After reading “The New Jim Crow”, it became clear that the government is far from an institution of peace and order with a role of serving the citizens. Paternalistic and authoritarian drug policies effectively terrorize citizens. These harsh tactics isolate drug users by reinforcing the negative implications of their actions through disproportionate sentencing, social degradation, and a felony conviction. While these threats may prevent an individual from committing the crime in the first place, punitive measures only cause more damage in the long run, sending users into a downward spiral with no hope for escape. In the United Kingdom, the Merseyside model offers an alternative to drug enforcement. It was heartening to see that law enforcement officials followed a heartening policy which sought to rehabilitate rather than punish. Could the punitive approach the United States law enforcement officials follow be a result of cultural differences or is financial gain the underlying motive?
Category Archives: Questions & Comments
Drug Users: Criminals? Or Patients?
One of Michelle Alexander’s main points was that no one benefits from applying overly punitive measures to nonviolent offenders (especially). The drug war in the US has a habit of criminalizing these nonviolent offenders, that doesn’t help people quit or get back on track but keeps them in a negative cycle.
So I’m touched, in a way, by the Dutch/European view of things:
“The Dutch, being sober and pragmatic people…opt rather for a realistic and practical approach to the drug problem….The drug problem should not be primarily seen as a problem of police and justice. It is essentially a matter of health and social well-being” (Marlatt 31).
How far is to far?
At first, harm reduction scared me a bit. Why should we ge giving handouts thus enabling destructive behavior? Since then, I have come to the realization, and seen the stats, to support this cause and its effects on the drug community, but it seems that the Dutch may have taken this to far. I can’t argue with the fact that their system has had positive effects, but the implications are hard to fathom. Truthfully, my argument falls apart when we look at the desirable prosperity and freedom in the Netherlands, but how far can this go? Once Marijuana becomes legal in the US, what will the next step be? Im curious to discuss this in class.
Harm Reduction The Non-American Way
When Marlatt spoke about what harm reduction means in other countries such as the Netherlands, I was surprised at the approach those foreign countries took to control the consequences of drug usage and prostitution. I definitely felt like one of those foreign visitors when I read the chapter, “struck with what appears to be a liberal and permissive approach to drugs and sex”. (31) As we know, in the United States, it is illegal to use illicit drugs like marijuana, and if you get caught using it or possessing it, the police will arrest you and eventually, you will be sent to court and even perhaps to jail for breaking the law and taking part in life-threatening activities. Sure, there is rehab but that’s usually not until you go through all of these criminal proceedings. However, in places like Amsterdam, their public health policies are quite the opposite. They are not particularly promoting drug use and unsafe sexual activities, but they are doing what they can to help the people avoid facing the consequences of engaging in these matters. It is shocking to me to hear about how accessible drugs are given to its users in settings like the “coffee shops” but yet I am rather relieved that free sterile syringes, and condoms are widely available too to back up those actions. I understand that many people just can’t help it but to keep using drugs due to addiction or having sex with strangers because that is their way of making a living so at that point, it would be quite ineffective to have the justice system jump in and make these people’s lives more difficult just like what happened in the War on Drugs. I personally believe too that it is more effective to have these low-threshold and high-threshold programs which gives these people a variety of options on how to go about getting their lives back together and not fall under pressure with the government on how they should live their lives that I’m sure these people consciously chose to live.
It seems as if the United States would be much more efficient in following through with the Dutch model of harm reduction but I know it would be very controversial because it would seem as if the government doesn’t mind that all these illegal and dangerous activities are allowed or even favored. I think the government has to realize that the reason there are laws on these matters is because using drugs and having many sexual partners without protection can lead to very bad consequences for everyone involved in it. If these actions were beneficial to our health, of course there wouldn’t be laws limiting these actions. We have to get over the stigma we expect and protect our people the best way over the reputation we want. The Dutch model strikingly reminds me of the van we visited on our Coney Island class trip that gave counseling, free sterile syringes, condoms, etc. Their goal wasn’t to encourage people to do more drugs and sex to ruin their health or to arrest these ‘potential criminals’ but to support them in being as healthy as possible while doing these things and hopefully, on their way to ending their drug usage and safe from diseases like STDs, HIV and AIDs. Perhaps that van is the start of a new and reinvented approach to dealing with these public health matters in the United States.
Do you think the current way of harm reduction in the United States is ideal, or is there a more effective, efficient and productive approach?
Harm Reduction: Governance and Government
It was interesting for me to think about just how much of law is unwritten, and decided by individuals, making up a larger system. This makes for vastly different approaches to drug charges, not only in our country but around the world. It’s bizarre to think about how relaxed other developed countries are compared to our legislation regarding the same offences, to the point that a charge could be considered a felony in the United States and a reason for assistance and medical attention in Europe.
I recently went on a field trip for my newswriting class to a criminal courthouse to watch night court arraignments. There were several people that were charged with possession of marijuana, cocaine, or heroin that were allowed to leave the court freely. I don’t understand how something that our country views as serious enough to be considered a felony can at the same time be released as they are considered to be at flight risk. We had an opportunity to speak with the judge, and when asked about this said that drug laws are on the decline and this is why they are treated less harshly. It was fascinating to observe just how much of the decision process was under his control. Of course he had the written law to objectively follow, but there are inevitably some subjective qualities in his sentencing process.
I thought this was a good example of how harm reduction needs to be targeted towards both aspects of governance: the governmental regulations themselves and those in power to make real changes. With drug laws changing slowly but surely, and these changes slowly being reflected in key figures like judges, the United States is hopefully on the way to more of a harm reduction based model. But will our country ever be on the level of Europe in terms of our approach to drug laws?
-Jacqui Larsen
Harm Reduction
I found the Harm Reduction overview interesting because before I went to Europe my study abroad professors told me about Amsterdam and how often a lot of students visit there simply because they speak English and are surprised by how open they are about marijuana and prostitution. One of my classmates from Amsterdam who studied abroad with me in Spain was extremely open with his usage of marijuana. To him it was something just like smoking a cigarette or having a shot of alcohol. I personally believe that both marijuana and prostitution should be legalized. Instead of shunning them out from society, I think it would be better to embrace them and try to help them especially in regards to prostitution. Often prostitutes are taken advantage of because what they’re doing is illegal but we should be able to provide a safe environment for them and have them get regular help check ups as part of the job.
Harm Reduction
Prior to taking this class, I was pretty unfamiliar with the harm reduction movement. We were all fortunate enough to be born after the AIDS crisis, so (I don’t know about all of you) the idea of harm reduction was never something that I was exposed to growing up. Therefore, I found the reading pretty interesting. I also liked how it did not only focus on the United States, but mentioned countries like the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada and even Australia. Unlike some of my classmates, there was not one specific model that caught my eye; they all stood out to me in different ways. For example, the Dutch model was certainly interesting because of the approach they decided to take with their drug users. There were “coffee shops” that sold drugs, while other parts of the city were sexually charged to say the least. I also found the UK model to be interesting because it literally allows drug users to be prescribed drugs on a maintenance basis. My question is, who decides this basis? How do they know where to draw the line? Also, do they really think giving the drug users more drugs is going to help? I understand the section in the reading when Marlatt says that in addition to many other things, giving them the drugs will prevent them from dropping out, but won’t this just continue to create a vicious cycle? Maybe I am not fully understanding the harm reduction movement, but I don’t see how it is that easy to just promote drug use.
The Dutch Model
The part that stuck out to me in Chapter 2 of Harm Reduction Around the World was “The Dutch Model.” Even though the system seems to work in Amsterdam, with fewer drug users in general and high school students using considerably less cannabis than 59% of American high schoolers, it astounded me that a system like that would purposely exist. Maybe because I am an American and our government deals with drug use differently, but I am surprised that anyone would use the Dutch Model. Sometimes, we talk about drugs in my classes and people say that legalizing drugs will make people less attracted to them. It’s just like how the Prohibition increased alcohol consumption and how that decreased when the ban was revoked. In that sense, it makes sense that the Dutch model would work. However, the idea is still strange to me because of how strict drug policies are in America. I am interested in visiting Amsterdam just to see how things are there and how the system works. Is there anyone else who shares this interest?
Drug Tourists
In Harm Reduction Around the World, one part that stuck out to me was the mention of drug tourists in Amsterdam. Because of how lax the laws and/or the following of them was, Amsterdam would get a special type of tourist. I understand that tourism is good for the economy, but is the reputation that comes with and gets spread around by them really worth it? Instead of a reputation for the culture and history Amsterdam possesses, it gets one for its red-light district and drug availability.
Drug Policy Patterns
It was interesting to read Harm Reduction Around the World because one is able to see the different attitudes of varying countries towards drug related crimes. The fact that countries like Holland and the United Kingdom had mitigating polices made me wonder if there is an ulterior motive behind mass incarceration in the United States? If one logically reasons why the United States does not have a reductionist policy, no real answer surfaces. It just seems so logical to follow a reductionist approach rather than a intransigent stance.
Furthermore, as Albert mentioned in his post, America’s policy on handling methadone when compared to that of Amsterdam’s is much more stringent. It is definitely discouraging for an addict, in America, to somehow seek help because of the stigma. The whole methadone story reminded me of the controversial Needle Exchange Program. Interestingly, this program was first started in 1983 in Amsterdam. Just like, Amsterdam’s policy on mandatory condom use in sex work, this program helped curb HIV transmission rates among citizens, On the other hand, the Needle Exchange Programs still remains controversial and in a sense tightly regulated in the United States. It just seems like there is an unfortunate pattern that is observable in the United States’ attitude towards drug regulation policies.
Don’t we want all drug addicts to recover and eventually become productive members of society? How can we expect a person to recover if his mean to recovery are impossibly difficult?
May 9th Response
Reading chapter two of “Harm Reduction Around the World” by Alan Marlatt was very eye opening for me, especially with the harm prevention programs the Dutch and United Kingdom have in terms of drug related crimes. It made me wonder why the United States can’t apply such a model to itself especially with positive results from these two main examples. Holland separates drugs into soft and hard drugs and allows drug addicts to purchase soft drugs in designated locations in order to prevent them from going to dealers who may recommend them hard drugs such as heroin or cocaine. The harm prevention programs in Amsterdam and Holland also gives out methadone in an easier way, where the individual would merely go into a specialized van and take the dosage. It is more efficient than America’s policy where everything is highly regulated to the point where individuals are stigmatized and discouraged from receiving treatment via methadone. Amsterdam’s sex business also prevents many individuals from being harmed, with mandatory condom use and patrolling police offices that protect both worker and client. These methods prevent the contraction of H.I.V. and prevent both the escort and client from being harmed. However, I believe the best harm prevention policy in the chapter was U.K.’s policy of not handing out an arrest on the first time someone is caught with a drug, but instead they give a warning and resources to assist the individual with their addiction.
Government in urban areas should enact many of these harm prevention programs in order to combat the public health crisis many of these areas face. Compared to the United States, where drug addicts and sex workers usually have no way to rehabilitate their way into society because of taboo and threat of imprisonment, harm prevention provides a safe environment for these individuals. Although the chapter stated that it might not work in the United States because of scalability, it would be interesting to see if pilot programs would be put in place in order to test the effectiveness of the program. Plans that provide prescription grade drugs to individuals would prevent them from taking a drug that has been contaminated with fillers. Nevertheless, in order to enact these programs, the government must agree. The article “Emerging Strategies for Health Urban Governance” provided suggestions for what government can do. Ideas such as allowing more people to participate in government planning, having networked organizations, having concentrated goals, and having a way to enforce planning are all good ideas. The article also noted that many urban areas have a government with limited funds and uneducated government officials. I think potential cabinet members who are experts in what they do should be appointed in order to inform and suggest to the government leader of the area what the best course of action would be.
The Long Winding Road to a Solution
I remember last seminar’s seminar: Science and Tech in NYC, I had to research about the Gowanus Canal’s restoration efforts. Their task is insanely difficult to the point I said aloud that it would be clean when my great-grandchildren become adults. Michelle Alexander’s solution to the incarceration crisis similar to the Gowanus Canal’s mess because it would involve a very long-term effort in order to solve the solution. In fact, if her changes were proposed either by politicians or public interests groups, many of the policies that she is challenging will have lobbyists blocking every attempt. It may be stalled to such an extent to the point where public support has died out and many of the politicians who originally proposed the plan may no longer be in office. In other words, the solution to mass incarcerations of young Black men involves a long winding road.
I believe Alexander’s plan involves taking on too many interests groups for one organization to handle. For instance, she wants to remove financial incentives for police stations, federal grant money from law enforcement, and reeducation for law enforcement personnel just to name a few. According to the Department of Justice, in 2008 there were over 800,000 sworn officers. She also wants to close prisons and prevent the creation of new ones. If one were to avoid the stockholders of private prisons, there are over 400,000 correctional workers according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. The overwhelming number of workers that she plans to affect, coupled with public support, as many Americans do believe that prisoners should be in jail where they rightfully belong, that plans that she propose are not the type that are right for the type of government in the United States.
When Alexander spoke about African American civil rights lawyers and Rosa Parks, it was a shock to me because I never knew about the other two individuals who refused to give up their seat. It all comes down to marketing a cause or belief because voters and public opinion can affect the United States government. If the United States were a dictatorship, Alexander’s proposals would get across easily because red tape wouldn’t be involved. However, because of voters and lobbyists the obstacles that Alexander wants to do would take a very long time. I believe in order to solve the mass incarceration crisis, education through social media and viral videos must educate the public before proposing Alexander’s wants for change. As she said, many white and middle class families are unaware of the affects the War on Drugs is having on us today.
After listing several similarities between mass incarceration and Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander admits that her argument is not foolproof. One limit that caught my eye was where Alexander points out that while the perpetrators and supporters of Jim Crow were undoubtedly racist, she is not calling those in favor of mass incarceration racist, but rather racially indifferent. However, is someone racially indifferent if they are ignoring the plight of other races? Wouldn’t it count as racism by default if one sits and back and lets others discriminate and be discriminated against?
Coming to an end, who’s at fault?
At one point within the chapter, Michelle Alexander notes that a notable difference between Jim Crow and mass incarceration is that the current system of control receives, or rather seems to receive, the support of African Americans. In society, blame is placed on the individual that arrested: because they chose to commit crimes, they are incarcerated. However, Alexander makes the argument that all of us are essentially criminals, and the current system exploits the fact that everyone makes a mistake at some point in their lives. An illusion of culpability is created, it isn’t that the urban poor are more likely to make mistakes, it’s that they are more likely to be targeted by the system of control. While political policies and judicial proceedings may be at fault for playing a part in the system of control, wouldn’t the law enforcement agencies have the largest part in targeting individuals to be prosecuted?
What’s Next for Jim Crow
I thought Michelle Alexander had a very interesting writing style, where she presented information in each, which she then combined with information from previous chapters, effectively reframing the issues chapter by chapter. I found this to be a bit repetitive at times, but I understand her purpose for doing so, as it sort of mirrored the compilation of injustices which add up to an overarching racist system. However, I appreciated that Alexander ended the book with lists of the similarities and differences to the Jim Crow era. As many have said, she comes off a bit biased at times, and for me this helped demonstrate that she does understand that her arguments will be met with some controversy and has thought through the strengths and weaknesses of her analogy. Most notably, I was relieved that she mentioned that whites are also affected by the drug war, which was something that hadn’t quite fit with the Jim Crow metaphor until she expanded upon it.
I was also glad that she addressed what some had criticized in class, how she was protesting mass incarceration and the drug war so intensely without proposing policy suggestions. However, she states towards the end that The New Jim Crow is not intended to reach such bounds, but rather to start the conversation. I think this was a wise choice overall, because she only did what she felt qualified to do and what she knew could be handled in the scope of one book. That being said, what does everything think are possible ways to change the flawed system of mass incarceration? Also, how do we prevent discrimination from simply taking a new form in the next chapter of United States judicial policy?
-Jacqui Larsen
Chapter 6
Michelle Alexander talk about how affirmative action needs to me taken in a different manner against racial injustice in today’s judicial system. She says that racial justice advocates do not realize that they have helped make the new caste system invisible, spread the myth that anyone can move up in society, and encouraged the “trickle down theory of racial justice”. It was interesting how she talked about Martin Luther and how his dream was to view all people equally regardless of race. Since we have adopted this mentality, when majority of the black men are imprisoned, we can justify that and say that they chose this way of life. However, there are other factors that can lead them into prison and keep them in prison.
My question is how do racial justice advocates implement affirmative action, is it just in the criminal system or do they reach broader areas such as education, politics, etc.
Chapter 5
Throughout the course of the book, I have been constantly questioning Alexander’s statements and her statistics. I was always mindful of the fact that she never seemed to address the opposing point of view, but only focused on her point and tried to shape her argument. However, it is worth noting that the points Alexander raised are indeed relevant. I had never thought that mass incarceration could be used as a system of racial control, when in reality it can and has. Just looking at basic statistics, there is a higher ratio of prisoners to free men in the black community than there is in any other. Needless to say, Alexander has fulfilled her goal: she has made me think about the idea of mass incarceration being used as a means of holding one race subservient to the other. I do believe this is something that people need to discuss, as it is evident there is a problem. Therefore, the quicker we find a solution to this highly biased system of mass incarceration, the quicker our society will move in the right track.
The New Jim Crow Ch 5 & 6
To be honest when I first started reading this book, I was extremely questionable about Alexander’s point of view and felt that she might be biased or exaggerating things. The latter is still somewhat true and she even says it herself in this part of the book when she makes an analogy between the past and the present in Chapter 5 but the underlying sentiments are still true. She’s made me more aware of the system that we’re apart of and how things need to change. She makes a point when she says that the majority of America fall into the disillusion that their justice system is doing the right thing, when in fact it’s full of holes and every step of the process may be oppressing African Americans. People do not want to see the faults in their own system and in our case many people have already seen the faults but do not attempt to do anything about it.
Forever Discrimnating
Due to human nature, it is impossible to get rid of discrimination. Everyone knows that they can’t be the best, but they want to make sure that they’re not the worst. If the world miraculously became truly accepting of other races, there would probably be some other form of discrimination. After reading The New Jim Crow, I feel like there will always be injustices, but they will be covered up. Things went from discrimination by race to discrimination towards criminals. While it makes sense that someone would want to be wary of felons and ex-felons, racial discrimination still exists and is the underlying cause for the disproportionate amount of blacks in prison. Even when things are meant to be unbiased, something in the system makes it discriminatory towards blacks. I’m not really sure what to say about this other than that this book gives a shocking and depressing view of everything in America. I want to know: what does Michelle Alexander/ do you think we should do to solve this problem?
