It’s an unfortunate fact. Now how are we going to deal with it better?

[Powell]: Now we know how to look after myself and what situations, you know, do and don’t work for me. And, you know, now I’ve been able to manage that better. I know it’s not a character flaw or something negative about me. I’ve been able to bring it into my life in a positive way. I might just go home, I can see that person might need a hug, or just, you know, maybe they might want to, maybe I should ask them that question to see how they’re feeling. And I don’t know why I feel it, I should all about this, but maybe that’s what—maybe I lack that in my life as well. But so going back to my life now, I see that they’re gifts because I can give it to people, and actually it brings positive things into my life, into my relationships, into my work, and my family as well.

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Transcript for Figure 13.8, Newberg’s Ban on Pride Flags at Schools Gets National Attention

[Dan Haggerty, host of The Story on KGW]: So should we, should we get into this Newberg thing? Let’s get into this Newberg thing. After all, the rest of the country seems to be awfully interested in it.

I want to start with a quick recap just to get everybody up to speed. A lot of you may already know some of this stuff, but the school board in Newburgh recently banned the Black Lives Matter symbol and the pride symbol from its schools. The board members who voted for this say they want to keep politics out of the classroom, and they believe those are political symbols. Now this has divided the community. Some neighbors, they built a huge pride flag in a field as a protest. Meanwhile, the ACLU wants to sue the district saying the ban is unconstitutional, but the school board – they’re sticking with it.

So let’s boil this down a bit, shall we? I talked to a journalist named Ryan Clark with the Newberg Graphic. He knows his story and he knows his community, inside and out, and I want to start by talking about each symbol on its own, beginning with the pride flag and why the board views a symbol that has always been a representation of inclusion as a polarizing political Image.

[Ryan Clark]: Board members have said on the record that they believe that LGBTQ people in the LGBTQ movement generally is inherently political and has an agenda.

I will say that Newberg historically is a conservative Christian community, but there I know of many people and speak to them constantly in the community who are both LGBTQ and devout Christians. Whether they be students at George Fox University, professors, community members, business owners. There are people of all walks of life in Newberg. There’s more diversity than someone on the outside might think is in a rural suburban community.

[Haggerty]: OK, now look. Don’t start tweeting at me just yet. Let’s keep going here. ‘Cause next I want to talk about Black Lives Matter. The slogan of a social movement that asked people to consider certain aspects of racism and discrimination and inequality that is exclusive to people of color in this country. Now what makes this symbol arguably different from the Pride flag is that BLM is an actual organization that has a political agenda.

But how do the people who are opposed to this ban grapple with the fact that Black Lives Matter is an actual organization that is politically – does have a political stance, that does collect donations for political means?

[Clark]: The biggest thing I’ve heard from from black people in Newberg and black activists and their allies is that the signs themselves do not indicate support for Black Lives Matter the organization, nor do they come from that organization specifically. They aren’t purchased from BLM, the organization, but the signs do affirm to black students that their life matters.

[Haggerty]: Now I know this is a touchy topic. I know that I’m sure you’ve probably already made up your mind and not just on the topic, but on my potential bias one way or another, as I’m reporting this story. But I do want you to consider something that is indisputable and keep that in mind. There are Republicans and there are Democrats both who support the phrase Black Lives Matter and what it stands for. There are Republicans and Democrats who support the LGBTQIA community. Your skin color or your sexual orientation does not decide your political party. Or how you feel about politics, immigration, abortion mask mandates, how we’re handling a warming climate, or if you support police. That was one of the arguments when people wanted a thin blue line flag to be removed from an office in Aloha High School. That symbol was always something that’s supported police and recognized fallen officers. But it’s also been co-opted for political purposes and people wanted it to come down. The district defended it by the way, citing free speech.

So I was curious with the school board in Newberg thinks of that flag and if that flag has a place in their schools or if this discussion about political symbols is exclusive to pride and BLM.

Have they commented at all about about that?

