20 December 2016
The Intercept: How Many Children Were Shot Dead Today? An Interview with Gary Younge
Every day, on average, seven children and teenagers are shot dead in the United States. November 23, 2013 — the day Gary Younge chose randomly as the setting for his book Another Day in the Death of America — was “just another day in America.”
On that Saturday, he writes, “as befits an unremarkable Saturday in America,” 10 children and teens were killed by guns. On that particular day, all the victims were boys; seven were black, two Latinos, and one white. The youngest was nine, the oldest 19; their average age was 14.7. But as Younge notes, they were not all the children and teens killed by guns on that day — they were the ones he could find, scouring local news sites for stories that sometimes fell short of a hundred words. [...]
While the book tells the neglected stories of these children’s lives and deaths, it also paints a brutal picture of their settings. The result is a story that’s not so much about gun violence as it is about America’s resignation and indifference to guns, violence, and a complex web of other tragedies: racial segregation, institutional failure, social precariousness, and poverty. [...]
Set less than a year after the Sandy Hook shooting, when a lone gunman killed six adults and 20 small children at a Connecticut elementary school, the book aims to capture the dissonance between Americans’ obsession with the all-too-regular spectacle of mass shootings and the “national shrug” with which the relentless stream of gun deaths is met every day. Yet the book is not polemical in the way gun debates often are; it is more simply and powerfully a quiet collection of stories. As Younge writes, “It is not a book about gun control,” though “it is a book made possible by the absence of gun control.” [...]
The gun control movement has two challenges. The first is to try to find a way to connect to the people who are most routinely and regularly affected by gun violence — and those are low-income people of color. The inability to connect with them mirrors a lack of urgency within that movement. One of the problems is that while large numbers of people support, for instance, background checks, they’re very unlikely to make it a priority in their voting. And that’s unlike the gun lobby: They think it’s urgent, they think it’s really important. But the people who are most affected by gun violence aren’t the people who are genuinely reached by the gun control movement. [...]
Also, what I did find out by reading quite a lot about Dallas is that this segregation didn’t happen by accident: Dallas was made like that. For 200 years, America was a slave state, for 100 years it was an apartheid state, and for 50 years it’s been a non-racial democracy. So you can see where that comes from: this non-racial democracy is actually a relatively recent thing for America. I covered the election from Muncie, Indiana. There’s an old map of Muncie that shows how it was segregated between the wealthy area, and the white working class area, and the black area, or the ‘Negro section,’ as it was called. And it’s exactly the same now. Nothing has changed.
The Conversation: The problem with Snow White, and what Scandinavia can teach us about i
In Stockholm’s Nicolaigarden pre-school, the teachers do not read Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the students. Rather, its library holds children’s books that show different types of heroes and a diversity of family models (including those with single parents, adoptive children, and same-sex parents).
Titles include One More Giraffe, about two giraffes caring for an abandoned crocodile egg, and Kivi and Monsterdog, whose protagonist, Kivi, is a child of unspecified gender. The idea is to present a more diverse and realistic image of the world kids live in and to avoid representations that reproduce gender stereotypes. [...]
All children are given equal access to a variety of games, toys and costumes, in the same play space. Library books present strong male and female protagonists in similar proportions. Hiring practices encouraging male applicants have led Nicolaigarden to have up to 30% male caretakers, the highest rate for preschools in the country. [...]
Decades of research based on classroom observations indicate that teachers interact differently with boys and girls, though they’re convinced they give them equal treatment. They call on boys more often, involving them with new learning materials and giving them extensive feedback. They turn to girls when it comes to social topics or support learning, having them repeat what has been previously discussed. Even nonverbal teacher behaviours, such as smiles, have been shown to favour boys over girls.
Vox: How Obama quietly reshaped America’s war on drugs
Individually, none of these stories may seem related, and it was easy for them to get lost in the train wreck that was the 2016 election. But all of these stories are part of the same overarching story: The Obama administration really has, slowly but surely, worked to reshape how America fights its war on drugs — to treat drugs more as a public health issue than a punitive criminal justice undertaking. [...]
Much of this has been rhetorical. The Obama administration has made it a point to avoid the term “war on drugs” out of concern that it perpetuates the same old way of dealing with drugs. Michael Botticelli, who leads White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) as the “drug czar,” has repeatedly said that “we can’t arrest and incarcerate addiction out of people.” President Obama has echoed the sentiment, suggesting a public health approach makes more sense for drugs.
But there have also been real policy changes attached to the talk. The administration has dramatically increased public health spending for anti-drug efforts, proposing the first drug control budget since President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s that would spend more on treatment and prevention than law enforcement and interdiction programs in the fight against drugs. He has used his clemency powers, particularly for nonviolent drug offenders, more aggressively than any president in decades. And he has looked the other way as states have legalized marijuana, despite a real ability to crack down on these states and stop the experimentation of legalization in its tracks. [...]
“For too long we’ve viewed drug addiction through the lens of criminal justice,” Obama said at a conference in Atlanta earlier this year. “The most important thing to do is reduce demand. And the only way to do that is to provide treatment — to see it as a public health problem and not a criminal problem.”
The Huffington Post: British Values? Populism And Cultural Superiority?
Politics without ideology is another way of defining populism. Rather than winning the electorate over to your position through reasoned, supported argument, you immediately react to their prejudice and the popular opinion becomes policy.
In the case of immigration, not only does this approach give validity to people’s xenophobia and racism - as we have seen with the Brexit campaign and the wave of racist violence that came in its wake - it also ultimately damages those people who have been exploited in this way. In Brexit, the very people that carried the vote will be the first to suffer from increasing prices, loss of jobs, the destruction of the welfare state, NHS and social care. Similarly, with controls on immigration, the net contribution that migrant workers and their families bring to our communities and the economy will be lost. In an aging population, there will not be enough people of a working age to fund pensions and social care, let alone service a spiraling national debt. [...]
The myth of ‘mass migration’ is based in these beliefs. The simple fact is that the UK is not subject to mass migration of any kind - most migrants and refugees are not coming here. The number of migrants per head of population puts the UK somewhere around 40th in the world ranking. Despite one of the strictest and most expensive points-based visa systems in the world, 60% of immigrants still come from outside the EU. This is a part of our true post-imperial legacy, as the majority of these people are from commonwealth countries, joining well-established communities and family in the UK. Yet this mass migration myth was directly exploited by the Brexit campaign and never debunked effectively by the Remainers.
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