Invisible Punishment
In Chapter 5 Alexander talks about “invisible punishment” (first coined by author Jeremy Travis). This system of exclusion is the primary obstacle to reintegration. By making it impossible for offenders to re-entry many normal cycles of society, we in a sense create a population whose only home is prison.
The New Jim Crow: Chapters 5 and 6
As The New Jim Crow came to an end, I have to say Michelle Alexander made a valid and convincing argument. While I still am somewhat skeptical and still believe that her own race caused her to be biased in her writing, I agree that there is a racial problem with mass incarceration that needs to be taken care of. In the beginning pages of Chapter 5 she states, “today, most Americans… don’t know the truth about mass incarceration.” I liked this section in particular because I, for example, am proof of that, and I’m sure most of you are, too. The difference between us and the rest of the Americans, however, is this book. We have read it, become educated about the topic, and changed our minds (some more than others, and if we haven’t changed our minds, it has at least caused us to think). I think that if more Americans read this work and other works exposing the “new Jim Crow,” their opinions will be changed as well. Alexander literally explains each of the parallels between mass incarceration and the old Jim Crow, among many other interesting facts and statistics. How could they not change their minds, even after all of that? To say the least, the book was very eye opening, and it made me think a lot about the future. I fear that no one truly knows what is in store for society in twenty to thirty years from now. My question to you all is, do you truly think a social movement (like Alexander explains in Chapter 6) is all that is needed to solve the problems put forth in The New Jim Crow? Or are we doomed to forever live in a world where two individuals can be treated so differently because of race?
Something that stayed with me most from the reading was the manipulation in place during plea-bargaining. The fact that sentences are so over the top that innocent people will choose to do time simply so as not to gamble with spending the majority of their adult life behind bars, is absurd. Alexander highlights the discretionary power that prosecutors have within the justice system—their ability to create a rap sheet of trumped up charges, charges that likely would fail in court—simply so that they can present someone with the threat of extreme sentences so as to gain plea bargains. Something I thought it would have been interesting for Alexander to touch on would have been the prosecutor’s motives in convicting more people. Prosecutors may have political ambitions, and when they run for office they can present tough on crime stats.
Alexander’s dissection of current hip-hop culture was very interesting. Many social scientists both black and white have discussed pigeon holing involved with perceptions of black males, and the difficulties black males face in navigating an environment of generalizations and assumptions. You’re a rapper, a sports star, or a gangster, in order to have status. Popular culture doesn’t usually romanticize images of blacks as doctors, or lawyers, or business owners. Alexander’s criticisms of the minstrel aspect to hip-hop have themselves been raised within the hip-hop community. However the consumerist culture that is glorified within hip-hop is in my mind more an expression of the culture we live in, and crosses all racial barriers, hip-hop is just more blunt about it. Alexander also forgets that hip-hop is powerful more because of the beat then the lyrics. Very self respecting women will dance like you wouldn’t believe when Juveniles Slow Motion comes on—a song with highly misogynistic lyrics—however its because they are hypnotized by the beat.
-Jesse Geisler
Change of Heart
When I first started to read The New Jim Crow, I was very skeptical of the book. The whole topic is very controversial and difficult to discuss. Nobody wants to admit that their legal/justice system has giant cracks within it. We all hope to live in a society where justice executed fairly and of course in a non-discriminatory manner. The author begins her analysis of mass incarceration with an introduction to its structure and policies within the legal system guarantee biased results.
After reading the first few chapters. I kind of realized the major issues at hand with our legal system. Michelle Alexander uses several Supreme Court cases that help to bolster her argument against the fairness of the legal system. The last few chapters of the novel describe the comparisons of mass incarceration to Jim Crow. The most obvious similarity between the two is marginalization of the African American community. The race of Americans is used as stigma just like the stigma of criminality. They function in a very similar manner.
In the last chapter, the author proposes a sort of “solution” to the major racial disparity that exists in our legal system. She suggests that only a social movement can weaken the caste system and legal laws will be futile without a grass roots movement. People have to acknowledge the shortcomings of our system and have to reach a consensus upon change. Her main point is that advocates have to realize and confront the role of race in our society, without this, a new caste will inevitably form upon the dismantling of the “old” one.
My question is: Did anyone have a change of heart regarding our legal system after reading The New Jim Crow?
Post-incarceration limitations
The Issue is in the Incarceration
Based on what we’ve read, it’s quite obvious that life of a felon after prison is one of prejudice, unequal opportunity, and general hardship, but what is the root of this problem? and why do they occur in such large numbers? Lets ignore race for a second, The US currently leads the world in incarceration rates with 743 of 100,000 citizens currently in jail. In total, this comes out to about 2.3 million total inmates. 2.3 million people, around 40% of which are African American, are in terrible positions upon their release.
We all know that there is a problem here, tens of billions of dollars are being put into both the prison and welfare sides of this process, and the victims of the inadequacies of this are stuck in a position between life as an ex-felon and life as a citizen. If the government can work to increase the efficiency of the prison system, change laws to reflect the time, and buffer the racist patterns of arrest, they could limit the number of ex-felons on the street, thus being able to give them more opportunity.
I think im ready to hear Alexander’s solution, but what is your’s?
Boxed In
In Chapter 4, Alexander talks about how those who have been convicted and deemed a criminal have no way to live a normal life again, no matter how small the crime they did is. All people look at is whether or not you went to prison. They seem to assume all criminals are the same and try to shun out criminals. Alexander tries to show us how hard it is for a criminal to get back on their feet again, when they can simply get evicted from their house and become homeless, and have to pay for all these extra fees once they get out of prison, when they can barely even find a job due to to their record.
She also highlights the importance of their rights being taken away no matter how small the crime they did. It gives this mentality that they are lower than the average person since they have no basic rights. I think there should a line drawn in society. Those who probably made a mistake in college and took some drugs shouldn’t have their whole lives ruined cause of it. I think the government needs to help these people more instead of taking advantage of them. They should be able to connect these people with decent or at least minimum wage paying jobs not jobs that offer them little to nothing as if they’re practically working for free. Is there really no second chance for these people?
Chapter 4
I found it rather interesting how Alexander started the chapter off by mentioning Frederick Douglass and his fight against slavery. Alexander compared those who were released from prison to the slaves who were “free by law.” Just as these former slaves were not truly free, people who are freed from prison are still subject to much hate and prejudice. A fine example of this is when a felon asked for an application for housing and he was denied on the grounds that he was an ex-felon.
The reason for such hate is the stigma society places on those who have been to prison. Those who have served jail time are extremely frowned upon and the whole idea of going to prison is heavily stigmatized. Another point to note is that because of this stigmatization, a good majority of those who are released from prison are caught in this cycle of coming back home, finding no job/housing, and going back to prison for committing a petty crime (which they probably needed to commit in order to sustain themselves).
At the end of all this, I find myself asking if our country is ever going to progress if we keep denying people who’ve committed some wrong second chances.
Ch. 4
Reading this chapter I was immediately caught up in topics that we had talked about before in class. Again, there were many actions that were directed against criminals and people who had committed a felony. I think I was most surprised that many judges and officials either did not know or chose not to tell those convicted of crimes of the other consequences of being convicted and not serving time in prison.
These consequences included getting your license revoked, not being able to qualify for public benefits, not being able to find a home, and not being able to find a job. Many blacks, women and men, are stuck in a cycle of going to prison, returning home, not being able to support themselves, and then going back to prison because of a small offense. It was also interesting to see how the use of state prisons and jails dropped from 74% to 40% once people who were freed from prison were given housing.
My question is, has the EEOC taken any other measures to help ensure that discrimination doesn’t occur between job applicants who have committed past demeanors verses those who have not? If so, is it effective?
Stigmatization and Response
I was particularly intrigued by the idea of stigmatization, and how it is either embraced or acts as a source of shame for those affected by incarceration. I think a lot of people blame factors like rap music or gangsta style for perpetuating crime, when in reality they are often a result of being forced into a stereotype. By embracing a stereotype, it is easier to deal with the consequences if the generalizations end up playing out as true. A person can then act as though it was their upbringing or overall personhood that caused their behavior, rather than an act of their own volition or a flawed justice system. Certainly drug promoting and misogynistic lyrics do not help solve crime, but they certainly do not directly cause it. They must be inspired from an ingrained lifestyle of some sort.
I was less familiar with the idea of shaming, particularly among families and church goers. The very fact that this involves hidden information means that this isn’t a phenomena that is well publicized. All that seems to be represented in the media is persona outlined above, of the typical criminal embracing a crime lifestyle. It helped me to read Alexander’s examples of actual stories of those that have been harshly impacted by the current criminal justice system. I think it’s easy to characterize a criminal as entirely in the wrong, as completely deserving of whatever punishment our judicial system sends their way, but it’s important to be aware of the injustices that are inherent to the present standard.
What did everyone find more compelling overall, Alexander’s description of embracing the crime stereotypes or feeling a sense of shame? Which do you think is a more common response?
-Jacqui Larsen
Once A Criminal, Always A Criminal
In this chapter, Michelle Alexander points out all the ways criminals remain criminals, that is to say that once someone is convicted, or even just arrested, for a crime, he is labeled as a felon for life. Due to the fact that he is now permanently considered a second-class “citizen,” he has very limited resources and that makes it extremely difficult to recover. His family may be too ashamed to support him. He is ineligible for federal aid programs and may not qualify for most jobs. Even if he has a job, he could still be in debt. What irks me the most is how some states have “poverty penalties.” How can people pay for these penalties when they would not afford to pay for the other fees in the first place? While I understand that these penalties are meant to dissuade people from ignoring payment, it is also keeping people from rebuilding their lives. “Although ‘debtor’s prison’ is illegal in all states, many states use the threat of probation or parole revocation as a debt-collection tool. In fact, in some jurisdictions, individuals may “choose” to go to jail as a way to reduce their debt burdens…many states suspend driving privileges for missed debt payments,” which often cause those who were lucky enough to get a job to lose it (156). I want to know what people think we should do to fix the system. How to we keep the dangerous criminals from damaging society without harming the ones who want to rebuild/are innocent?
Chapter 4- The New Jim Crow
In this chapter, we see yet another side to the problems of the mass incarceration. But one thing that she does in this chapter differently is that she brings in the perspective of a person. She talks about the prisoner who spends more money on transportation than he makes in his work, which spurs in a interesting view of what it means to be a paroled individual.
There is much to criticize about Michelle Alexander’s take on how to write this book. Her belief is that the statistics will speak for themselves. But she uses statistics to back an emotional argument, and every emotional argument needs a good emotional backing.
My question to her is why does she avoid using stories like the Mr. McNair? My belief is that if mass incarceration is really on such a scale as she suggests, she should very easily be able to procure examples of wrongful incarceration and from there show just how powerful her point rings true. By her coming from an unbiased background, where she has only facts to back her up, but no people, she is essentially garnering opposition from people who easily cite the stats as false. But bring in a testimony or twenty, and people will realize just how horrible the situation is.
The biggest solution to all the problems is to educate and to speak out. This has been repeated many times. But why does Ms. Alexander believe otherwise??
The New Jim Crow, Chapter 4
It was very distressing to read about the hard life facing newly released prisoners, and the mistreatment that they are forced to put up with, sometimes for the rest of their lives, seemed extreme. However, although Michelle Alexander did manage to evoke some sympathy in me in this chapter, it wasn’t until I was thinking about it afterwards that I realized how hypocritical it all is. It is easy to read Chapter 4 and claim that you would not discriminate against someone with criminal history or an arrest history, even if it is non-violent crime, but we all do it. When we discriminate against people who have been arrested or convicted it isn’t out of racism or misjudgement or lack of knowledge, but out of the desire to keep ourselves safe. There are obviously innocents who get mislabeled as felons, and Michelle Alexander would argue that some people arrested or convicted for possessing drugs should not be labeled as felons. While discretion should obviously be applied when making serious choices that effect other people’s lives and the details of their convictions/arrests should be taken into account, there comes a point when we must put ourselves first.
The New Jim Crow: Chapter 4
Prior to reading this book and this chapter in particular, I had never really thought of what happens to felons once they are released from prison. I think I can speak for mostly everyone in this class when I say that as a result of the media and society focusing so much on the events leading up to an individual getting into prison, we seldom think of what happens when they get out. On one hand, I could certainly see how (not to sound harsh) the public/media/society wouldn’t care; after all, these individuals are convicted felons that had to have done something to warrant their arrest. However, after reading the chapter I also feel that the government has made it unnecessarily difficult for them to get back on their feet. After all, they are still human beings and paid the price for their actions. It becomes a question of whether it is ethical or not to take someone’s right to vote away, suspend a driver’s license, and to discriminate against them for certain jobs among many other things. Fitting back into society after being released from prison is way more of a task than it should be.
While reading, I also remembered an article in the newspaper that I read two weeks ago. After 38 years in prison, David Bryant was finally released after being wrongly convicted of raping an 8-year-old girl (he was 18 at the time). Rather than explaining the entire story, I will attach the article for anyone who wants to read it, but I couldn’t help but think of how this man’s life is going to be now that he is out of prison. Sure, he is different than what Alexander is talking about in The New Jim Crow because Bryant was wrongly convicted, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t going to struggle just like the others. He even says, “I don’t have a mother, or brother, or sister. I don’t have any place to go. I don’t have a dime to my name. What am I going to do? I still don’t know.” He never learned to drive a car, open a bank account, and I can only imagine that although he didn’t do it, he will not be looked at the same way. Being convicted for rape is not exactly something pleasant. Society often looks down on convicted rapists – innocent or guilty. This poor man’s life and the lives of all those who are released after incarceration will never be the same.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx/new-york-city-judge-vacates-conviction-1975-child-rape-death-article-1.1314857
NJC Ch4-5
Chapter 4 expounded on the nature of the obstacles to fixing our prison problem – the problem being: way too many prisoners, and limited rehabilitation opportunity. The obstacles are hard to navigate because they are imbedded deeply in law, and while the laws reflect real concerns, they are tangled and contradictory enough to make it nearly impossible for any ex-felons, even non-violent ones, to re-enter society. This is institutional discrimination in operation – people are considering the laws at face value, and not in the context of other existing laws. They are paying less attention to the potentially problematic situations that can arise for ex-convicts, in part because ex-convicts are a looked-down upon minority.
Limited Freedom
I found chapter four of The New Jim Crow, to be very illuminating. It described how former felons released from prison are regarded as sub-humans basically. A very disturbing point that the author drove my attention to was the fact that ex-convicts were stripped of basic freedoms, such as the right to vote and serve on a jury.
Michelle Alexander cites several laws and which interdict the re-integration of former felons to society. I found some of the laws and stipulations to be particularly horrendous. The author mentioned a law that stated if a former prisoner, in public housing, was caught doing drugs, or anyone associated with him even far from the property the convict would be evicted. This is beyond ridiculous. This law can damage and destroy family. It can serve as an impetus to the useful integration of former prisoners in to society. I mean how can society ever expect former prisoners to be productive members if they are all so limited in their resources? If you think about it, they can’t get a job because they are identified as felons via a black box. They have the government and parole officers eyeing their every moment waiting for a wrong move to lock them up. It is as if they are almost destined to go back. By the virtue of society, it seems like these people just like float and can’t develop self-efficacy.
Another interesting point the author noted was how the black youth of America congregates in a sense to celebrate this stigma. She explains how this is a defense mechanism because these adolescents are used to the whole assumption of criminality that by virtue, they accept embrace it. This creates a dangerous situation because criminality should not be celebrated or promoted amongst the youth. In a sense, it seems like society has a drastic and innervating role in shaping the futures of former-felons and people who are thought to be such.
Probable cause is incredibly ambiguous. Having been stopped and searched myself several times, both in my car and on foot, it’s not a pleasant feeling. As the author noted, there are sufficient indicators or interpretations of laws for a police officer to stop you for pretty much anything. You can be pulled over simply for driving too well, as if obeying the law to the T is in and of itself suspicious. It used to be that military or “I support my local law enforcement” type bumper stickers were safe havens, distinguishing you from the profiling net. However police trainers have started targeting cars with these types of identifiers, purporting that drug dealers use them as a ruse. Although you can refuse your car to be searched, when they actually bring the dog, they can easily cause the dog to make a false alert. Trainers and dogs are spending hour’s together rehearsing scenarios, and if they want to get in your car believe me they will signal to the dog to bark (I know someone who trains canine units). I also personally know someone who had over $80,000 worth of contraband confiscated. No arrest or paperwork were filed, the officer simply stole the merchandise and drove off.
Alexander raises the issue of the perverse incentive police departments have regarding arrests. Although commissioner Kelly has routinely reminded us that there are no “quotas” that his department must fill, for local law enforcement agencies incentives for funding a bigger.
A Nation Not at War?
The War on Drugs incentivized aggressive law enforcement tactics as well as disproportionate sentencing, threatening those swept up into the criminal justice system. Federal grants and congressional policies to combat drug ownership (not so much dealership) facilitate the existence of a ruthless paramilitary force that is costly and detrimental to society. Law enforcement tactics meant for combating drug use process large volumes of individuals as to catch the one or two individuals that are actually guilty of a crime. Last week we were discussing possible solutions for institutionalized discrimination. Congressional policies such as the three-strike policy or the War on Drugs that are punitive and socially conservative cause a cascade of reforms that neglect societal freedoms and largely benefit the policy-makers that try to garner support of socially conservative voters. One might ask what society would have been like had the War on Drugs not been conceived?
“Reasonable Suspicion”
We all understand the the body responsible for these patterns, conspiracies aside, is law enforcement. Law enforcement officials, however, are given a lot of power when they can deduce reasonable suspicion. Unfortunately, the factors that contribute to the decision to investigate/apprehend a drug use suspect are more present in African American communities; poverty, crime rates, gang violence, etc. Racial profiling, which is a hot topic in recent years, is clear and present in drug arrest patterns today.