[Clark]: Not even remotely. They’ve been asked by opposing board members who. Have questioned how this would apply to other political items and they said it would be a case by case basis. As far as flags that might be on the other side of the aisle or clothing that staff might wear, at this point, they have have not been as specific as they have been with the Black Lives Matter signage and the pride flags, and that cuts to the core of what seems to be a lot of folks in the community and and they’ve told me this, and in the stories I’ve reported, this seems to be an intensely political issue here.

[Haggerty]: Clearly yes, this is an intensely political issue, but the question is, is that because those symbols are innately political or because we are making them political in Newberg on both sides of the issue?

Either way, it may not matter. Like I said before, the ACLU wants to sue. They think this is an infringement on the Constitution and the right to free speech, and it might be. In fact, the district isn’t even sure. Right now, they’re trying to figure it out as we speak. Let me know what you think. Email us at thestory@kgw.com, find me on Facebook and Instagram. Or you can use Twitter and the hashtag heydan.

Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 13.8, Newberg’s Ban on Pride Flags at Schools Gets National Attention

Transcript for “Newberg’s Ban on Pride Flags at Schools Gets National Attention” by KGW News is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 13.24, US College Students Need Help

[Hank Green]: Good morning John, 10 years ago when we first started making Crash Course I had a pretty specific idea of what kind of help students needed in high school and college. They needed better tools for learning! And they do. And I’m really proud of the work Crash Course has done in that space. But also, during those 10 years the outcomes for your typical high school junior have not been great. 84% of those kids want to continue their education after high school but only about 66% of them will. And of the people who go onto college, only 60% of those people will actually get a degree. And so yes, about 40% of Americans with student loans are not going to get a degree.

My first impulse when hearing this is “this is a learning problem. We need to teach these kids better.” And that is part of the problem, arguably the larger part is just understanding how this tremendously complex system works. Admissions, financial aid, credit transfer, degree paths, a huge variety of institutions with a huge variety of systems. Only 20% of students receive counseling on how best to pay for college. Only 30% receive counseling on how admissions works. And worst of all of course, people for whom this is hardest are the ones who get the least support from their institutions and systems. And they’re also the ones who, on average, have the least time and money to deal with it.

If you need more aid and more loans, it’s much more likely that you have a fulltime or part-time job during the period in which you are applying to school. You’re also much more likely to have unpaid work doing childcare or elder care, and you’re less likely to have other people in your life who have gone through and experienced these systems who can give you advice. Everything from loans to majors to transferring credits from community college to class selection, career counseling, financing. This is a big, messy bureaucracy. Anybody who interfaces with it, even people inside of it, will tell you this. They know it’s hard. But the less you know, the more likely you are to end up in a situation where you’ve boxed yourself into a bad outcome. Or you may even be being taken advantage of by bad institutions. The inability to make an informed decision when it’s one of the most important decisions you’re ever going to make, is one of the main reasons why so many students end up with loans but no degree. And we understood none of this when we were first making Crash Course.

So over the last couple years for you and me, and a lot of the people who work at Complexly, we’ve undergone a bit of a Crash Course in understanding how higher education actually works in this country. And we had a little bit of help with that. So I’m excited to be telling you that in partnership with Arizona State University, we are launching a new Youtube channel called Study Hall.

And also we’re launching a new course on Crash Course. It’s called Crash Course How to College, a course that takes on all of the options a person in the U.S. has to face when considering their future. From financial aid, to admissions, to majors and careers.

Now we already made a series of courses with ASU under the name Study Hall, with the specific goal of helping people with the subjects that most interfere with a student’s ability to succeed in early college. Now we are launching the Study Hall project as a whole Youtube channel starting with a series that I’m extremely excited about. It’s called Fast Guides. The Fast Guides are a quick but pretty deep dive into what you’re getting yourself into when you’re choosing a major. What work can you expect? What skills do you need? What are good alternatives if you want to switch majors from that major? And what do graduates in that major end up doing after graduation? I’m so excited about these 2 new things, I’ve learned so much about why they are necessary.

