How race frames our attitude toward drug addictions

From an article titled, "There was no wave of compassion when addicts were hooked on crack." A nationwide case study is now laid out before us. It shows us that drug addictions are not treated equally.

Faced with a rising wave of addiction, misery, crime and death, our nation has linked arms to save souls. Senators and CEOs, Midwestern pharmacies and even tough-on-crime Republican presidential candidates now speak with moving compassion about the real people crippled by addiction. It wasn’t always this way. Thirty years ago, America was facing a similar wave of addiction, death and crime, and the response could not have been more different. Television brought us endless images of thin, black, ravaged bodies, always with desperate, dried lips. We learned the words crack baby. Back then, when addiction was a black problem, there was no wave of national compassion. Instead, we were warned of super predators, young, faceless black men wearing bandannas and sagging jeans.

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When the issues are more about tribal identity than the merits of the issues

To what extent are the issues really about the merits of the issues, rather than about tribal identities? Zaid Jilani's article at The Intercept nails it. The title: "A NEW STUDY SHOWS HOW AMERICAN POLARIZATION IS DRIVEN BY A TEAM SPORT MENTALITY, NOT BY DISAGREEMENT ON ISSUES."

THE LOOSE CONNECTION some voters have with policy preferences has become apparent in recent years. Donald Trump managed to flip a party from support of free trade to opposition to it by merely taking the opposite side of the issue. Democrats, meanwhile, mocked Mitt Romney in 2012 for calling Russia the greatest geopolitical adversary of the United States, but now have flipped and see Russia as exactly that. Regarding health care, the structure of the Affordable Care Act was initially devised by the conservative Heritage Foundation and implemented in Massachusetts as “Romneycare.” Once it became Obamacare, the Republican team leaders deemed it bad, and thus it became bad. Mason believes the implications of such shallow divisions between people could make the work of democracy harder. If your goal in politics is not based around policy but just defeating your perceived enemies, what exactly are you working toward? (Is it any surprise there is an entire genre of campus activism dedicated to simply upsetting your perceived political opponents?) “The fact that even this thing’s that supposed to be about reason and thoughtfulness and what we want the government to do, the fact that even that is largely identity-powered, that’s a problem for debate and compromise and the basic functioning of democratic government. Because even if our policy attitudes are not actually about what we want the government to do but instead about who wins, then nobody cares what actually happens in the government,” Mason said. “We just care about who’s winning in a given day. And that’s a really dangerous thing for trying to run a democratic government.”

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Steady Diet of Bad TV and Movies

We are in the middle of a big experiment. What happens when you subject hundreds of millions of people to vivid portrayals inducing consumerist tendencies and paranoia? A haunting thought keeps recurring to me: We were once a nation with such potential, but we have been poisoning ourselves with our mass media. Yes, there are many thoughtful TV shows and movies that challenge us to be self-critical, as well as shows that inspire us to be our best selves, Over the decades, though, we have willingly lapped up far more TV shows and movies that do the opposite. I haven't watched much TV for the past decade, but I do see many previews for shows, and I do check in here and there to see what shows are about. Thousands of plot lines teach us to distrust those who look like they are not from Europe or who talk with an accent. We learn that weapons are the first choice for solving complex social conflicts. We learn that failing to carefully plan works out most of the time. We learn to be cocky in our ignorance embracing Dunning-Krueger as a substitute for being well informed. We learn from show after show that putting other people down or dehumanizing them is a worthy substitute for empathy. We learn that people come in two mutually exclusive flavors, good and bad. We learn that impatiently acting out is often a worthy substitute for hard-earned intelligence and wisdom. We learn that we can recognize the good guys by the fact that they have lots of money, fancy houses, a lot of shiny consumer gadgets, and formidable weapons. [More . . . ]

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Race is not real, but racism is alive and well

From The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea by Robert Wald Sussman, from an long excerpt published in Newsweek:

For the past 500 years, people have been taught how to interpret and understand racism. We have been told that there are very specific things that relate to race, such as intelligence, sexual behavior, birth rates, infant care, work ethics and abilities, personal restraint, lifespan, law-abidingness, aggression, altruism, economic and business practices, family cohesion, and even brain size. We have learned that races are structured in a hierarchical order and that some races are better than others. Even if you are not a racist, your life is affected by this ordered structure. We are born into a racist society. What many people do not realize is that this racial structure is not based on reality. Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race. There are no major complex behaviors that directly correlate with what might be considered human “racial” characteristics.

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