The racist pattern of incarceration end up dooming the population that has been incarcerated. In Chapter three, Alexander tells the story of victims who lost rights and welfare possibility because of their crime history. I can only imagine that this leads to further drug use/arrest etc.
My question is: how can we intervene in this cycle of incarceration and relapse, while maintaining equality in the arrest process?
The New Jim Crow Chapter 2 and 3
As I read more of the book, I find it intriguing that she’s asking a lot of questions that I’ve never though about before. She brings up a lot of good points. From what I know those who are randomly searched are more likely to be of color than not. People may say it’s random but it really isn’t and is based on the persons bias. Due to the stereotypes that have been followed African Americans, it’s unfortunate to see them being viewed as a certain way when in fact it isn’t true that they’re the group to do most drugs etc. She also talks about how the 4th Amendment has been bent so that officers can search your things if under reasonable suspicion. She see’s it as a downfall to people’s right but I actually think it’s somewhat necessary for officers to do their job. If there’s really something suspicion going on, and they have to get a warrant, that person may ultimately get away in the end since the officers have no grounds to arrest them.
She’s extremely skeptical of everything and since I’m not much a conspiracist, I can’t really see eye to eye with her on everything. For example she makes it sounds like police officers were originally told to target African Americans and make it so that only African Americans should be arrested when she says, “The first step is to grant law enforcements extraordinarily discretion when regarding whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses, thus ensuring that conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes will be given free rein”. I believe that there is racism whether it be intentional or unintentional when arresting African Americans but I don’t believe that it was purposely set up from the very beginning for African Americans to be victims.
New Jim Crow, Ch 2-3
“Quite to the contrary, arrests for marijuana possession— a drug less harmful than tobacco or alcohol— accounted for nearly 80 percent of the growth in drug arrests in the 1990s” (Michelle ) Cheers! I support this whole-heartedly. It seems like a habit in this country – that we constantly get fixated on trivial matters in politics and argue fanatically about them when we could be spending our time and money in much better and more humanity-oriented ways. Does the government care about testing a drug like marijuana and seeing if it actually is less harmful than legal substances? It would help cut down on the prison rate if they legalized it. But I wonder if science even matters in this case… from what Michelle is saying politics have the last word, and politics have decided marijuana should be a very singular conquering campaign for law enforcement.
A lot of what Michelle is saying in Chapter 2 definitely resonates with me. This line in particular stood out to me, “In the years [from 1982 to 1991], the Court has heard argument in 30 Fourth Amendment cases involving narcotics. In all but one, the government was the petitioner. All save two involved a search or seizure without a warrant or with a defective warrant” (Michelle 62). She goes on to list some more things, but what kind of jarred me was, “In all but one, the government was the petitioner”. It’s kind of scary actually, especially because these are nonviolent crimes. Its like we’re moving into a dystopian future where the government controls our lives. Seems to me that at least 50% of the petitioners should have been citizens for the numbers to be fair, because the government was founded as an institution for the people, to protect the people. Not to act on its own as a watchful eye on the people. And the law, to me, should be mainly for citizens seeking to get justice, not the government.
The New Jim Crow: Chapters 2 and 3
Chapter 2 of the book talks about the fourth amendment, where peoples civil rights are mentioned. According to law, a police officer must read the person he/she is arresting the person’s Miranda Rights. However, the problem with this is that if the people do not know they have the right to remain silent, then there is no point in the existence of these rights. Similarly, according to the Reform Acts, the suspects were asked before their possessions were searched. However, if these people did not know they had the right to refuse, then what is the point of the right’s existence? It exists for the sake of mere formality.
Furthermore, Alexander also brings up the idea of discrimination and inherent feelings of racism. For example, when a group of seemingly “unbiased” whites were asked who they thought were most likely to be the drug dealers/users, most of them replied African Americans. In reality, however, there are more whites who use and sell drugs than there are blacks. This is indicative of the feelings of racism that has unfortunately seemed to embed itself into the heart of this nation.
The New Jim Crow: Chapters 2 and 3
The first thing that struck me as odd was the way the author wrote about our justice system. She brings up statistics which really strive to distort the data to fit her thoughts. For example, she talks about how the system is not geared towards trying to catch the drug dealers, and she cites the statistic that only 1 out of every 5 arrests for drug possession are dealers. My problem with that statistic is the fact that a dealer generally caters to more than one person, and so, if the goal is to fight drug possession, getting a drug dealer for every 4 users seems extraordinary.
But she brings in other skewed data as well, and passes them off as facts. The “fact” that there are paid witnesses, and that the justice system has a lot of flaws is only evidence that the justice system has a lot of flaws. That’s it. It doesn’t mean that the system is skewed; it means that people are. The fact that there is something wrong with the people means that the people need to be fixed.
The question of whether the system is flawed or the people are flawed is a very big one in this book. The idea, however, that you could change the system to fit the ideals of one group of people, specifically when the main group of people running the system have mixed feelings about that minority group, is absurd. Thus, I cannot agree with Ms. Alexander any less.
My question is to the author: Does she really believe that the justice system today would be all that bad, even if we were to take the ideas of people out of the picture? Does the fact that the system was made by people make the system itself that bad?
Ch. 2 and 3
As I read about how polices searched people during the Drug War, I wondered if what they were doing was okay. They did ask the people for permission to search bags and if permission was granted then they were able to search. On one hand, the people did not know that they could say no to the police; however, the police were able to more efficiently search for drugs.
The Reform Act had some flaws and I wonder what the purpose for these laws to be made were. For example, if you owned property that someone else was using for drugs, you could be held guilty. Also, many people were not willing to pay more for an attorney than what their assets cost. Finally, the government, instead of making expelling drug crime their first priority, often seizes assets because of the revenue it will bring in. I was wondering how true these claims are about the Reform Act and if there are any statistics to support this information.
Controversial
I’m surprised that I’ve never heard about this book on the news before because it deals with such a controversial topic. Michelle Alexander claims that the War on Drugs is a conspiracy to continue racial discrimination and encourage racial injustices. In the first chapter, Alexander reasons that there never should have been a War on Drugs because there wasn’t really a drug problem. In the second and third chapters, she provides many examples of how the War has been used to incriminate blacks. With all the information she provides, people have to wonder if African Americans really are being targeted.
Alexander does not include much information about what happens in court cases, similar to the ones she had mentioned, when the accused are white. While it would be nice if she could give a fuller picture, I don’t expect her to, simply because this book reminds me of a persuasive essay. The chapters in this book are already long, and bringing in the other cases might weaken her argument. If people want to learn more about the other side, that information should be available in another book; it does not belong in this one.
In these two chapters, I am most curious about how it is legal for SWAT teams to invade people’s homes. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Also, when these invasions happen, the authorities are looking for drugs. Why would they need the SWAT team to do that in the first place?
The New Jim Crow: Chapters 2 and 3
To be completely honest, I didn’t really know much about the Reagan administration War on Drugs at the beginning of the book. When Alexander mentioned it in the introduction I was able to understand the big picture, but I was still hoping she would later explain it in more detail. Sure enough, in Chapters 2 and 3, I got what I had been hoping for.
Chapter 2 was filled with court case after court case, some of which were familiar to me from my high school government class. Other pieces of information weren’t so familiar, like how the police officers could use “pretext stops” in order to try and search for any illegal drug activity. I was curious as to how the police officers would decide on who to stop. Maybe I’m wrong, but the whole thing just seems a bit too subjective to me. What one officer may consider to be suspicious could be perfectly normal to another officer. While reading, I could understand Michelle Alexanders frustration and I could see how she could think that African Americans were targeted.
As for Chapter 3, she begins the chapter with two very interesting cases of an African American man and woman whose rights were taken as a result of incarceration. The woman, for example, was no longer eligible for food stamps and was about to be evicted. I do agree with the fact that there is a problem with what is going on in the lives of that man and woman, but once again the question I have to ask is, what about whites? I appreciate the fact that this time, Alexander takes the time to mention that the incarceration rates for drug offenses for whites had been rising as well, however where are those case studies? I am sure that if she looked hard enough, she would have found a white woman and man in the same exact situations – disadvantaged because they were former felons. Yes, her argument would not be as strong, but at least she would be presenting both cases to the reader in an efficient way.
The New Jim Crow Response #2
Chapter 2 and 3 in The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander discusses the injustice involved with incarcerations related to drug use. While reading it, I wondered why there is so little interest on the subject when a lot of the issues with the War on Drugs sound preposterous. For instance, Alexander explains the conflict of interest with police stations in terms of arrests. For example, she states that police officers had an incentive for making random searches in order to get more people arrested in order to get increase their budget and by having a stake in the confiscated assets of drug related crimes. In fact, the book gave an example where a former officer stated that the Pentagon would give any equipment needed for the drug war. These weapons made it possible for police and SWAT team members to storm into a house and confiscated a Learjet from a millionaire who was suspected for owning drugs yet none were found. I wonder what would happen if the cases Alexander bring up were to be brought into a more mainstream audience. It also appeared as a surprise to me because I am pretty sure that if more individuals were aware of the treatment that the incarcerated faced, there would be more activists. However, if imprisonment and drug users become more stigmatized from society due to media influence, I fear that many individuals will refuse to care about their rights.
Another thing from the two chapters that I enjoyed was Alexander’s acknowledgement of how improbable the War on Drug’s policies would be if it were attached to white middle class Americans. In fact, she labeled the action as political suicide. On top of that many judges are against the unjust protocol of sentencing. Her example of a case of an individual who was charged with possessing powdered cocaine instead of crack cocaine was brought to attention. Black individuals frequently used crack cocaine, while more affluent white individual used powdered cocaine. In the case, the judge’s sentence was appealed and the defendant was sent back to prison for an additional 10 years after he married and had his own family. This gives an image of the chips being stacked against Black and Brown Americans. The SWAT home invasions on fraternity houses and suburban houses with affluent and well represented connections where drugs are equally as prevalent is disregarded for poor urban environments where the individuals at that location would be unable to get much of a representation. My anticipation for Alexander’s solution for the injustice against young Black males grows even stronger. At this moment, I would think that financial incentives should be cut from police stations, and I also think assistive housing and employers should not be required to know about whether or not an applicant was previously arrested. Although this would not immediately solve the problem, it would curb the major incentive for more arrests and for former prisoners to successfully reintegrate into society.
Fairness and Irony
In The New Jim Crow, the author presents many points that bolster her argument regarding the racial disparities that exist in our present incarceration system. Michelle Alexander discusses many Supreme Court cases that “bless” racial discriminating done by the police and prosecutors. However, it seems to me that she does not actually consider the nature of the case.
The case I am particularly referring to is McCleskey v. Kemp. The crux of the case centered around an African American man, Warren McCleskey, facing the death penalty for killing an officer in an armed robbery. This case was appealed to the Supreme Court due to supposed evidence of racial bias in the fact that the prosecutor pursued the death penalty because of race. It seems like the author is set on proving that the Supreme Court has fostered an environment for the development of racial disparities, that she forget the fact that the man was a murderer! Whether or not he deserves the death penalty is obviously an important key, but so are his actions. Ms. Alexander seems to disregard his action and wants to prove a certain “injustice” towards the criminal. It seems to me that she is acting from a biased stand point through her argument. She is definitely not presenting the case in an objective light but with a light rife with her own feelings. It is also pretty terrifying that the author accuses the Supreme Court of encouraging racism, she definitely does not point out all the trials that actually took place. In a sense, she expects fairness from the justice system, yet she does not provide a fair assessment of the court herself.
My question is does the author truly present a fair view of the justice system? Does this weaken her entire argument?
David Zilberman
The New Jim Crow
I feel like the problem that needs to be addressed is re-entry into society, and the age-old problem of prisons – how do we balance punishment with reasonable leniency Continue reading
Great Issues–But are all Alexanders Statistics Correct?
“The New Jim Crown” by Michelle Alexander focuses on a central issue of our time: the penal system. Increasingly research into criminology seems to tell us that putting non-violent offenders behind bars has little positive effect on crime rates and only further hardens them, making them more likely to become possible violent offenders. Sociologists and economists will talk about the economic effects of mass incarceration, both at a macro and micro level: at a macro level, it is costing our nation between $30,000-$40,000 a year for every one of the 2 million behind bars—at a micro level it devastates African American communities and prevents families from ever accruing any real markers of wealth. Research into psychology also should lead us as a nation to question how culpable some of these criminals truly are. Surely many need to be contained, rehabilitated, or monitored—however as in the case of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally handicapped man executed under the Clinton administration who “had so little conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked for the dessert from his last meal to be saved for him until the morning,” clearly we are treating punishment as the de facto response, rather then recognizing that many criminals likely suffer from mental illness of some sort or the other, questions of free agency aside (56).
While I do not believe I can truly disagree with many of Alexander’s assertions, I do slightly take issue with the motives she believes underlie our massive penal system. Alexander believes slavery transitioned to Jim Crow Segregation, from there to engineered class antagonisms and social and economic discrimination, which then led to the mass incarceration of blacks today, what she deems the “New Jim Crow.” The motivation she believes is racism. While I agree racism is likely a predominant factor, I do not think it is the only one, and perhaps not even the primary one. This is because the politicians engineering these “tough on crime” laws and rhetoric are doing so for personal political gain—it is all self-serving. If interest served them, they probably would throw Lithuanians as a people under the carpet. I think the motivation is more personal political fame and wealth, and the people seeking this will do anything to obtain it, including stoke class or race antagonisms. While I agree with Alexander that many of the politicians egging these incarceration laws forward are morally bankrupt, I also thinking that a good deal of them are likely too intelligent to truly believe racist rhetoric themselves—that based on phenotypic differences some people are inherently better than others—rather I think they simply want to further themselves and will do so by any method possible.
The one issue I take with Alexander is that many of her statistics seem cherry picked, or that she simply misunderstood them. In the introduction, she states that while between the 1960’s and 1970’s Germany, Finland, and the US had approx. the same crime rates, the US prison rate dwarfed that of Germany and Finland. From the brief research I’ve done, she seems to be conflating petty crime with violent crime. Yes, they may have had overall similar crime rates, but not murder rates or gun violence—given that both Germany and Finland don’t make it easy to obtain guns—which to some extent could explain why the US imprisoned more (only to an extent). Additionally, she states that Blacks and Hispanics are no more likely to commit crimes than whites, statistically. While it is true that of course no race is naturally more violent than another, if you look simply at homicides in NYC, over 85% are perpetrated by blacks and Hispanics, as are the victims over 80% black or Hispanic. Naturally this is due to socioeconomic circumstances. I don’t have a specific reference here, but in the last seminar class we did some research into this phenomenon. These were just two statements regarding stats in the intro that I took issue with, though reading further there are too many to count.
The question I would ask you is do you know someone in prison and do you think they deserve to be there?
-Jesse Geisler
Is today really a New Jim Crow era?
When reading the thoughts of Michelle Alexander on today’s racial injustice particularly towards the African-American group, I sensed that she is rather biased and therefore, only finding ways to defend for her fellow righteous African-Americans and their ancestors. While there is no doubt that the slavery and the establishment of the Jim Crow laws in American history were extremely harsh and unfair towards this racial group, I think comparing those historical events to African-Americans subjected to underprivileged and less favorable conditions due to criminal activity and record is not exactly the right correlation. It just so happens that there is a much higher percentage of African-Americans falling into this category of felons, and that is out of their own doing and actions to become those felons, not because another racial group forced them to commit such crimes. In my eyes, people are judged by what they have actually done nowadays because we don’t have ‘mass incarceration’ just because they are simply of African descent. No matter which President we have, a white, black, asian, etc. one, criminals are going to be treated the same way to get what they deserve for their wrongdoings. However, I am not objecting the fact that there are loopholes in the American criminal justice system, especially when racial stereotyping is put into play, but as with life, we have to fight for what is right.
The racial caste system is an interesting perspective. Alexander says that “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” (2) Of course, there are still minorities all over this country and ‘white’ people are considered the majority. I’m not going to deny that minorities usually have to put a greater effort to achieve greater political power in this country. However, I think with the election of President Obama, it shows that many racial boundaries have broken and that they don’t exist anymore as the way we have understood those boundaries for many years. Everyone has a chance to exercise their rights and they are not taken away from us unless we let them get taken away. Do you think there is a clear racial caste system in our society today? Do you think there is a “continuing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” that has led to Alexander’s arguments thus far?
The New Jim Crow
My first thought upon reading through the Introduction and first chapter of this book was that this is a subject matter that people are afraid to discuss. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 seemed to be the ultimate achievement for an oppressed class, the fact that an African-American took the highest office in the most powerful country in the world, finally erased the boundary between blacks and whites. Well, It didn’t.
Mass incarceration, to be quite honest, isn’t good for anyone. First, it encourages racial profiling and discriminatory sentencing, and second, the cost of this large-scale incarceration puts a further strain on the economy, while not effectively inhibiting crime. My question is: how can we change the justice system to make it do its job in both an equal and effective way?
The New Jim Crow
I found the idea of the New Jim Crow interesting. I’ve never looked at incarceration as another form of Jim Crow even though the numbers of those in prison are overwhelmingly African Americans. I however think her ideas are exaggerated. To compare incarceration due to someone committing a crime to slavery and Jim Crow laws that only applied to African Americans seems a bit extreme. I do however agree with her that racial discrimination is still extremely apparent in America today. In the big cities in America, it may be less apparent but once you travel more South, you can see that many people still hold onto the ideas of pre civil war days which is quite sad.
The idea that we’re stuck in a caste system is intriguing especially since America is known for the idea of there being social mobility. I think that people are not indefinately bound to their social class and there is social mobility, however it get’s harder as you go down the social class pyramid and especially harder for those who have been incarcerated to make it up the pyramid again. There should be better ways for those who have been incarcerated to integrate back into society.
Intro and Ch. 1
In the preface, when Alexander wrote that she is writing this book for people like her, people who cared about racial equality, it almost gave me chills. The reason why is because racial equality, to me, is so natural. Obviously, whites and blacks should have the same rights and be treated equally. For someone to go against that seems “not normal”. I quickly became interested in what Alexander’s “new” Jim Crow laws were.