So please check out Crash Course How to College and the Study Hall Youtube channel, and send them to everyone you know who might be going to college in the near future. Including yourself. I have seen the tremendous amount of work and thought and care that has gone into these things. And I know that when good people work hard together they really can help to solve hard problems. So tell everyone you know! There are links in the description and also probably right here. John, I’ll see you on Tuesday.

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Transcript for “US College Students Need Help” by vlogbrothers is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

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Transcript for Figure 14.3, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

[Instructor]: During the Holocaust in the 1940s, Viktor Frankl spent three years as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps. His wife, father, mother and brother died in these camps. He was faced with extreme hunger, debilitating illnesses and brutal living conditions, yet unlike the prisoners around him he somehow managed to find hope and meaning during one of the most catastrophic events in human history. It’s no wonder Man’s Search for Meaning sold over 10 million copies and became one of the most influential books in the world. With that said, let’s have a look at three powerful lessons we can learn from the book.

Lesson one, he who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear with almost any ‘how.’ Frankl was confronted by a fellow inmate, let’s call him Felix. Felix shared a dream he had in February 1945. A voice told him he could wish for something so he wished to know when he would be liberated from the concentration camp and have his sufferings come to an end. The voice replied, March the 30th. Felix had a strong sense of hope and was convinced the voice in his dream was right. As the date ticked closer the war got worse, making it appear to be very unlikely that freedom was near. On March the 29th, Felix suddenly became ill. On March the 30th, the day he expected to be free, he lost consciousness. On March 31st he was dead. To paraphrase Frankl’s own words, the ultimate cause of my friend’s death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed. This suddenly lowered his body’s resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed and his body fell victim to illness and thus the voice of his dream was right after all. To back up this case, the chief doctor of the concentration camp witnessed an increased death rate of prisoners between Christmas 1944 and New Years 1945. The doctor believed this was due to prisoners having false hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near, many lost hope and fell into an endless sleep. So you might be asking, what can we learn from these stories? Well Frankl sums it up by saying, “Any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength “in the camp had first to succeed “in showing him some future goal. “Whenever there was an opportunity for it, “one had to give them a why, “an aim for their lives, in order to strengthen them “to bear the terrible how of their existence.” Basically, the prisoners who found a reason to live had a stronger will to live and chance of coming out alive and those without a reason to keep going, increased their likelihood of severe illness and death. Frankl goes on to describe two prisoners who were contemplating suicide. They used the typical argument that they had nothing more to expect from life, but they didn’t commit suicide. Why, because they found meaning, a reason to keep going. For one it was his child waiting for him in a foreign country, the other man was a scientist who had written a series of books which still needed to be finished. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the why for his existence and will be able to bear almost any how.

Lesson two, love is the ultimate and highest goal to which a man can aspire. Frankl emphasizes that everyone’s meaning is completely unique and that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which a man can aspire. It was one man’s love for his child that kept him pushing forward and for another it was his love for sharing his findings with the world through books. For Frankl himself, it was the love for his wife that kept him going. He realized the power of love on a cold dark day where he and his inmates were commanded to march out to a work site. They emaciated prisoners were beaten and forced to trudge over large stones and icy terrain. One inmate whispered to Frankl, if our wives could see us now, I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us. Upon reflecting on this time in the past, Frankl said, “I did not know whether my wife was alive and I had no means of finding out. “But at that moment it ceased to matter. “There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch “the strength of my love, my thoughts, “and the image of my beloved. “Had I known then that my wife was “dead, I think that I would still have given myself, “undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation “of her image and that my mental conversation “with her would have been just as vivid “and just as satisfying.”