I especially liked Alexander’s writing style and how she introduced Cotton and then traced back to his great grandfather and the rights that he, too, were denied. It helped to tie how racial issues were still prevalent today, especially in the criminal justice system. I never would have thought of this new Jim Crow law of mass incarceration. It is interesting to see how policies and ideas that were prevelant during slavery are still prevalent in America, today.
“The language of case may well seem foreign or unfamiliar to some” (Alexander 13). It does seem foreign because Americans are constantly fighting for equal rights and criminals should also deserve their rights after they have done their time. Otherwise, there is always a potential that the same crimes may be done and the reality that they will not be able to support themselves or their families.
My question is, how well spread in America is this notion that mass incarceration is a form of inequality.
The New Jim Crow Intro and Ch.1
The Jim Crow laws were thought to be completely illegal and wiped away from the face of America. African Americans were considered completely equal, as they had all the same rights. However, Alexander starts the book in quite an interesting fashion when she talks about Jarvious Coton and his ancestors. She dscussed how him, his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather could not vote. While the reason his ancestors could not vote were because of the Jim Crow laws, the reason Cotton could not vote was because he was a convicted felon.
Alexander argues that mass incarceration happens extensively in the U.S. and the African American minority group is targeted. She shows how the moment after a person becomes a convicted felon, everything that was illegal before now suddenly becomes legal. For example, prior to conviction, it is unlawful to deny a man his right to vote. After conviction, however, this becomes legal.
I thought it was extremely ironic how Alexander came to the realization that the Jim Crow Laws have not gone, but merely exist in another form, on the day of President Barack Obama’s victory. A day that was supposed to be one of jubilance and celebration African Americans and other minority groups rather became a day where Michelle Alexander realized the complete unfairness and inequality that exists within today’s society.
The New Jim Crow: Civil Rights, Politics, and Mass Incarceration
Like several of my classmates, I was intrigued by the idea of a “New Jim Crow” as I hadn’t really considered the United States’ high rates of incarceration in this way. A major point I got from reading the introduction and first chapter is just how strong of an influence political agendas and power have on impacting public opinion and perception. Based on the data Alexander presents, like how 1 in 4 black males will serve time in their lifetime, it is clearly an important issue. However, most people (myself included prior this reading) are likely not educated on just how race-centered so many “crime-fighting” legislation are in the post-Jim Crow era. I was shocked how the War on Drugs occurred in a time when a very small percentage of the population felt it was a pertinent matter. Similarly, the extreme rates of incarceration in our country are not fed to us as something that needs changing and thus, we typically do not heed them as pressing in our voting preferences or even our frequent thoughts.
Nonetheless, social issues can be changed as years pass when proper media attention is given, as evidenced by the Gay Rights movement of the last few decades. I couldn’t help but compare the Civil Rights progression outlined in the first chapter to how Gay Rights are evolving in the United States. I remember hearing about how in the 1990s, as soon as public opinion shifted to an ever so slight majority of people who were in support of Gay Rights, gay characters began being featured on shows like Friends, Will and Grace, and Sex and the City. It’s almost eerie just how powerful the media can be on popular opinion, and vice versa. As this acceptance continues, and public interest increases, issues like the repeal of DOMA and a possible constitutional definition of marriage take center stage in political agenda. One can hope that Alexander’s book will help raise awareness and take the first of many steps in fixing racial discrimination and unlawful incarceration.
Did anyone else compare mass incarceration to other current issues facing the United States?
-Jacqui Larsen
The New Jim Crow: Introduction and Chapter 1
Slavery and the Jim Crow laws are parts of our country’s history that many Americans, regardless of whether they’re black or white, aren’t too proud of. I know I don’t only speak for myself when I say that learning and reading more about them only makes me wish I could somehow go back and erase the past. Since this is not possible, all we can do is use the past to create a better future. One would think that with the election of the first African American president, Barack Obama, and the success of many African Americans in all areas (Alexander mentions Oprah Winfrey, for example), our great nation is making progress. However, what I got from the introduction and Chapter 1 of this book is that this is definitely not the case.
According to Alexander, mass incarceration is the “New Jim Crow.” It is a legal way for African Americans to have basic freedoms denied and be discriminated against. Prior to reading, I would not have gone so far as to compare this situation to a caste system because the only knowledge I have of the caste system is what I learned about in high school. As far as I know, members of Indian society were born into their caste and could not move up the social ladder; there was no social mobility. In the case of the U.S. today, I’d like to believe that we all have a chance to create success for ourselves and move up in society, and that we do not have some kind of caste system. I am still somewhat skeptical, and am looking forward to reading more. Who knows, maybe she’ll convince me with the next couple of chapters.
I also just wanted to briefly reflect on the fact that she stated her race on the second page of the book (“As an African American woman…”). Did that affect the way you read and understood the book? Do you think you would feel differently about the book and the opinions presented in it if she had not given her race? It certainly changed the way I viewed the book because as I read, I couldn’t help but wonder if the writing was biased. I found it harder to believe some of the things that she wrote because again, I kept thinking that her feelings were further intensified because of the simple fact that she is an African American. I don’t know if she would still be trying to preserve affirmative action and end mass incarceration if she was white, and I guess we never will know.
The New Jim Crow response #1
When I started reading “The New Jim Crow” I was intrigued by the ideas brought forth by the author because I had never heard of or even considered them before. When people talk about the slavery or Jim Crow in America they generally refer to it as over, with some remnants of racism remaining. It was intriguing to read a point of view that said that not only is the battle against racism not over, but that it is the same battle in different disguises. I don’t know if I necessarily agree with Alexander, because even though she admitted that her theory is a little out there, she seemed to me a bit of a conspiracy theorist. Her hypothesis does have evidence supporting it, but I feel like many rational explanations can be given for many of it. I also got the impression that she is picturing a bunch of fat old rich white men sitting around discussing how they can band together to make the lives of African-Americans horrible. I am not trying to defend racists, just I think Alexander is superimposing ideas of racism onto everything she mentions in the book, whether it is applicable or not.
Conspiracy
On the first page of the introduction, Michelle Alexander states, “In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals – goals shared by the Founding Fathers. Denying African Americans citizenship was deemed essential to the formation of the original union” (1). I was surprised by this statement because I never thought about how doing such a thing could be essential. I knew that it was not addressed when creating the original union, but why would this still be a goal today?
It was interesting when I found out that “the War on Drugs began at a time when illegal drug use was on a decline” (6). For once, I think I’m convinced that the data pointing to a conspiracy was not coincidental. If the CIA knew that the guerrilla armies they were actively supporting were smuggling illegal drugs to the United States, why would they block efforts to investigate this crime? However, it’s not as surprising that an illegal drug crisis would suddenly appear after the drug war was declared because people tend to focus on sensational media. I remember writing in my paper about community about how most people gain strength after a crisis, but the media focuses on those who are devastated. In this case, “people of all color use and sell illegal drugs are remarkably similar rates,” but there are “stark racial disparities” between the rates at which people are imprisoned (7). I thought it was interesting how there was a time when people thought there would no longer be a need for prisons when about thirty years later, Clinton “slashed funding for public housing by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent) and boosted corrections by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent),” especially after studies recognized prisons to be failures (57).
Everyone says that they want to be treated as equals. However, we continue to have racial discrimination in ways that help (Affirmative Action is supposed to help) and hurt minorities. Why does it seem like America, which is supposed to be all about equality, discriminates even more than other countries? While Alexander stated that the concept of race didn’t mean anything until Whites started conquering everything, European countries discriminate less than America.
The New Jim Crow Response #1
Once I read the introduction and the first chapter of “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander and saw her definition of an ongoing phenomenon known as racial caste, I remembered the article entitled Prison and the Poverty Trap. In that article, it discussed what imprisonment does to inmates upon their reintegration into society. It states that inmates earned a little more than $1.00 a day. Even with the discrimination that the inmates will face upon release, the pitiful wages that they earn in prison is not enough for inmates to support themselves or their family after their sentence. I cannot wait for chapter 6 for Alexander to give some examples on how to combat the “racial caste” system we currently have in place imposed by the War on Drugs.
I knew I had to check if there had been updates on the policies that exist today when it comes to drug arrests because of the still ongoing War on Drugs. I came across an article written in March of 2013 where federal judges are working with prosecutors in order to sidestep drug laws. In other words, the accused could enroll in a program where the convicted would have to pass a sobriety program. After they pass the program, they would avoid prison. I wonder if Alexander would think differently of Obama because of this, as she claims little has been done to the system of control during his administration (Alexander, 14). Also, I wonder if individuals under this program would still be denied assistive housing because of being sent to trial. It would be interesting to see if this is a step in the positive direction in order to address the mass incarceration rates of drug related crimes or if this program was put in place to curb the increasing cost of prisons. Nevertheless, progress has been making sentencing more lenient for drug related crimes compared to the War on Drug’s no tolerance policy.
Articles mentioned: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/long-prison-terms-eyed-as-contributing-to-poverty.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=science
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/02/nyregion/us-judges-offer-addicts-a-way-to-avoid-prison.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The New Jim Crow???
Just by reading the introduction of The New Jim Crow, I could tell that it was going to be a very bold and controversial novel. The introduction really serves as a foundation of what you can expect the author to argue. I’ve never really heard of the term the “New Jim Crow”, and how it can relate to mass incarceration. The author seems to want to draw parallels between present day society, the Jim Crow era, and slavery. It does really seem like a stretch to compare the standing of African Americans in the 21st century to those of slaves in the colonial era.
The author does draw some good points when discussing the destruction and re-birth of multiple caste systems. However, she seems very biased and one-sided. She doesn’t give the progress that African Americans have made throughout time any justice. The author seems to briefly mention a positive event for the progression of African Americans, and then sweep it under the rug. It was interesting to see her “conspiracy” view of the government. From what I understood, she was trying to say that many former presidents, some of which are alive, were raging a war against African Americans and any people of color. She goes on to mention the fact that the “War on Drugs” was just another way of cracking down on racial minorities. In my opinion, these claims reek of hyperbole. The author is very narrow sighted and seems to just focus the negatives aspects that exist in our society. It will be interesting to read her claims that will argue about the existence of New Jim Crow.
My question is from what you read do you think the author may be exaggerating in her opinions? Does she really objectively present the development of African Americans throughout history?
David Zilberman
A Synergism of Plagues: “Planned Shrinkage,” Contagious Housing Destruction, and AIDS in the Bronx
“The geography of AIDS in the Bronx is indeed basically that of drug abuse,” Rodrick Wallace states. Wallace connects “planned shrinkage” in the Bronx—the process of allowing overcrowded and decaying buildings to burn by purposely meeting the blazes with ill equipped and insufficient numbers of firefighters—to the spread of intravenous drug use and in turn HIV/AIDS. Wallace is making several complicated arguments in this piece, all of them connected. He believe data shows that the burnout out process in decaying communities and the drug use and AIDS rates that follow it are essentially a contagious phenomena, e.g. a self fulfilling prophecy. I had no idea that vast sections of South Bronx, Brownsville, Bushwick, East New York, and the Lower East Side were essentially left to burn, and was shocked at what seemed the blatant illegality of this. The city purposely downsized or closed fire departments that served decaying communities with the highest incidences of fire, so as to burn out this “urban decay;” most of this done under the direction and advice from the Rand Institute of Research, hired by the city. Rodrick mentions that it is the equivalent to stopping the production of and distribution of medicine in an area that faces an epidemic. Perhaps Rodrick’s paper didn’t have the intent of focusing on victims of the blazes, but the question that was left unanswered for me was how many were negligently left to die in burning buildings, due to a planned insufficient fire rescue response.
Rodrick’s argument for why the burnout was contagious is fairly logical and simple. As vast areas burn, populations are displaced and must move into surrounding real estate. This burdens buildings in the surrounding area with overcrowding, taxing ancient electrical systems with more use and causing further buildup of highly flammable trash and people smoking/lighting/cooking things. And with the displacement of the burned out population into surrounding areas comes the movement of diseases and social habits: AIDS and drug use. The areas that were initially allowed to burn already had high incidences of AIDS and drug use, and moving and causing forced mingling of these populations with surrounding areas only intensified the rate and spread of these problems. And as the surrounding areas became overcrowded and burned out, the problems further spread. I found Rodrick’s arguments highly persuasive and interesting, and the stats well placed although complicated. My question is, what were the legal ramifications for the city, now that the evidence is out that the burnings and negligence were planned in advance?
-Jesse Geisler
Gentrification compared to Urban Renewal
One of the main inferences I made when reading Fullilove’s descriptions of the devastation urban renewal caused within the African American community, was that blacks are in a constant cycle of coping with PTSD. PTSD reverberates through generations, as parents display behavior that affects kids, and so forth. And given that blacks as a group have gone from being first brutally captured and enslaved, to discriminated against, beaten, and stigmatized, with little or no rights and the oases of community they created destroyed by developers under the guise of helpful urban renewal, it is little wonder blacks have demonstrated slow social mobility growth. Psychologically damaging events occur generation after generation within the black community.
I agree wholeheartedly that urban renewal was devastating—the only possible argument I can think of in its favor is that of fire safety, because the ugly boxy cement buildings put up in place are perhaps less of a fire trap then the haphazard wooden ones that made up twisted streets full of history and stories—however the current issue that comes to mind is gentrification. Is gentrification just a slower form of urban renewal? The developer’s bulldozers replaced by the yuppies whole foods? Its almost as if, when anything is deemed to “bad,” too much of a slum it will be destroyed by developers or government programs, whereas if it becomes to “good,” the yuppies will come like sharks smelling blood in water. Fullilove seems to imply there is some ghetto “sweetspot,” a mix between edginess and community love, which would be the ideal place for African American renewal and revitalization. I would ask, how has gentrification root shocked your neighborhood?
-Jesse Geisler
Progress in the 1950s
I thought it was interesting how Fullilove relates urban renewal to war, although this correlation necessitates the question of whether urban renewal causes societal upheaval which facilitates war, or whether urban renewal is the result of societal upheaval which would be the precursor of war anyway. But Fullilove connects the French revolution and the war in Vietnam to urban renewal programs in Paris and the US, respectively. I also enjoyed Fulliloves discussion of the 1950s use of word “progress” to cover up anything. People who had very little political knowledge and analytical ability to foresee consequences of urban renewal would blindly say they agreed with it because they supported “progress,” whatever that even meant. My dad grew up in the 50s and often told me about how he thought the era was characterized by conformity. After the chaos of WWII, people just wanted everything and themselves to be as “normal” as possible. So the question I would ask you is, how what terms today do you think are used similarly to the way Fullilove describes the word progress was used in the 1950s?
-Jesse Geisler
Ghettos in Root Shock
I thought it was interesting how Fullilove discussed meanings of the word “ghetto” and differentiates this from what a “slum” is. According to Fullilove, a Ghetto is an area of enforced residence due to membership in a particular ethnic or religious group, whereas a slum by contrast is an area marked by poverty and worn out housing. The map Fullilove provides, showing how poor areas tend to clump in urban centers with wealthier enclaves on the outskirts, the barriers marked by acts of vandalism was highly interesting. She is implying residents are contained and enforced to continue living in the ghetto due to general discrimination from those outside the area. As professor Braine mentioned on our field trip to look at the 3D map of NYC and our discussion of public housing, in some areas you are “Once a tower kid always a tower kid.” This is to say the stigma of where you grow up will follow you. Fullilove made several interesting inferences in her discussion of African American ghettos. First, she implied that for the people living there it is close to a warm, friendly place, with strong communal support and ties. Given that my experience of “ghettos” I’ve visited or people I’ve known who have grown up in such areas is post the crack epidemic and American crime wave, when I say I am skeptical of her assertions it may be because I cannot imagine a 1960s ghetto. The second interesting connection she makes is the implication that the end of segregation led to the end of the “supportive” African American ghetto; the end of this kind of idealized nurturing community. I would ask what a ghetto is to you, and how would you define it?
-Jesse Geisler
A trip through South Bronx
Ive only every seen the South Bronx twice, once when I made a wrong turn trying to get onto the RFK bridge, and once from an academic perspective at the Queens Museum Panorama. Driving through the area, especially at night, made me feel extremely unsafe, despite living in East Flatbush for a year prior. I think what differentiates the Bronx from other areas in NY is how compact it is. Wallace brings up overcrowding in houses in the Bronx. And I dont think I need to reiterate that this, paired with injection drug use, among other things, makes the area extremely prone to HIV.
So, are parts of New York “to far gone?” is there a way ha we can restore, not just the Bronx, but the bad areas of New York? and how? it’s easy to say urban renewal, but we all know that that would simply displace to many people to deal with, on top of the cost.
Societal HIV
The spread of drug abuse, and indices of public health including homicide and infant mortality suggest a disruption of personal domestic and community networks accompanied the migration of ghetto communities. While HIV may be mainly regarded as a public health issue, it must be regarded in a larger social context as well. HIV/AIDS not only deteriorates health but contributes to urban decay, catalyzing a collapse of the urban ecosystem. Ostracizing and stigmatizing such individuals leads to social disunity naturally caused by ignorance and apathy of individuals and government.
Could this ignorance be analogous to a “societal HIV infection” in that in that it disrupts the societal structure and causes its slow, dwindling emaciation, which is virtually incurable?
Spread of AIDS in South Bronx
As many others already mentioned, the first thing that came to my mind when I realized this article was about the South Bronx was the trip to the Queens Museum as well. I remember during the trip how Professor Braine kept saying Bronx, particularly South Bronx, is perhaps the only are where we’d see completely black on the map. After reading this article, it is not so difficult to understand why.
The article starts of by mentioning the reduction of the fire service. This might seem irrelevant, however, it acts as the initiator of a chain reaction which ultimately lead to the spread of HIV/AIDS in South Bronx and much of Bronx in general. When fire services were reduced, people tended to come together in a community, as they felt the sense of security they had lost when the fire services were gone, could be replaced by people simply being next to each other. However, Wallace makes it explicitly clear that while there are various mediums by which HIV/AIDS could be transmitted, drug abuse was the vector in South Bronx. The problem would not have been potent were it not for the “planned shrinkage” program of the city and the redlining by the Fire Department. These two events caused “the geography of drug abuse from being tightly and centrally distributed in the traditional poverty communities of the South-Central Bronx into a split and bifurcated pattern covering a much larger area…” (Wallace 17). The expansion of drug use also led to the expansion of drug abuse, which in turn exponentially increased the rate of HIV/AIDS. My question, however, is why did the government not try to tackle the drug abuse problem? This was clearly the reason for the staggeringly high rates of HIV/AIDS in the South Bronx, so why was this problem not addressed?
Synergism of Plagues
This reading reminded me of what we talked about on our trip to Queens Museum and how the South Bronx was consistently affected throughout the years whether it was about poverty or HIV/AIDS. It was one of the few areas that was concentrated with people affected by both. I like how Wallace uses a lot of graphs to show how the South Bronx is being affected. He makes an interesting correlation by starting off about the lack of fire services in the South Bronx. Who knew that this would eventually lead to increase poverty and people with HIV/AIDS in the area. It’s sad to see that the government wasn’t able to help South Bronx. Even if the government did start to build more fire services in the area, it simply wasn’t enough to counteract the downward slope the South Bronx was headed towards. Even today the South Bronx is still a community know to have a high poverty rate and a greater density of people with HIV/AIDS. Wallace makes a good connection as to how the South Bronx needs more help and that it left alone it’s only a downward slope for the community. He talks about how there are some apartment buildings that have a lot of tenants who have HIV/AIDS and how people find the building “undesirable” and then eventually the landlord abandons the building which then becomes a perfect place for fire setting. My question is how can we rebuild the South Bronx? Sadly society is shallow to an extent and it’s unfortunate that people would be turned off by people who have a disease that isn’t even air born. How do we prevent these buildings from closing down and how do we detach the stigma associated with the neighborhood?
Effect of HIV/AIDS
It was necessary to keep the spread of HIV and AIDS in check in the south Bronx and other areas because the rapid spread of these diseases effected the population on a larger scale. Drug use and other promiscuous behaviors spread the disease and this soon effected more “developed” parts of the nation. Looking at the Bronx, these mechanisms to spread HIV/AIDS effected South-Central Bronx and Northwest to East Bronx. And this, along with other factors, gave New York City the title of the HIV capital of America.
It was interesting to see how housing related to people who were infected to HIV. I have never thought of it in that light. The sicker people were, the less able they were to work and pay the rent. There was also a chance that a particular housing area could have multiple people infected and that would drive away healthy tenants. There was an urban crisis that often composed of either homelessness, drug use, violence, deterioration of public health, or poverty (2).
My question has to do with something mentioned later on in the article. Why is it that when a larger population of people are infected the number of people with symptoms are proportional to the number of people without symptoms.
“A Synergism of Plagues”: Wallace Reading
The closest I have ever gotten to the South Bronx is “seeing” it on the panorama at the Queens Museum, so I found the reading to be quite interesting from the very beginning. At first, I questioned the direction of the reading as it jumped from AIDS in the Bronx to the fire service reductions and the fire/abandonment epidemic to overcrowding and urban decay. However, as I continued to read I understood that the concepts, in fact, are strongly connected. As the reading pointed out, the overcrowding led to drug abuse which in turn, led to AIDS. They then explore the possibility the the infection will go unchecked, and if it does, it is possible that the AIDS outbreak could lead to further urban decay that continues to cycle “in a destabilizing positive feedback.” My question is, if this were to happen, how would the cycle end? Would there just continue to be more urban decay which leads to more drug use which leads to more AIDS which leads to more urban decay and so on? At what point is enough enough? Instability from the first urban decay wave, as Wallace explained, made AIDS difficult to control, so I can only imagine that it is getting increasingly more difficult. What is even scarier is that it is becoming a threat not only to the South Bronx, but to a five boroughs within New York City. I like that Wallace lays out a threefold plan for a return to stability (1. restoration of municipal services, 2. community organization, and 3. attention to stabilization/ extension of low income housing availability) and I feel that it has the potential to be successful.
Planned Shrinkage
Like Albert, I was surprised by how there could be a domino effect that would lead from neglecting municipal fire services to drugs and urban decay. This paper was definitely a challenging read because of all of the math and statistics involved in explaining the correlation between these seemingly independent variables. How can neglecting municipal fire services cause people to contract HIV/AIDS? I never would have guessed that there would be a connection. Nevertheless, I am both intrigued and dismayed by the fact that this series of cause and effect could have been stopped, but it was not. Instead, it was a “planned shrinkage.” I want to know how the government was allowed to let all this happen.
Wallace reading
While reading Wallace’s article I was both shocked and amazed by the statistics he presented and how he correlated them. However, what I found most interesting was not actually in the article, but rather the words on the first page under the author’s name:
Department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Epidemiology of Mental Disorders Research Department, New York State Psychiatric Institute
Am I the only one who thinks it odd that AIDS is being studied by someone in a department on the epidemiology of mental disorders?(If there is a sensible and factual answer to this question please provide it because I am not asking this question rhetorically.)
Reading- Synergism of Plagues
While reading the article, the most prevalent thought I had was that this cycle is a vicious one. The fact that it can be stopped but isn’t, simply for politics is one that disgusts me. I myself hate politics because morals always seem to take a back seat to policy.
But one thing lingered within me. My question is what are the other interrelated concepts that haven’t been looked into? Where do they play into the scheme of living, and how do they impact, speed up or slow down this vicious cycle?
AIDS and Politics
The reading by Wallace presented the spread of AIDS in a very different angle when compared to the more traditional approach of discussing AIDS. The author discussed the direct correlation between the wide spread drug abuse and the concentration of AIDS specifically in the South Bronx. This in turns fuels the rates of urban decay and forced displacement in people which in turn accelerates the further spread of AIDS.
A key point that the article makes is that the destruction of neighborhood social networks and such programs, serve to bolster the percentage of AIDS among people. The destruction of many neighborhoods served as an impetus for the wide spread of AIDS. Certain areas were deemed blighted. Many components that make up a neighborhood were slowly taken away from the neighborhoods chosen for “planned shrinkage.” This in turn resulted in the wide spread of AIDS. The disease moved in a diffuse pattern and spread rapidly.
There are proposed solutions to the restoration of the affected communities such as the re-development of municipal service, and community organizing. This can only serve as a preventative measure for any future unrealistic outbreaks of AIDS. What about the people who were already infected by the disease as a result of “planned shrinkage”? How does it feel to know that your life endangered because of a political drive?
David Zilberman
Deliberate Decay
The most striking and also most upsetting thing about the South Bronx burnout is that the initial gears for decay were turned deliberately. Wallace speaks about “planned shrinkage” – a development strategy akin to amputation without providing proper hospital care.
Strengthening the village within the city
Displacement, or “diss-placement” has adverse effects on entire communities and ultimately the individual. Although public planners usually act on the aesthetics of communities, the well-being of families and individuals are often overlooked. While overcoming this barrier may seem impossible on a municipal level, Fullilove mentions a model project that was able to demonstrate the importance of housing rehabilitation, housing cooperatives, and social services for families that have been recently uprooted and strengthened the “village-within-the-city.” In modern day Newark, the main hospital and medical school’s efforts to conduct community outreach has essentially integrated the institution into the surrounding community.Root shock can be sympathetic and humane if the means to facilitate a new neighborhood with a sense of unity are provided. Still, is this end justified by the means by which it was achieved?
Closing the Wounds
What struck me the most was that they compared losing their house to losing their own skin. “Without replacement, of a house should be considered a “third – degree burn.” The number of blocks with third -degree burns, divided by the total number of blocks, gives the Community Burn Index.” When I read this, it was like ouch. I think the term Community Burn Index really shows how deeply affected they were and how this damaged their social life. It wasn’t only one person that was affected but rather it felt like their whole neighborhood had been set on fire and taken away from them. They were no longer able to be together and it’s sad how many of them said that they were no longer family anymore because they were now from another part of town. They now consider those that used to be close to them ‘strangers’. Through all this though, it was nice that there were people who were willing to try and help them move on. They tried to reach out to those who were affected and get them to talk about their current life, to make sure they were adjusting properly. I however also found it sad that we’re expected to try and reach this state of normalcy is fast as possible in order to move on with our lives. Even if things may seem “normal” again, the situation is something that has changed their lives forever and something they will never forget. For example when they bring up 9/11, I personally wasn’t affected but it’s an event that has changed our city and even our country forever. The memory of it still lies deep within us and it’s sad that so many people have to live with the memory of their homes being taken away from them
Root Shock
As I read about her perspective on the 9/11 tragedy, I felt a close connection, and I found myself trying to remember what happened that day. I remember being in 3rd grade, and I remember a little of the shock that the teachers showed when they heard the announcements. I remember the announcements made on the PA system by the principal, and how he sounded so serious, while he usually is a very relaxed person. I remember being dismissed from school early, and waiting for my mom to show up. I remember the fear on her face as she ushered my sisters and I into the car and took us home. I remember trying to watch it on TV, but the TV was full of static. I remember a lot of the small details. I just can’t seem to remember feeling any fear. As a child, I was observant of many things, but I couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of this event.
I speak of what I remember because I wish to ask, throughout this book, we see countless stories of people who have definitely encountered root shock. I only wonder if there is a similar syndrome faced by the younger children of these families, a situation where the children couldn’t comprehend what was happening but were still affected in some way. Throughout the book, the stories are about people who understood, even to an extent, what was happening. What about the children who couldn’t quite comprehend what was happening? What happened to them?
Moving with Hope
The first six chapters we read focused on what rootshock was and all of its negatives. We mentioned in class how rootshock can severely traumatize people, as they are being asked to move away from something they were raised with. However, chapter 7 attempts to shed a ray of hope into the idea of urban renewal. While it is extremely unjust that urban renewal happens mainly in Black communities, it is important to always cling onto hope. Some of these people needed a new beginning. Urban renewal presented them with the opportunity to start fresh and build an entirely different life.
However, the effects of being forcefully moved from the place where one grew up, will never truly fade. This, in conjunction with the escalating racism and outright discriminatory behavior by the whites toward the blacks, fueled the inevitable rise of people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. These people served as beacons of hope to all the blacks who were forced out of their communities. These two prominent figures, particularly MLK, fought for what he knew was right. As soon as one person steps up and takes the mantle, then everybody else will quickly follow. This is exactly what happened, as blacks from everywhere, realizing the unjust situation they are in and clinging onto the hope that things will get better some day, rallied behind these leaders and fought for themselves.
Rootshock can also be caused by factors other than urban renewal. For example, the tragic event of 9/11 completely traumatized all New Yorkers. The Twin Towers were part of our heritage; it was a part of the city. When this building was gone in the blink of an eye, all of New York, regardless of whether you lived in Manhattan or not, was brought to a traumatic standstill. However, once again, hope presided and now we are nearly finished with the project of building a new skyscraper, which honors the memory of the fallen towers.
Different Organizations
Here Fullilove talked about different organizations that can add in rebuilding a city after some type of insurrection. The two types were community based organizations and neighborhood based organizations. The community cased is more effective but my question was why is it so? There seemed to be a lot of different programs in place to rebuild a city such as housing programs, setting up schools, and setting up hospitals. I wonder how long it really takes to get a city to “going” again.
Some people were happy to be leaving their current place because it would have better living conditions. Sala Udin was sad that she was leaving old friends but happy because there were better facilities. Through all of this, African Americans still had to face racism and during this time people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X came up, giving a voice to black in the US. These people helped strive for rights and better conditions for African Americans and those of color.
“Are you saying my community is dead?”
I thought this question was a jarring contrast to Fullilove’s classification of root shock as a “Community Burn Index” of sorts. I first read her analysis as a purely empirical, from her perspective of a curious psychologist rather than a concerned one. I appreciated how sensitive she was to the emotional state of the community members and how they viewed the situation. This, along with her journey with Cantal-Dupart, demonstrates her commitment to preserving the spirit of the community, and making upgrades of what exists rather than starting from scratch.
I was especially interested in Cantal-Dupart’s ideas about aesthetic beauty in public space. As Fullilove explains, the insider and outsider perspectives both have their biases. It takes a truly committed observer, an artist and healer of sorts to see neighborhoods for both what they are and what they can be to the people that live there, for what is truly beneficial and familiar to its roots. It takes a combination of the well-informed resident and the well-meaning onlooker to make wise decisions for preserving a community and its members.
Even with tragic events like 9/11, citizens have the chance to find the beauty in the rubble, the possibilities in what has been lost. So long as there is a commitment to preserving the presence of the people who have lived, worked, and make connection there, a community will remain very much alive.
The question is: how is a community to reach consensus on what is to be done?
-Jacqui Larsen
Digital Education with Analog Modality
When reading Fullilove’s proposal for education in the digital world from pages 228 to 232, I wondered why she proposed that schools should be extended in both the number of hours and the amount of days that students spend. At first, I thought she proposed this in order to give African-Americans certain skills needed for the workplace, such as trade school, but since she stresses the need for a college degree in order to someday elevate the student’s social class, trade schools couldn’t be the reason. Perhaps Fullilove proposed that children needed to be kept in school longer in order to keep them away from their possibly fractured home life. If that is true, it may explain why she prefers a longer school session instead of the policy where schools teach one half of a curriculum and parents teach the other. I find that hard to believe when there are students who did not learn English as a first language, but outperform many of their peers in school.
Not only that, but in order to learn in the digital world, students need to be actively engaged with the increased amount of stimulation available to the everyday citizen such as video games and social media. If one extends the time in school without changing the way school is taught, then it is the system that is flawed and not the student or race. I wonder what would happen if individuals took a more holistic structure of school instead of the one that exists in many public schools today.
Games can be used as a bridge to create more engaging educational environments that is very different from way individuals are currently used to. For instance, Quest to Learn is a public charter school founded in 2009 which is located in New York City for students grades 6th to 12th and is the first game based school in the world. Their student body consists of 26% Black and 29% Hispanic. This school operates on a method of points and levels instead of numbers that will eventually lead to an average number or a letter grade. Instead of assignments as homework, Quest to Learn uses quests with objectives in order to learn points and experience. The main difference between these two systems is that instead of a traditional bell curve for students, all students at Quest to Learn have an equal opportunity to “level up” into a level that equates into an A. This because instead traditional exams that average up, failing a quest does not damage an average at Quest to Learn. The student who fails a quest would simply have to complete more quests in order to level up to the highest level they can get. This decreases competitiveness as well as pressure, which in some cases can prove detrimental to a student’s development. There are also elements that occur in video games at the school. In fact, the school also has a “boss level” system where students work together in order to accomplish a task. With Quest to Learn’s ability to create a school that is engaging and encouraging to the students it will be interesting to see how different they are compared to the rest of their peers when they graduate and move onto college in 2016.
Although I agree with Fullilove’s statement that there should be a form of community in school, such communities should be achieved though Quest to Learn’s system where students can interact in school and complete assignments both physically and digitally. Or else, how can you educate individuals for the digital world with an analog modality.
One of the core themes that seems to be present through out the entire novel deals with communities rebuilding after an overriding separation. It is interesting to note the similarities and differences in how the communities in Pittsburgh, Newark, and Roanoke reacted to urbanization. One of major points, that some of my classmates pointed out as well, is that there seems to be a loss of community between the members of the former community. This seems like a very odd point because it is pointed out that some members of the communities experience a healing process through a “re-enactment” of their former living space. It would seem logical that people would try to be even closer to each other in order to hold on to whatever remnant they may have of their former community Throughout history, we have seen diasporas of many ethnical groups such as Jewish diasporas and Latino diasporas. Now, these can serve as a sort of analogy to root shock because in essence a large wave of people was displaced from their homeland via an outside force. However, many ethnic groups in our present society still form a tightly knit community and have a strong sense of relationship amongst each other. It seems that members of these groups can relate to each other and form a sort of intangible bond.
Why do members of diasporas seem to have a strong sense of community yet, according to Fullilove, members of uprooted communities seem to have a “weak” sense of community?
To Hide or Ignore
“When all the fancy rhetoric about ‘blight’ is stripped away, American urban renewal was a response to the question, ‘The poor are always with us, but do we have to see them everyday?’ The problem the planners tackled was not how to undo poverty. but how to hide the poor” (197). I never really thought about New York City hides its poor before. Yes, Time Square is famous for its skyscrapers. Tourists admire the tall buildings and bright lights. New York is the city that never sleeps. But I never thought about poverty in New York as an “ugly secret.” When you go anywhere in the city, you often find homeless people on the streets or in the subway. There is poverty everywhere. Still, most people tend to ignore them if they can. I never thought that the city actively tries to hide the poor because I always thought that most people just ignore them in the first place. This made me wonder: people constantly talk about helping the poor, but few people ever really do that. Why?
Throughout Root Shock, Dr. Fullilove keeps pointing out that after all the communities she mentions are forced apart almost no one finds that sense of community anywhere else. However, I don’t think that the new neighborhoods were as bad as one would think from the testimonies, but that the negative opinions stem from a comparison of the new place to the old one. I know that this example can’t really compare to the ones in Root Shock because these people all moved willingly, but I’m thinking back to a few years ago when we got two new neighbors at around the same time on my parent’s block. One neighbor was outgoing and made an effort to get to know the people on her block. The other one kept to herself and barely said hello to us. Today it feels like the friendly neighbor has been here forever, but we still refer to the other neighbor as “new”, because we know almost nothing about them. These two people live across the street from each other, but one managed to make herself a community, and the other lives on the same street as virtual strangers.
Crackheads in My Neighborhood
I recently had an experience that gave me a taste of what “street life” actually means and, simultaneously, insight to the underlying network of my neighborhood.
Basically my bike was stolen yesterday by a well-known neighborhood crack cocaine addict with help in the form of clippers provided by his friends, my crack head neighbors. Continue reading
Through the first 9 chapters of Root Shock, I’ve had trouble relating to the concepts addressed. I guess I’ve been waiting for the anecdote that got to me.
The realization on the power of root shock, as well as the balance of social classes, occurred for me when Fullilove addressed New York. Her firsthand account of the events on September 11th in conjunction with the information she presented up to this point revealed how doesn’t only occur to victims of urban renewal etc.
So, how did 9/11 uproot you or your family, if at all, and how did it affect your identity as a New Yorker?