The final lesson is this, when we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. Before Frankl was put in a concentration camp, he was working as a clinical psychiatrist. He once had a client with severe depression. Let’s call him Peter. Peter could not overcome the loss of his wife who died two years ago. Frankl asked him, what would have happened if you had died first and your wife would have had to survive for you. Oh, he said, for her this would have been terrible. She would have suffered. Frankl replied, you see, Peter, such a suffering has been spared and it was you who have spared her this suffering. He said nothing, shook Frankl’s hand and calmly left the office. Frankl said, “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering “in the moment it finds a meaning. “such as the meaning of a sacrifice. “Of course this was no therapy in the proper sense “since first his despair was no disease; “and second I could not change his fate; “I could not revive his wife. “But in that moment, I did succeed in changing his attitude “toward his unalterable fate and he could now at least “see a meaning in his suffering.” In the world today, countless people who have found themselves in seemingly hopeless circumstances have found meaning in their lives. Nick Vujicic is a living example. He was born with no arms or legs but he overcame his disabilities to live an independent, rich, fulfilling life where he serves as a role model to help millions of people to overcome adversity and living meaningful lives. Some things in life are inevitable. The loss of loved ones, terminal illnesses, and forgotten memories. Whatever we do, Man’s Search for Meaning challenges us to accept that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find a meaning in it, and move forward.

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Transcript for “Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl” by One Percent Better is included under fair use.

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Transcript for Figure 14.12, Taken from Their Families

[Walter Little Moon]: I ended up in a place where nothing… nothing… nothing made any sense at all. You know, it wasn’t home. It wasn’t… I didn’t know anything about school. Nobody ever told me anything about school. I didn’t know what education was.

I remember that I wanted to go home. Period. I didn’t want to be there; I just wanted to go home.

[Dennis Banks]: We all had to strip down naked, and then they put the DDT on us. They line us up and they’re cutting our hair. You have long hair, you have braids, and then that gets cut off. And I would say within a matter of an hour and a half we’re standing there, all looking alike.

[Narrator]: Between the 1870s and the 1960s, over 100,000 Indian children were sent to one of the nearly 500 boarding schools scattered across the United States.

[Historical Speech]: Through the agencies of the government, they are being rapidly brought from their state of comparative savagery and barbarism to one of civilization. (Children singing “Ten Little Indians”)

[Banks]: You couldn’t sing any Native songs or tribal songs.

They just started using English. You could only… you could not use any other language. We’d whisper, “Pass the bkwezhgan, bkwezhgan”– pass the bread over. It’s like I had to be two people. I had to be Nowa Cumig, and I had to be Dennis Banks. Nowa Cumig is my real name, my Ojibwa name. Dennis Banks had to be very protective of Nowa Cumig. And so I learned who the presidents were. And I learned the math. I learned the social studies. I learned the English, and Nowa Cumig was still there.

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Transcript for Figure 14.13, The U.S. Government’s Education of Native American Children

[Walter Little Moon]: This is education that was promised us, that was guaranteed us through the treaties, but it wasn’t. It was torture. Brainwashing. They called us many different names… Savage. Dumb. I got beat for looking like an Indian, smelling like an Indian, even speaking Indian. Everything I did. (cries)

[Dennis Banks]: Their de-Indianization program, it failed. But the toll was devastating. It destroyed our family. It destroyed the relationship we had with our mother. I could never regain that friendship-loveship relationship that I had with my mother. It wasn’t there anymore, and that’s what, to this day, I keep thinking, that, you know, damn this government, what it did to me and what it did to thousands of other children across this country.

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Transcript for Figure 14.14, Remaining Native

[Ku Stevens]: I was raised in a sweat lodge, you know, in that kind of atmosphere going to bear camp each year, going to Sundance each year. You know, those are just hard native things. I’ve always just been native.

[Delmar Stevens]: Ku was a fun little kid. He liked to run. When he was maybe four or five and there was a kids half mile, he sprinted it, it was just fast.

[Ku]: You know, they always told me, your legs are going to take you places. I just wish it could have happened sooner. We just didn’t have the resources.

I can just imagine my people out here know and what they had to go through and the odds of me being here right now. It’s just… it’s crazy.

[Delmar]: Grandpa was Frank Quinn. He was born in 1905. When he was eight years old, he was stolen from his family and taken to Stewart. He rebelled. He left three times as a little boy.