Broken Bonds
Throughout this book I found it interesting how people seemed to be so close to their neighbors and had such great attachment to their community and the area in which they lived. David’s story of when Elmwood went through urban renewal surprised me since he would often run back to Elmwood and cry next to his old house. I’ve never felt that great of an attachment to the area I live in and I can barely recognize who my neighbors are. The stories in Root Shock however show how families in the neighborhood would often help each other and their children would play with each other. Has things changed over time where this sense of community is no longer that important or does it have to do with the fact that everyone in the community were in a similar situation and were able to connect over something. Root Shock also shows however that these tight bonds are fragile. After urban renewal families no longer contact others in their community. People moved on and even walking distance was too far for some people to take the trip for if they weren’t next door to them. Doesn’t this show how superficial these relationships were and how it was only temporary due to their situation?
Music in Root Shock
I like to put things in musical terms, likely because I am a musician. For me, the most valuable aspect of all of these Seminars, has been the ability to compare the art, history, science, and sociology of New York, and other urban areas, to musical development and progression. Throughout its history, music has functioned to bring the community together in some way. Jazz, which flourished in the areas most susceptible to urban renewal, has consistently been a product of the people playing it and listening to it. You can even track the gentrification of Jazz music around this time.
When Fullilove discussed the Essex Chorale I immediately saw it as the clearest example of a consistant community for the citizens of Essex County. Their music is able to emotionally sync with its listeners; this characteristic that singers strive for is inherently present in this choir.
So, what role does music play in the establishment of community?
Neighborhood Health
A neighborhood can offer social supports that are difficult to replace and essential to an individual’s quality of life. These social supports are implicit to public health. Individuals in a tight knit community walk freely to local destinations, have more information about members of the community, and have a greater sense of security. While these community qualities may be taken for granted by many, these qualities can facilitate a healthy lifestyle. In the novel, Fullilove mentions that elderly individuals removed from their community could not walk to the stores, and many became ill.
While one may think of a community facilitating good public health by making tangible public resources available to its members, the social supports it offers are invaluable as well. While community has been largely defined as a physical space in Root Shock, we have different definitions of community today. Communities have moved into the online realm with greater technological advancements. What can we expect if we were suddenly taken offline? Would it have the same effect as those in Roanoke?
Root Shock- 4-6
As I read this book, only one thing kept flying through my mind. I really couldn’t understand it at first, but it kept appearing. It was a feeling that couldn’t be stated until the book said it for me. Someone, I can’t find it now, said that the community was a place where you could walk in the dark and feel safe. That truly hit home for me because I know how that feels. My community is very much the same way. And the every story detailed a little bit of the experience of being within a community. It truly felt like Director David Riker said. Dr. Fullilove was able to tell the story of many communities without having been in one simply because she learned how to tell their stories.
My question is simple: What other factors make up a community? And what connection does Dr. Fullilove have to these stories? As a psychiatrist, does she believe Root shock is a medical condition?
It Takes a Village to Raise a Child
This section made me think about how important it is for children to have a steady sense of home, of having one place where they make connections, learn to trust people and feel supported. It became clear to me in reading David’s tragic story, in how even through his rough family life he found strength in his surrounding community. It wasn’t perfect, and it didn’t prevent the abuse, but it was much better than living in an isolated apartment complex where no one knows you. David also had the wildlife preserve as a refuge of sorts and a place to develop his interests. However, after urban renewal, this community where he was raised was no more. And even as David returned with Fullilove, the area looked less and less like the place where he was raised, new commercial buildings in the place of houses where community members used to live, and he learned of deaths only by visiting. It was interesting to me that even in places where David had so much suffering in his community, like where he waited while his mom went to the liquor store, he still was saddened by how much it had changed. It was as though the only pieces of the neighborhood that provided him comfort and safety had been destroyed. I also noticed that it almost took the death of his mother and coming to peace with his childhood that he could ever find “home.” I think it speaks volumes when a homeless shelter is a person’s first true sense that they belong somewhere.
In seeing how David’s life progressed, I couldn’t help but think of the old maxim “it takes a village to raise a child.” Urban renewal may seek to make economic advancements for the community, but at what cost? How can they justify displacing a social and economic support system for so many?
-Jacqui Larsen
What is Kindness?
Reading these chapters, I wondered how so many people could live so close to each other and have community, yet when problems arise, the sense of community disappears. Arleen Ollie’s experience interested me in that she moved away from her neighborhood because of financial reasons and when she returned to Roanoke, the sense of community was lost. She emphasized how in the past if people were sick it, it was natural for help to come quickly and people did not have to be asked for help. David’s journey was also interesting in that he was able to see the changes of Elmwood and eventually its loses. There was different emphasize on kindness and how there were kindness in situations such as in gardening, dancing, selling goods, and other professions. However, this kindness did not stop the violence that was happening in child molestation and unemployment.
My question is similar to Jessina’s in that does a community need to be poor in order for kindness to occur and also, besides for the fact that people in a community lived near each other, what other things tied them together?
Where did the kindness come from?
Throughout the book, Fullilove includes anecdotes about how urban renewal happened in places that were thought to have nothing in the first place, but yet there was so much lost. The neighborhoods were poor and dirty. Outsiders thought that there was no way for these places to get worse, so anything they did to them could only be an improvement. However, in all of these neighborhoods, lives were lost. I don’t mean it in the sense that people died, but the way the people were used to living was lost. People went from generally supportive and kind neighborhoods to ones where people were mean and purposely distanced themselves from others. While the people who left their neighborhoods due to urban renewal were still kind, the areas that they moved to did not let them practice that kindness. That is why the kindness disappeared. So far, I keep hearing about how people have moved from poor but loving neighborhoods to wealthier but more isolated neighborhoods. My question is: does a neighborhood have to be poor for the people to feel a sense of community?
From Bad to Worse: Root Shock Chapters 4-6
As Fullilove continues to talk about the urban renewal projects that destroyed places like Roanoke, Virginia, I can’t stop thinking of these people. As if their lives weren’t bad enough to begin with, (they were of low status economically and lived in slums that were eventually deemed “blighted”) they only became worse. These individuals didn’t have much to begin with, yet they lost it anyway. It is amazing how society often makes a fuss over situations when well-off families and neighborhoods lose everything they have, (in a tragedy, disaster,etc.) yet when the poor lose their homes, cultures, and overall sense of identity, it is alright because it is “for the good of the city.” The comment that councilwoman Mary Pickett made a few pages into Chapter 4 especially stood out to me. It ended with, “some people had to suffer.” Basically, what I got out of that was that the individuals living in neighborhoods that underwent urban renewal (African Americans in this case) were in some way the sacrificial lamb. But why was this the path that was taken? If the goal of urban renewal had to do with fixing the land and neighborhoods themselves, why couldn’t they do so in such a way that displacement and root shock would not occur? Or, if displacement and root shock were inevitable, why couldn’t they provide more immediate support to the communities? If they couldn’t provide homes from everyone, the least that could have been done was to provide individuals who may be experiencing stress or trauma with some kind of psychological help, such as counseling.
A loss of Community
While reading the middle half of Root Shock, it was quite surprising to realize the dramatic effects urban displacement can have on people. Dr. Fullilove discusses the history of urban replacement on communities and how people struggled in order to survive urban replacement. The author discusses how people were torn away from their communities due to urbanization of “insignificant” communities. What I found interesting to notice was that the author pointed out how the sense of closeness amongst former neighbors was essentially gone. It would seem that in rough times, like urban renewal, people would in a sense try to stick together and help one another get through the struggle. It is understandable that after urbanization people would not be so closely tied with each other because of the distance separating them. However, one would think that people would try to maintain a sense of family despite the distances separating them. The whole shift of community is very radical due to urban renewal. Before urban renewal, all the neighbors were very much intertwined in each other’s lives, but afterward it was as if a partition was built that forever separated former neighbors from each other.
My question would be, despite the effects of urban renewal why didn’t former neighbors maintain contact with each other? People do maintain contact with each other in spite of long distances between them…
Hurricanes and foreclosure
Root Shock looks at the impact of community destruction on the people who are displaced. While 1950/60s style urban renewal is largely a thing of the past, recent examples of community destruction include natural disasters and foreclosure. we will be learning more about foreclosure in class on the 14th, and also talking about the aftermath of hurricane sandy. “natural disasters,” however, are really about what happens when a natural event (tsunami, flood, earthquake) occurs within a particular social context, and the combination exacerbates long term vulnerabilities anchored in policy, resources, and social inequalities. the aftermath of Sandy in Canarsie brings together all of our topics for tomorrow, as described in this brief report:
http://www.bkbureau.org/canarsie-braces-foreclosure-wave-after-sandy#.UUDO8hyGuSY
Butterfly Effect
I thought it was especially interesting how Fullilove alluded to the Butterfly Effect, or the idea that one small change can impact the entire world. As she writes: “the flapping wings of a butterfly in Beijing could affect the weather in New York” (17). We often don’t think of how something that seems so insignificant can have drastic effects. By the same token, an event like moving a Brooklyn based stadium where victories, memories, and a sense of community thrived to Los Angeles has staggering repercussions. But Fullilove also dissects how issues like a smoking ban can trigger flash mobs, even if there is not a direct link between the two. When considering these minute changes combined with the sense of culture lost after displacement, I oddly couldn’t help but think of the Harlem Shake videos. This may be a strange comparison, but I remember watching of video of Harlem residents reacting to the Harlem Shake videos, and many were downright offended at the misrepresentation of the dance. If culture is so easily transformed and borrowed, it puts int o perspective how simple it is to transform a neighborhood. I would imagine even these subtle instances, of stealing a habit or norm from a community could be greatly upsetting to those who experienced and created it.
Harlem Reacts to ‘Harlem Shake’ Videos
Did anyone else think of less drastic cultural impacts while reading?
-Jacqui Larsen
Root shock and public health
According to Fullilove, root shock is the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem. Socially, it can destroy language, culture, dietary traditions, and social relationships, undermine trust, and various resources. Physiologically, it can increase anxiety, and increases the risk for every kind of stress-related disease from depression to heart attack. It will be interesting to see how public health can be linked to a social movement, and what effect displacement can have on the health of a population.
In the second chapter, the author explores the Montgomery bus boycott and mentions that the boycott was effective in “changing people’s state of being” and fewer injuries related to anger were reported in hospitals. While I always considered the social implications of segregation and racism, I never truly pondered the public health implications of those social policies. What were the effects of such policies on public health? Were statistics and studies on disease also segregated?
Google: Root Shock
Before I even opened the book, I realized that I wasn’t quite sure what root shock meant. At first, I assumed it was a term fabricated for this book, but I figured I should Google it to be safe. To my surprise, 8 of 10 links sent me to this book, but 2 offered me a definition. Up to this point we all know what it means, so I wont get hung up on that, but what I found most interesting is that the first source I found cited Hurricane Sandy as the most recent occurrence of root shock, the second being the Japanese Tsunami last year. This bit of research combined with the elegant definition and “injury” metaphor provided by Fullilove hit it home for me.
I hate to say it, but I dont think I have ever experienced root shock. How easily comparable is it to emotion trauma? I guess Ive had “my world turned upside-down,” but never my literal world.
Traumatic Stress
I really enjoyed learning about root shock especially since the term is new to me. I think sometimes people undermine how valuable the area we live in is. When reading the beginning of the book it made me realize how people take their current lifestyle for granted and how we’re lucky to have a roof over our heads. What neighborhood you live could really change the way you see the world because it’s through what you experience in that neighborhood that makes you who you are. While reading this, it reminded me of the recent natural disasters that happening in New York. It saddened me to think about how some people I were close probably experienced root shock when their houses were taken down by Hurricane Sandy. To think one day you’re living comfortably in your house and then the next for it to be completely torn down must be so horrifying. Without good mental health, one can’t really have physical health either. When reading Root Shock, it saddened me how some people in the past couldn’t live their daily lives without experiencing root shoot on a basis. The black community for example was traumatized by racist practices everyday. It makes me glad that our society had advanced beyond that to an extent. Not only did they have to deal with regular stress of everyday life but outsiders had to add stress to them too. Has there ever been a time where you experienced root shock?
“We Can’t Stay Here” – Root Shock Chapters 1-3
Those of you who know me know that I am a Psychology major, so naturally I enjoyed the beginning of Root Shock. Mental health is something that I think should be taken just as seriously as physical health, and it certainly is nice to read about it related to public health as a whole. While the mental health aspect of the reading is something that I am familiar with, I am not as directly familiar with root shock. Fortunately, I (or any of my loved ones) have never been uprooted or forced to leave home. However like any other traumatic event, I could only imagine how incredibly difficult it must be.
With that being said, I couldn’t help but think of the victims of Hurricane Sandy as I read. After the storm, my cheerleading team went to Gerritsen Beach to help out and I can’t even begin to describe what I saw. There were boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations, memories, pictures – you name it – lined up on street corners waiting to be picked up by the garbage trucks. As we walked up and down the blocks, I distinctly remember asking one woman if there was anything we could do for her. She turned around, shook her head, and replied with a heavy heart, “We can’t stay here.” That was the moment that I truly realized how horrible the situation was for them – both physically and emotionally.
The Mind Shock
When a person hears about home uplifting, he/she would be inclined to think of the financial burdens and the troubles the house-owner would have to go to purchase a new house. Nobody would really think about the emotional trauma uprooting causes these house-owners. For many people who have been uprooted, the house they have been staying was much more than a house: it was a family heirloom that was handed over from generation to generation. This emotional trauma leads to an unhealthy mental state, which will adversely affect public health. This book discusses the deleterious repercussions of uprooting houses and warns that it is high time “root shock” comes to a halt.
Root Shock: Part I
When I hear the term public health, I think of diseases, prevention of sickness, and health of the public. And that’s the trend that we saw while reading The Ghost Map. But apparently it is not only physical health that must be factored in to this field. It is deeper than that. Public health is not only about physical health, but it is also about mental health. As we see in the book, there are plenty of examples of root shock, but it never occurred to me until this book that public health also encompasses the mental health and the mental well-being of the public.
My only question now is, how do public health officials accommodate for mental health issues?
When learning about what root shock is, I thought it was interesting how “the restored geography is not enough to repair the many injuries to the mazeway” (14). Then I thought about how attached I was to things when I was little. When my parents threw out our old microwave and replaced it with a new one, and when they replaced our windows, I was really upset and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was probably overreacting, but I can imagine that that’s how the people who experienced root shock must have felt. I didn’t think it would be such a big deal when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, but then I thought about how upset I was when the sunflowers I grew got too big and then disappeared one day. I felt betrayed when I found out my mother gave them away and then they were eaten.
I thought it was interesting how poorer, industrial neighborhoods occupied the center of the cities, while the wealthier, more residential neighborhoods. It reminded me of the chapters of Nancy Foner’s book I had to read in Seminar 2 about how people of every race were trying to follow the White people, in terms of living space. Whites, on the other hand, were trying to move away from everyone else, and everyone was trying to move away from the Blacks. This also reminded me of the articles I had to read about how Prospect Park was divided. The article said that on the pretty west side of the park, there are mostly American-born, white people, and half of them own their own homes. Most people had earned at least a bachelor’s degree, and more than half of them make more than $60,000 a year. On the east side, nearly half of them were born outside of the United States and make under $30,000 a year.
When reading the first three chapters, I immediately thought of the term “root shock” as a form of gentrification of a wider scale. I remember taking a road trip with my parents back to Cincinnati, Ohio in order to see our old neighbors and friends. I was surprised to see that many of them moved away, but when I visited my godmother, I was told that it was because the mall nearby closed down its most important stores. Macys, JC Penny, and the theater section of the mall closed and what remained was an empty “For Rent” sign at their former locations within the mall. I also realized that the elementary school I attended closed because of depopulation and a newer school was built in the more populated area in the county where I used to live.
It is also a little important to look at the four major options that Mindy Fullilove brings up on page 65 on what American cities could do to open up housing for blacks. As a believer of racial integration, my idealistic side supports her first idea, allowing open housing. However, if such an event occurs, it doesn’t fix the underlying problem of economic inequality. If open housing were to exist in all communities, a diverse gentrified population would form, followed by an equally diverse population of a lower class taking hold in a community. While I do agree with the advantages and disadvantages for her second option, allowing wealthier whites to live in suburbs, I ultimately disagree with the option because if every wealthy individual leaves an area, that area filled with economically and socially disadvantaged individuals would be labeled with a stigma and will eventually become a slum. For the third option of building housing projects in existing black communities, it varies depending on the community that the housing project is built in. If the community was thriving and there was some sort of life, it could be done. However, building a housing project in a dangerous area would not be the best idea. Finally, for the fourth option, leaving everything the way it is, I fully support her idea that it is disastrous because an increasing population without increased housing would eventually push many individuals into homelessness.
Until starting Root Shock I hadn’t considered the intensity of the emotional trauma that comes with being completely uprooted from the place one considers home. While reading the beginning chapters I tried to empathize with the people mentioned who lost everything they knew and in a sense, lost their realities. However, the author’s emphasis on the pain experienced by those uprooted was also accusing the governing powers for not caring about the poor and/or black citizens. Although Dr. Fullilove did make some very good points about the people in charge being racist and classist, I also feel like she overdid it a bit in making them out to be villains. Their purposes of their actions couldn’t only have been to be malicious and I am curious as to how biased the author’s opinions are, since she has spent years conversing with the people she is defending. I’m not trying to say that what the government did was right, rather that Dr. Fullilove isn’t providing even a smidgen of their side of the story.
Serendipity
The beginning chapters of Root Shock were in a sense very revealing. The author opened the novel by relating her, in a sense, epiphany of the term root shock. Dr. Fullilove goes on to discuss the effects of urban sprawl and urban renewal. She mainly focuses on root shock, and cites Ebbets Field as an example of root- shock. Afterwards, she focuses on discussing the effects of root- shock in areas like Paris during the Haussman era, and in the United States during the McCarthy era.
I really never thought about urban renewal and sprawl in the terms Dr. Fullilove analysis presented them to be. One can’t help but associate urbanization with progress and development. At the same time, you don’t usually think about all the destruction urbanization can cause. I mean for the buildings to be built, other ones had to be destroyed. Concurrently, many people’s lives were ruined and changed forever. In a sense, the first few chapters really opened my eyes to the whole scope of urbanization. It can really be viewed as a double- edged sword. You can draw a parallel to the manifest destiny. One associates the manifest destiny with America’s prosperity and development, at the same time it caused the destruction of Indian reservations.
I wanted to ask if you think that urban renewal brings more harm than good (vice-versa)?
Cautionary Measures
In my last post, I mentioned that it seemed like the population of London didn’t seem focused in finding the source, and possibly cure, of the Cholera Epidemic. As Ghost Map came to a close the population became more concerned with the severity of the epidemic. The act of removing the broad street pump, the source of the epidemic in this area, is a big deal. It demonstrated an understanding of epidemiology and a shift from the miasmatic school of thought.
The one topic that I wish was addressed more in the book, was the state of mind and understanding that the general public as well as the explanation that they received. I think it was apparent to the people of London that they were dealing with a deadly and consistently present disease, but did they think this was some miraculous and unexplainable issue? was the general consensus that researchers, such as Snow, were working towards a valuable cure or an ineffective solution. Unfortunately it is difficult to see from the perspective of a peasant or commoner from this time, but that point of view could be very valuable and relevant.
-John
The Ghost Map: The Finale
As I read the last chapters of this book, I realized something quite interesting about myself: I never thought history could be so captivating and exciting. I found myself rooting for the hero, John Snow, and found myself hating the temporary villain made in Reverend Henry Whitehead. But I also realized this novel went deeper than just the facts. I found John Snow and Henry Whitehead’s relationship to be quite captivating. After much thought, I realized it was rooted deeper than just their partnership and their goal of finding the cure. They were two people who shared similar values: The Reverend who worked among the poor couldn’t believe that class had anything to do with the disease, and Snow who came from a poor family who wouldn’t accept that relationship and thus was able to find the truth. Their shared views is what made them the perfect team.
My only question is to the author of this book: By the end of the seventh chapter, he downplays Snow’s achievements by stating that it’s Whitehead who spearheaded the achievement by finding the index case. I feel like that statement tries to detract from Snow’s amazing work and legacy. Snow is, after all, one of the most original people. I want to know why the author downplays Snow’s achievement when he could easily show that both of them are to be commended.
Why cholera spread so much!
It was evident to me while I was reading the book why cholera had spread so quickly and at such an effective rate: the people, and moreover, those in power, were unwilling to admit that perhaps air was not the medium by which cholera traveled. At the very beginning of chapter 7, Snow had decided to present himself in front of the board to show them the data he had collected over the previous week. Thanks to the presence of an overwhelmingly and almost unnecessarily substantial amount of evidence, the Board was finally convinced, albeit with some hesitation, to discontinue water into the Broad Street Pump [“the Board of Governers remained unimpressed with Snow’s theory, though they followed his advice.” (Johnson 167)].
However, when Henry Whitehead heard about this, he made it a point to disprove Snow, as he was so convinced in the truth that was the miasmata theory. “When he first heard the contaminated pump theory that Friday, he reacted with a quick dismissal, siding with the jeering throngs on Broad Street…And Henry Whitehead was so unconvinced by the case against the pump that he vowed to disprove it” (Johnson 167). As is clearly evident, the sheer stubbornness from Whitehead and others in power seriously hampered the truth from coming out: the truth that Snow had worked so hard to find out.
Despite the initial staunch opposition from Whitehead to Snow’s waterborne theory, overtime Whitehead began to realize the veracity of his data and of his findings. Unfortunately by then, many thousands had already died of cholera. Had Whitehead and others like him been more receptive and open-minded about deducing the true cause of cholera, perhaps thousands of lives could have been saved.
Figuring it Out
As The Ghost Map came to an end, I couldn’t help but reflect on the simple event that left a lasting impact on Broad Street, London, and even science as a whole. Removing the Broad Street pump handle was truly a turning point in history. Dr. John Snow, some “unknown person” who was not a household name then or even now, went against a popular belief at the time and turned out to be right (162). He put so much time and effort into both proving his theory and disproving miasma, as well as trying to convince others (specifically the Board of Health) of something as simple as “cholera is waterborne.” Snow’s research even came with a cost, as more individuals needed to contract and die from cholera in order for him to continue to obtain scientific evidence.
However, I don’t understand that even if there was a thought or some small chance that cholera was waterborne (even if only one person believed it), why didn’t they remove the pump handle sooner? In the time it took for Snow to research and convince the Board, including Henry Whitehead, more people were perishing from the disease. Why couldn’t they have removed the pump handle as a precaution and then have given John Snow a chance to prove the pump-contamination theory? This may be a stretch, but if the removal of the pump handle wasn’t difficult, couldn’t they always put it back on if the theory turned out to be wrong? After all, they weren’t 100% positive that miasma was causing cholera either and they still tried to take precautions in that area. For example, the waste was put into the Thames River in an attempt to take the cause of the noxious fumes out of the air. My final question is this – how many people need to be convinced that something is true before something is done about it? Is there a minimum amount of individuals (whether they be of importance in society or not) that need to first “figure it out”?
Maps of Today
I read an article yesterday evening related to John Snow and Edmund Cooper’s initial mapping of cholera. When Cooper first did a map on the outbreak of cholera, it was found to be too detailed and its meaning was lost by the sheer amount of data. The article I read involved researchers and scientists trying to map out the plague of frogs due to a fungus called batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. The fungus is currently causing fungal infection to the frogs in an interactive way. Unlike how Snow created a map that conveyed its information efficiently by reducing information, the map currently being created has too little information and needs improvement by adding more. This is because scientists want to include different types of fungi to the map in order to anticipate potential infectious outbreaks.
Another factor these researchers must face is accuracy. In the case of plagues that affect humans, it’s quite easy to find records and conduct interviews in order to find out the age and location of the deceased. However, when researching animals, certain factors must be taken into account, such as verification of an outbreak. Since anyone is allowed to upload data to the map, it may provide unreliable information. It is, in a way, a crude version of Johnson’s explanation of NYC’s 311 service where the city uses people as their eyes and ears. Yet when animals are used in the equation, it’s hard to get a truly effective map. Then it places the designers of the map in a dilemma: is it better to have a slow stream of reliable data during a plague, or is it better to rely on crowdsourcing to get a larger intake of data, where some cases of a plague outbreak in an area are true and other cases are false?
Article discussed: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/mapping-a-plague-of-frogs/?gwh=BC9B774A73D5172AEA315A791B1E2942
How to Stop Disbelief
As I continued reading Ghost Map, I kept noticing how many people were still in disbelief at Snow’s theory. Especially at the beginning of chapter 9, leading officials were still not willing to believe Snow despite the mounting evidence supporting his theory. Whitehead also was at first not able to believe but once he studied the neighborhoods and the ways the Broad Street pump was effecting its drinkers, he slowly came to realize the this disease was waterborne.
“For several weeks, Whitehead was at an impasse. All the evidence he had complied pointed o the existence of an index case that he had so long resisted” (177).
Even with so much evidence, Whitehead was still stubborn and I believe this is because he was not able to tangibly see the disease working. He kept thinking that if there was a disease, it should come from water that is murky and not clear. Eventually Whitehead does become convinced, but now it was a challenge to convince the Board of Health Committee.
My question is, in today’s time, is there a process in which a theory becomes fact? If so, what is the process and was there one in the time of Snow and the cholera outbreak?
True or False?
During the first few chapters of The Ghost Map, I was wondering what Whitehead’s role was. I thought it was interesting how Whitehead went from becoming greatly opposed to Snow’s theory to being the most influential propagator of the theory. The question “What if Whitehead were not convinced by Snow’s argument?” has a lot of scary possible answers. As the epidemic was just starting to disappear, Sarah Lewis was about to restart the epidemic when her husband died. Who knows how long the disaster would have lasted?
While Whitehead answered most of the questions left, I still don’t know how drinking more water from the Broad Street pump helped cure people. It seems counterintuitive. There are still bacteria in the water. While there was less over time, drinking the water would add more germs into your body.
I thought it was interesting how the miasmists were blinded by an idea. I am interested in psychology, so I think it is interesting how people will create circular arguments when they don’t want to be wrong.
This whole book generally reminds me of how there is the theory that cell phones can cause brain cancer. My mother believes that the theory is true, but I learned in my physics class that it is not. In order to cause cancer, the waves given off by the cell phone must have a certain amount of energy to break the chemical bonds in DNA. The RF waves given off by cell phones don’t have enough energy to do that. To this day, there isn’t a definite answer, so people are left trying to make sense of what they hear. Like, “is coffee good for you or bad?” Why are there always so many contradicting stories out there?
Living Maps
It took me until the last chapter of the book to realize just how important and common maps are in collecting social data. Clearly, John Snow’s “ghost map” was essential to his pivotal discoveries, but today I think it’s easy to think of maps as practically obsolete outside of an academic context. I was initially thinking of programs like Social Explorer which we looked at in class, as well as tools like GPS and Google Maps as the current representation of such guides. However, the last chapter especially helped me realize how “mapping” extends beyond a purely geographical realm. Johnson mentions programs such as New York City’s 311 and reviews posted on various websites, which also aid in combining fact and figures into one source. We live in a world now more interconnected and intricate than great minds like Snow could likely even fathom. I think this speaks to how impressive it was of Snow to link together the various clues, lacking such technology. As Johnson states:
“Snow’s Broad Street map was a bird’s eye view, but it was drawn from true street-level knowledge” (197).
It seems a unique quality of the time (and today no less) to be able to be both sociological investigator and researcher. Of course he wasn’t alone in his work, but it appears based on the information presented that Snow was quickly able to synthesize his research even though it stood against accepted scientific thought of the time. I cannot help but think, how did he find the courage to continuously fight against the standard, with all the new discoveries he needed to string together?
-Jacqui Larsen
The Prosecutor Becomes the Witness
“The prosecutor had turned out to be the defense’s star witness.” (The Ghost Map, pg. 183)
We can look back at Victorian London and shake our heads over Benjamin Hall’s unwillingness to even investigate John Snow’s theory, but our view of the matter is skewed since the truth was exposed a long time ago. John Snow’s concept of cholera being a waterborne disease was revolutionary, but why would anyone believe him when every other intellectual in the city is insisting that the disease is caused by miasma? Rev. Whitehead was one of the many who didn’t believe Snow, but perhaps what made him different than many others was his lack of scientific knowledge. Whitehead was not a scientist, but rather someone who was entrenched in the epidemic and recognized that many theories did not match up with what was actually happening. I chose the quote at the top of the post because I thought it summarized Whitehead’s approach to the waterborne theory well. Whitehead was prepared to prove Snow wrong once and for all, and instead the two solved the mystery together and became lifelong friends. So now I have to ask-why is this not a movie yet?
News Media
After John Snow explained his connection between the pump on Broad St and the cholera deaths in the surrounding area, and sufficiently convinced city planners that something dangerous was lurking in the waters, the pump was closed. After closing the well, and thereby removing a serious point of contamination, the epidemic began to slow down in the area affected by the well. Johnson notes the reaction by the Globe.
The Globe published an upbeat—and typically miasmatic—account of the present state of the neighborhood: “Owing to the favorable change in weather, the pestilence which has raged with such frightful severity in this district has abated…(131).”
Reading this made me think of the vaccine scare, and the way news media hyped reports from angry parents who wanted to connect their children’s autism to some palpable causative factor, even though none of the evidence was there. In the case of the Globe’s story, they were likely well aware that a significant change in the neighborhood was the closing of pump. The pump was an important landmark and known for its quality water, and closing it inconvenienced a fair number of people. However the Globe chose to write a story appealing to what people already think, that is, that weather patterns, smells, and air born “humors” somehow cause diseases. This made me think of the vaccine issue, because despite the fact that there has been as far as I know zero proof that vaccines cause autism—and it has been established by researchers that a connecting factor among those babies who have autism and were vaccinated is that they were formula fed, which is much more likely to be related—the concept of autism from vaccines is still in the vernacular. And some publications reported on the issue despite the entire lack of evidence, and only further perpetrated the concept, as with the Globe and the miasma theory.
-Jesse Geisler
Interesting Contradiction Perhaps
“62 percent of all recorded deaths were of children under five. And yet despite this alarming mortality rate, the population was expanding at an extraordinary clip (74).”
I sampled this quote, because it is indicative of an interesting mistake I think people make in talking about lifespan in pre-antibiotic times. People often state that the average lifespan during medieval into industrial revolution times was around 30 years, or something like that. However as we can see from Johnson’s quote, the majority of deaths from this disease, and in general mortalities altogether, afflict those under the age of five. This means that because there were so many infant deaths at that time, when you calculate the average lifespan the age is vastly reduced because the young deaths of babies offset the statistic. In actuality, if you survived past five, many people enjoyed healthy lives into their 50s and 60s.
The observations regarding beer—that those who avoided water and stuck to fermented beverages seemed to dodge the affliction—was also interesting. This research, while I am sure is accurate, contradicts to an extent findings that other researchers into cholera in London—such as Friederich Engels—found. He found a higher correlation between alcoholics and deaths from cholera. Researchers today have since connected the correlation between alcoholics and susceptibility to certain infections of the gut to the fact that regular excessive consumption of alcohol significantly changes the PH values of your stomach, making conditions of life more favorable for some bacteria. I guess the conclusion I would draw from Snow’s observation that some beer drinkers seemed protected from the disease is that they likely were protected if they stuck strictly to beer and beer only. Because if they had any exposure to the bacteria, even a dispersed and non concentrated sample, the PH conditions in their stomach likely would lead to rapid bacterial growth and their progression of symptoms from cholera would occur at perhaps a higher rate then other individuals.
-Jesse Geisler
I appreciated Johnson’s opening to the chapter, with his focus on recycling. London at that time, a city of two million people, had none of the public infrastructure, services, or works we today take for granted. Instead there arose a whole class of different gatherers, scavengers, and waste collectors, operating out of necessity, who scooped up items that alone represented little value but when collected and sold by the pound could return enough for someone to live on. The entrepreneurial spirit (or spirit of desperation) of these unemployed and desperately poor Londoners kept the city cleaner and more efficient then had economic conditions not forced people to eek out a dirty, grueling, dangerous existence collecting and retailing society’s garbage. I though Johnson’s segway from waste recycling at a societal level to recycling at a biological or chemical level a fairly clever way of highlighting the importance of utilizing waste: to do so is a basic function of most successful organisms.
“All nucleated organisms generate calcium as an excess waste product. Since at least the Cambrian times, organisms have accumulated these calcium reserves, and put them to good use: building shells, teeth, skeletons. Your ability to walk upright is due to evolution’s knack for recycling its toxic waste (16).”
Johnson then goes on to note that regardless of the reasons for a population’s density, (London’s population explosion can be attributed to the industrial revolution, whereas humanity’s first confrontation with population explosion, waste management, and disease came during transitions from hunter gatherer to agricultural based societies) without efficient forms of recycling, these forms of life cannot survive long (18).
Johnson also provided an example of how economic realities affected disease control and general cleanliness in the city. Despite the actions of the various waste collectors in London, the city was still filthy. However cesspools and latrines, those cleaned by “night soilers” were somewhat maintained given that the pay was high enough (night soilers would sell the human excrement to farmers outside the city) for many people to engage in the profession. However Johnson notes that as the city expanded, it became increasingly expensive to transport the waste outside the city walls to farms, meaning that the cost for cleaning each cesspit became unaffordable for many families. This is an economic reality, given that the factors of production (transport) had become more expensive, however it had the disastrous effect of allowing disgusting amounts of waste to accumulate, and disease causing bacterial populations to flourish.
The discussion of cholera, and the terror and devastation it caused, is relevant because despite the fact that today with have a significant amount of knowledge about the mechanics and operations of pathogens in our environment, there are massive frontiers of knowledge we have yet to discover. Reading about the dangerous beliefs in London at that time, such as that if water looked clean to the eye it had to be pure, or that disease is the result of moral failings, it prompts one to question how much of our knowledge is truly as factual as we would like it to be.
One thing that bothered me in the reading however, was this little gem of a quote, “to this day, the Netherlands has the highest population density of any country in the world” (16). I immediately questioned the validity of this assertion. How could a country like the Netherlands, a wealthy, highly stable, European country, with an aging population and declining birth rate, rival the population density of say, Bangladesh? When I looked up population density by country, not a single website had Netherlands in even the top ten. Although this doesn’t discredit Steven Johnson’s work, it does to an extent draw doubt to the validity of some of the data he raises, and leads one to believe that he may embellish generously so as to prove a point.
-Jesse Geisler
A small person: a significant impact
After reading the ending of the Ghost Map, I was able to acquire a better understanding of the role Whitehead had in the cholera epidemic in London. A seemingly small person in society had an outstanding impact on the future of an enormous city. Henry Whitehead had sought out an investigation of Snow’s waterborne theory in an attempt to disprove it. Whitehead had a clear edge over Snow in his investigation because Whitehead had a comprehensive background of the neighborhood as a whole. He was able to gather information on citizens who used to live in Soho and moved out as a result of the epidemic. Whitehead was able to conclusively determine that the Lewis baby was the first case of the cholera outbreak.
When reflecting upon this, I realized the importance of knowing your patients and surroundings well. One can even argue that Whitehead’s role in containing the cholera outbreak was just as important as Snow’s role. Without Whitehead, the true source of the cholera outbreak would have possibly never been determined. This eventually led to the construction of a proper sewage system and prevented another outbreak of cholera. The ending of the novel was very chilling in that the author made a reference to another possibility of a cholera outbreak emanating from the Lewis household; a kind of cyclic ending, I would suppose.
So my question is how would London react to the Cholera outbreak if indeed it were to occur like the author foreshadowed in the last few lines of the novel?
A Toast to Tasty Beverages
In our age, tea and beer are considered by some to be staple, ordinary beverages and the remarkable impact of these beverages on early civilization is often overlooked. Brewed tea supposedly contributed to London’s population growth by providing a source of sterile water that helped to ward off waterborne disease. The popularity of tea in the general population helped to prevent dysentery and child mortality. Beer served a similar role in an earlier period by providing a liquid which was free from pathogens. The author states that “it is a great testimony to the connectedness of life on earth that the fates of the largest and the tiniest life should be so closely dependent on each other.” These two beverages alone have forever altered the civilization genetically and socially. One can only wonder what other foods and beverages that we consider to be ordinary staples today, have had huge impacts on the development of modern society.