[News report]: Authorities in Canada have uncovered the remains of 215 children at the site of a former residential school for indigenous students.

[Misty Stevens]: I saw the announcement of the children in Canada.

[Ku]: I just thought of my great grandfather. How could an eight year old do that? Cross over mountains, 50 miles in a couple of days? It’s just unthinkable.

[Misty]: With all of the news coming out, we needed to come together and try and help. So we decided to do it. Running from Stewart to Yerington like his grandpa.

[Ku, speaking to a crowd]: I want to thank all of you, really, because this has been a dream of me and my dad’s for a while. And by you being here, every single one of you, you’re fulfilling that. And it’s something that’s needed.

[Ku]: It’s just not that simple. You know, it’s a lot deeper than that. And a lot of people don’t know that at all.

[Music]

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Transcript for Figure 14.17, Marie’s Dictionary

[In the United States more than 130 Native American languages are endangered. Several are on the verge of extinction with only a handful of fluent speakers remaining.]

[Marie Wilcox, speaking Wukchumni]: A long time ago there were no people, only animals. Eagle, our leader, said to the animals we must make people. All the animals wanted people to have hands like theirs.

[Wilcox, in English]: My name is Marie Wilcox. My grandmother delivered me Thanksgiving Day on November 24th, 1933. We only had a little one-room house. Grandpa and grandma always spoke our language, Wukchumni. I just didn’t hear my grandma speak too much English.

[Jennifer Malone, Wilcox’s daughter]: Knock, knock, knock.

Mom is our last fluent speaker now since my dad’s uncle, Felix Icho, passed away. When I was growing up I spoke English. I don’t remember hearing Mom speaking the Wukchumni language.

Mom worked in the fields. We picked a lot of fruit. And I think I missed a lot of school but I don’t know for sure.

[Wilcox]: I left my Indian language behind when my grandma died. I didn’t speak the language anymore until my sisters started to teach the kids. Hearing the girls try to speak their language again made me want to learn again. And I started remembering.

[Malone]: I was very surprised she could remember all that from age—young age that her grandmother had left her. She just started writing down her words on envelopes and papers. And so she’d sit up night after night typing on the computer which — she was never a computer person.

[Wilcox]: I’m just a pecker. One word at a time. And I was slow. Just peck, peck, peck. So when I had all these words together I thought it would be a good idea to try to make a dictionary. I didn’t say that I wanted to save it for anybody else to learn. I just wanted to get it together.

Every morning I’d have my coffee and have a sandwich or maybe oatmeal or whatever, and then I’d get right on that.

[Malone]: It took many years for her to do this dictionary. She loved doing it. She would work many hours late at night, and get up and work on it during the day.

[Wilcox]: And the X sound — Oh, that’s the hardest one for everybody.

[Malone]: I’ve been working with Mom on this dictionary for all the years. And I’ve helped her a lot.

[Wilcox]: The A right here. Oh, there. It made the “tr” sound and the “ch” sound sounds a little bit alike to me, but I don’t….You got it?

[Malone]: I got it. I feel it.

It’s very frustrating because she wanted to make sure I knew how to say the words right. So if I would say something and she can’t hear that well — “That’s not how I said it.” I would kind of get scolded.

[Wilcox]: We gotta go through this whole thing again because I didn’t like the sentences. They didn’t make sense to me.

[Malone]: Oh. It just seemed like it would take forever. I am very surprised that we’ve gotten as far as we have.

[Malone]: Do you want your jacket?

[WIlcox]: Yeah.

[Wilcox, in Wukchumni]: Coyote and Lizard wanted people to have hands like theirs. Eagle said, Coyote and Lizard will run a race. Run to the top of the mountain, and whoever puts their hands on top is the winner.

[Wilcox]: Thank you.

[Malone]: You’re welcome. All right now. Are you ready?

[Wilcox]: Yes.

Lake. Ocean. Sea.

Me and my grandson are trying to record our dictionary from A to Z. The whole dictionary took me about seven years. So that was a lot of work for me.

Language. Talk. Speak.

See, I’m uncertain about my language and who wants to keep it alive. Just a few. No one seems to want to learn. It’s sad. It just seems weird that I am the last one. And — I don’t know, it just — It’ll just be gone one of these days maybe. I don’t know. It might go on or not.

[Wilcox]: Put the rice in there. I know. Actually get the…

[Donovan, Marie’s grandson]: Colander?

[Wilcox]: Yes, the colander.

[Donovan]: O.k. All of it?

[Wilcox]: Maybe. More. That’s good.

[Malone]: I think she has a little confidence in me. But I know she has more confidence in Donovan because the way he’s really connecting with her and learning the language so fast— because I’ve been working on it all these years and I haven’t been able to speak with her like he does.

[Wilcox]: What now? You need a lid like this for that. A little one.

My role I feel is to archive it all, make sure that it gets documented and put somewhere to where a hundred years from now our families will be able to access and to be able to speak. And it will keep going with me and Donovan, I know.

[Wilcox, speaking Wukchumni]: Lizard was the first one to put his hands on the big rock and jumped up and down, laughing and saying ha ha ha, I won. I won the race. Now people will have hands like mine.

[Marie’s dictionary is the first Wukchumni dictionary to be created. It serves as an inspiration to other Native American tribes working to revitalize their languages. Jennifer and Marie are now teaching weekly Wukchumni language classes to members of their tribe.]

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Transcript for Figure 14.18, Native Rap

[In Diné and English.]

Greetings my relatives and my people. I am called N8V ACE.

I am of the Water’s Edge Clan, born for the five finger hand people

My maternal grandfathers are of the Bitter Water Clan. My paternal grandfathers are of the Five Finger Hand people.

That is how I am a Diné man.

I was born in Shiprock. I am from Red Mesa. I live in Albuquerque.

That is how I reside. Oh yeah my friend, I am Diné.

Representing, representing my people. I am called N8V ACE.

Representing, representing my people. Yes, I am Diné.

Representing, representing my people. I am called N8V ACE

Representing, representing my people. Yes, I am Diné.

I’m a N8V Navajo like Chief Manuelito, Chief Narbona, and Chief Barboncito.

My Pendleton bandana is tied to the right side, eagle claw chain hangin’

Feathers on that thang swangin’. Try to test me in my traditional moccasins…. Boy quit playin’

I am [–]. What you thinking?

R.I.P. Chief Joseph in my Pendleton blanket

Navajo language code talk out the system cranking. Navajo Pride with my Diné rug hanging

Good morning with my white corn powder

Thank you our Holy Ones, with my yellow corn pollen.

Thunder in the horizon…. yeah, those are my ancestors callin’.

Step to the Chief and we all ridin’.

N8V ACE, Navajo Tribe, Diné Nation.

Representing, representing my people. I am called N8V ACE.

Representing, representing my people. Yes, I am Diné.

Representing, representing my people. I am called N8V ACE.

Representing, representing my people. Yes, I am Diné.

May things become balanced / peaceful / harmonious, Our Mother Earth.

Our Father Sky, the Sun, the Moon, the Holy People, and the Holy Ones.

Thank you for the life we have, it’s beautiful.

Holy Mountains: Mt. Blanca, Mt. Taylor, San Francisco Peaks, Mt. Hesperus, Chimney Mountain, El Huerfano Mesa.

May there be harmony in all directions our Holy Ones.

From the East, to the East.

From the South, to the South.

From the West, to the West.

From the North, to the North.

From below, to below. From above, to above. Around us

May there be peace everywhere our Holy Ones.

With food, may we be physically strong. With water, may we have inner strength.

With corn pollen, may we have happiness throughout ourselves.

Thank you our Holy Ones. Diné Nation.

Representing, representing my people. I am called N8V ACE.

Representing, representing my people. Yes, I am Diné.

Representing, representing my people. I am called N8V ACE.

Representing, representing my people.

Yes, I am Diné.

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