Ghost Map Chapter 4 – 6
I found it interesting how Snow seemed to be the only one in London at that time who was able to think out of the box and see that the miasma theory wasn’t correct. It wasn’t even like all this happened over a couple of days. Snow had already been trying to figure out what the problem was for more then a year yet people were still stuck on the miasma theory after all that time. It obviously wasn’t the problem if more people were dying even with their attempts to clear the air. I would think people would realize their water system was contaminated even if it wasn’t visible to the human eye since their city was practically filled with waste. You would think scientists would try a new theory once they realized nothing was changing.
As we read about Snow, I find his dilligence commendable. He found something he thought was wrong and went through with it even though the whole city didn’t believe him at that time. It’s also interesting to see how a city goes through changes during times like these. With the outbreak, they finally realized they needed a better sewage system instead of keeping all their waste. Because I live in such a modern time now, it’s hard for me to imagine for people to be okay with there being waste everywhere. Now people complain if they see a couple piece on the sidewalk let alone fecal matter everywhere. I wouldn’t want to leave my house if that’s what my streets looked like.
Killer Sewers
“The sewers were killing people because of what they did to the water, not the air” (Ghost Map 82).
I keep thinking about how people did not realize that the disease was not air born. The miasma theory was held to such a high regard that the top physicians and nurses stood stubbornly by it. Timing was important at this time period and even though there was a great deal of evidence against the miasma theory, many people still did not believe. An Italian scientist in the University of Florence even identified the cholera species; Snow realized that the Lambeth inhabitants were not dying,
Yet, the streets were still coated with chloride of lime and bleach to get rid of bad stench, Chadwick made many decisions that brought death to thousands of people, Nightingale promoted fresh clean air, and the rich were considered to be in better “health standings” than the poor.
It’s interesting to see how officials did not believe Snow’s theory that there was something wrong with the water. This is probably because it was much easier to believe in an old theory than to deal with a new one. The miasma theory was simple and it was easier to believe because it was more “tangible” at the time. You can smell bad air but you cannot taste anything wrong in the water. If for example, the water smelled, looked, or even tasted different, then people may have had an easier time believing in cholera. Finally, Ghost Map talks about how the miasma theory was an ancient theory, which dated back to Hippocrates and the Greeks, and so well embedded in the minds of Londoners in the 1800s.
Miasma: The Obvious Explanation
The part of the reading that I found most interesting was the one about the miasma theory. It still boggles my mind that they were actually convinced that all smell is disease and that it was the obvious explanation as to why so many individuals were contracting cholera. Sure, (as James explained last class and as Ghost Map later explains) smells are what protect us from coming into contact with whatever toxic substance the smell is coming from, so technically all smell is disease if that substance is not avoided. However, all of this should have been irrelevant to the Londoners during that time because cholera was a disease of the intestines. It was not affecting their respiratory system in any way, so how could it be airborne? With that being said, I ask these questions: Why was miasma the obvious explanation to them? What made it so appealing and what in turn made the water theory so unappealing? I especially like how Johnson put it on page 126 when he asked, “Why did so many brilliant minds cling to it, despite the mounting evidence that suggested it was false?” He is absolutely right, many intelligent individuals in the fields of science and medicine believed in this theory, but why?
I can’t help but think of the saying “You can’t really understand another person’s experience until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes” when thinking about the cholera epidemic in London. I guess we will never truly understand why people chose to cling to miasma, because we were not there to inhale the horrific smells and experience the nightmare that was cholera. The most we can do is try and as far as I’m concerned, if all I could smell was filth every second of every day, I may have thought that it was the cause of the disease as well. It is easy to often place the blame on things that are right in front of our eyes. It is also important to note that the cholera epidemic affected them physically as well as mentally. In other words, they probably were not thinking straight – that is, except for John Snow.
Untangling the Intricacies
I was impressed with the author’s description on page 96, about the contrast between the gargantuan, thriving metropolis and this microscopic virus. Writes Johnson, “It is a great testament to the connectedness of life on earth that the fates of the largest and the tiniest life should be so closely dependent on each other.” This puts into perspective how wild it is that something so minuscule has the ability to ravage thousands, in an advanced urban center nonetheless. As far as civilization had reached at that point, a tiny particle not visible to the naked eye could be and was in fact responsible for so many deaths. I thought it was interesting how Johnson frames this, mentioning the strength of our sense of smell over sight. We often, even today, seem to rely significantly more on our vision, that we often forget how our olfactory senses are working at a much more ingrained, biological level.
As several have noted, it seems so simple to us now that the answer was right in front of their noses (although not in the way they’d expect). However, the bacterium itself obviously could not be identified by any basic sense, but rather the combination of various research methods. It is almost eerie in my opinion to read how Johnson dissects the every move of scientists and doctors like John Snow, how they piece together the clues and attempt to assimilate them into the conflicting dogma of the time. In reading this I can’t help but think of how the epidemics discussed in class that are facing our society today will one day be analyzed in a similar matter. It is easy to argue now that complex illnesses like cancer at present seem largely impossible to cure, save for certain correlations. However, it will surely one day be a sickness of the past, examined in the history books, and talked about by future students like us, wondering how we could have missed the connections between the dots so clearly laid out in front of us.
As Johnson contends, Snow really was doing a brave, complicated task, and should be commended for the intricacy of his work. Not only was he doing scientific research and sociological study, he was also working to change the seemingly incontestable health opinions of the time. With this I can’t help but wonder, what’s next in modern public health to be disproven as common truth?
-Jacqui Larsen
Adaptation for survival?
While reading the next few chapters of “The Ghost Map,” my favorite section revolved around the part where Steven Johnson discussed how human tolerance to alcohol arose over time because it was safer to drink than water, as alcohol has antibacterial properties. It reminded me of a video that I watched on YouTube, in which a speaker explained to an audience why many humans have developed lactose tolerance and why many have not. This stems from the time where our ancestors changed from a hunter-gatherer culture to an agrarian culture. Since many agrarian cultures herded sheep and cows, humans were able to consume milk for a longer time and eventually their descendants became tolerant to lactose.
The “adaptation” can be reexamined though the lens of genetically modified / processed foods. Although some individuals are against the process of using pesticides and industrial farming due to the long term negative health effects, a question can be raised on whether the human body will eventually evolve to have stomach and intestines that will be able to extract the nutrients from food without any negative effects from endocrine disruptors or from intake of hormones that have been placed into meat. Tea works the same way as alcohol in terms of killing bacteria, except tea uses the boiling process as well as tannic acid during the steeping process, and is able to have the same effects as alcohol without its detrimental effects. Perhaps there could be another way that can mitigate the effects of genetically modified / processed foods in a more natural way.
YouTube video mentioned in post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3iIfL8q0_k
The Scientific Method Approach
I find it quite interesting that despite much opposition to Snow’s theory, he continued to pursue the truth. The motivation that he had is quite refreshing, seeing as how many scientists got caught in the sea of popular conviction.
Snow’s behavior helps me understand why, throughout all of my science classes, we repeatedly are taught the scientific method. It is not merely to show you how to experiment, rather it is more to show you to doubt everything until you have considerable proof, and even then, to doubt it. After seeing how adamant Snow was about his theory, and after seeing how hard he worked to stick to it, I believe I have a new appreciation for the scientific method.
But, even though his background proved to help him become victorious, I still wonder why people were so against it. The scientific method’s roots were definitely well-accepted in the scientific communities. Why is it that they chose to doubt everything except miasma theory. As any firm believer of the scientific method would say, why didn’t they doubt their results?
Adamance: The bane of our society!
The deadliest disease in the world, the most catastrophic warfare, the most cruel genocide, all pale in comparison to the sheer lethality and deleterious ramifications of a stubborn mind. The inability of men to be receptive of new solutions results in the exponential increase of the consequences of the existing problem. This is clearly evident in these three chapters of the book. Despite overwhelming and substantial scientific and statistical evidence that cholera is a waterborne, not airborne disease, authorities continued to merely ignore these findings by finding “loopholes.” The authority figures of the time, particularly Edwin Chadwick, were fervent supporters of the Miasmata theory. Chadwick argued that all smell was disease, as he believed the smell was directly related to “London’s rising tide of excretement.” While this might have been true, the smell produced by the excretement was not harmful. Our brains make the smell produced by excretement unpleasant so that we will not come into physical contact with the waste, which indeed contained germs and bacteria. The smell, therefore was an indicator that danger is nearby; it is by no means the danger itself. Furthermore, the idea of bad smell means disease was so engraved in the minds of the Victorian population for other reasons as well. Florence Nightingale, one of the most influential medical figures of the time, said that the “very first canon of nursing…is to keep the air he (the patient) breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him.” She goes onto say that air containing foul smell can enter the patient’s ward, and this poisons the air the patient is breathing. While it is true that clean and fragrant air is indeed good for health, the opposite need not be true. Foul smelling air does not necessitate a decrease in health. Proponents of the Miasmata Theory were so parochial in their fervent conviction of the veracity of this theory that they refused to be the least bit receptive to Snow’s findings. This adamance by those who believed in the Miasmata Theory caused cholera deaths to continue for another decade, as Snow was left to find a foolproof method that would clearly indicate that water, not air, was the cause of cholera.
Tea, Beer, and Water
It was said that tea might have helped the population of urban spaces increase because it has antibacterial properties. Tea became “a staple of even working class diets by the 1850s” (95). In addition, there were many people who drank beer, which also has antibacterial properties, although it isn’t too good for the liver. This would explain why the cholera epidemic died down for a few years, but why did it come back up again in 1853?
Henry Whitehead had visited many homes and he could point out some cases where people would make a dramatic recovery from cholera. In these cases he noted that they “had consumed large quantities of water from the Broad Street pump since falling ill. The speed and intensity of their recovery made an impression on Whitehead that would linger in his mind through the coming weeks” (111). I think it’s interesting how cholera was being spread to people who drank from that pump, but drinking additional, large quantities of water from this source would cure people. It doesn’t make sense to me because I would think that adding more harmful bacteria into your body would make you more sick. Maybe they turned the water into tea first. Also, I thought the history behind the miasma theory was interesting. I noticed how the part about sharply unpleasant smells was similar to our discussion in class two weeks ago about how the smells do not cause illness, but are a signal to alert us that whatever is producing the smell is.
The Hidden Cause
The concept of people being sick because they deserve it and must have done something unfavorable in the eyes of God is not a new one. It’s an easy explanation given by the strictly religious and/or well-off parts of society who are spared from whatever epidemic is going on. I found it interesting that not only was this reasoning completely inaccurate during the cholera epidemic in London, Snow found two places where tens of people were spared: the workhouse, home to some of questionable character, and the brewery, where the workers would drink malt liquor instead of water.
John Snow is now lauded for finding the cause of the cholera epidemic, but it was upsetting to read about how no one believed him because they believed so strongly in the miasma theory. Had the public known about V. cholerae being a waterborne disease, many lives would have been saved. This makes me wonder about the diseases and sicknesses that are prevalent now that don’t have cures. While the newspapers in Victorian London were lamenting that no one would ever find a cure, no one listened to the one man, one of the most respected doctors and scientists of the time, who knew the truth. What if the same thing is happening now with a cure for cancer, or AIDS, or Alzheimers or any of the other illnesses we listed in class? What if someone has the cure everyone is desperate for but no one is willing to hear them out and fund the research?
Second to survival?
After reading these chapters, I became interested in the public’s, despite class, opinion on his the epidemic should be researched and handled. Chapter 4 discusses how John Snow based his research on various uncertainties (for example: he was unsure how V. Cholerae appeared under a microscope) as well as the fact that Snow relied on the success of the disease in order to study it’s patterns, symptoms, and cases.
This may be blunt, but why does it seem, like people weren’t taking the study this epidemic to seriously? The existence of the miasma argument shows that society did not understand the spread of disease as we do today, but after reading about the historical fear of unsanitary drinking water it seems like the answer was right in front of their faces.
The text constantly describes the ever decreasing quality of life in London, even comparing it to the plague, but was this not apparent to the citizens of this city? Or did it just come second to survival?
Stubborn Irony
While reading chapter entitled, “All Smell is Disease”, I found the miasmist’s recalcitrant behavior, to a certain extent, to be quite unusual. In the end, one of the causes of the rapid spread of Cholera was the development of a sewage system; the system’s development was highly promoted by the miasmists. Edwin Chadwick was a very influential miasmist who was a major force behind the development of London’s sewage system, at the same time, he caused the death of many people living in London.
What I found to be strange was that the miasmists were not willing to even give John Snow’s water borne theory a chance. They were so enveloped in London’s putrid smell that all the evidence John Snow had to prove otherwise, was simply brushed off. What’s even more ironic to point out was the John Snow was an esteemed physician. He had plenty of experience with ether vapor and chloroform. This would give him back ground knowledge of the effects of noxious fumes on bodies, and they all pointed away from the miasmist’s theory. Certain obvious factors like differing effects of “poisonous” airs amongst people were deemed to be the cause of moral depravity etc. It just seems like, as the author pointed out, that the miasmists could not admit that they were possibly wrong in their diagnosis of the cause of Cholera. They even elected another miasmist, Benjamin Hall, to replace Edwin Chadwick as president of the Board of Health. I just can’t but blame many deaths of Londoners because of the miasmist’s refusal to clearly see the evidence pointing in another direction from miasma.
What I wanted to ask is: How would the development of Cholera in London be different if John Snow was president of the Board of Health? Would the miasmist’s listen to him if he were in such an esteemed position?
David Zilberman
Becoming a City of Corpses…
In our eyes today, it is evident that something like the cholera epidemic would occur in a city like the Victorian London, but back then, it seemed as if London thought its city would be invincible to the effects of its own unsanitary ways. As Steven Johnson stated, “…it was drowning in its own filth.” (13) I found it intriguing to see how there were so many different types of scavengers living in London’s underworld such as the bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, mud-larks, night-soil men, toshers and more that contributed to the city’s management of waste. However, that type of waste recycling wasn’t enough to keep the city in control as it became “a matter of simple demography: the number of people generating waste had almost tripled in the space of fifty years.” (12) Therefore, the city’s natural resources like water became increasingly susceptible to contamination. Cholera dwindled the city’s original population like no before and it made everyone wonder what was the cause behind this. Dr. John Snow and Reverend Henry Whitehead collaborated to find the culprit of this deadly disease. The miasma theory was greatly believed in during 19th century London so in my opinion, that hindered the progress of discovery that unclean water running through the extremely filthy city caused all of these deaths.
I want to ask, why do you think there was such a lack of public health awareness during this period? Did the people take the pungent smell that traveled all about London as non-detrimental and that it did not bring another motivation to make changes in sanitation?
Victorian Medicine and John Snow
Victorian medicine was severely limited by the lack of basic empirical method or scientific knowledge. Germ theory, which we take for granted today, would have saved countless lives and allowed for progress in the field of bacteriology which would ultimately have revealed V. cholerae to be the perpetrator of cholera. Scientists and physicians of the era seemed to be largely concerned with promoting their own quack cures which superficially eliminated or obscured the symptoms of the disease. John Snow was able to overcome the conventional thinking of the era and laid the road for modern medicine and public health by examining the trends and analyzing what might be the underlying causes rather than acting entirely upon superficial observations.
Miasma theory had gained a strong foothold in the medical community, and supporters of the theory had remained steadfast even with John Snow’s discovery that V.cholerae was waterborne. Why was miasma theory so popular? Was it entirely because of ignorance and stubborn public opinion or could there have been an economic drive as well?
The Ghost Map: Chapters 1 – 3
I found the beginning of the books with it’s description to how London was amazing. I could picture how disgusting it must have looked, how crowded the streets were, the sweat rolling off people’s face. It got me to me every time they talked about the waste and how it piled on the cesspool. Just by picturing it, I can see how disgusting everything must have been, how suffocating it must have been to live there, I can’t imagine how these people continued to live there with those conditions, especially after Cholera broke out. People were definitely not rich but was it not possible at all to evacuate the area because there was clearly something wrong with the area. If it was up to me, I would give up all my money to live somewhere else as long as it meant that my family and I wouldn’t die. I wouldn’t want to take the risk of catching the disease and the area was filthy anyway. It makes me cherish what I have now, when I see how we try to keep our streets clean to an extent and most definitely our homes. I cannot imagine facing waste everyday or even being within vicinity of that much waste. It also makes me glad how much we’ve advanced as a society especially when they had their doctors in London coming out with a different cure everyday without actual evidence. Now we actually go through experiments to make sure a cure works. I cannot imagine our daily newspapers covered with ads of doctors to try their cure for a disease.
The Ghost Map: Chapters 1-3
As a pre-med student, I’ve taken Biology and am in the middle now of MicroBiology. In that class, we actually touched upon Snow’s remarkable accomplishment of figuring out cholera’s dastardly ways. We also talked about the symptoms and just how deadly it was. But none of the classes that I’ve taken so far come close to demonstrating just how gruesome and terrible it actually was. It is, and will always be, something imaginary, something that unless we actually contract, we can only sympathize, not empathize. But trying to put yourself in their collective perspective is, in my opinion, probably one of the few skills needed to effectively run public health initiatives. Understanding the disease is only one of the skills. Understanding the effect it has on the public is an entirely different and more powerful one, one that is absolutely necessary in order to effectively combat the panics of the public. As we see with Thomas Latta and his cure, which actually worked, his insights were buried under the public’s clamor for a cure, any cure at all, even ones that were most probably hoaxes.
My question then is: How do public health officials get this skill? Reading books is definitely not enough. How is it possible to obtain this very powerful skill of not just sympathizing, but empathizing?
– Joseph Kabariti
Just How Foul Was It?: The Ghost Map Chapters 1-3
We often take for granted the cleanliness of our own neighborhoods. In fact, we may even consider some areas within them dirty or unkempt, when in reality they are not as bad as they are made out to be. Consider, for a moment, your typical Thursday. Most of us wake up in our own beds, get ready in our personal living spaces, and then are off to school. Along the way, we may grimace at the individual on the bus who (to put it nicely) doesn’t smell so nice. Right about now you are wondering to yourself “I can’t wait to get off of the bus,” but an hour later you are forced to inhale the stench of the person seated right next to you in your English class. Finally, you endure what seems to be a long bus ride home standing next to another interesting smell, but soon enough you arrive home and it smells exactly the way you want it to. Let’s face it – unpleasant aromas are going to follow us wherever we go in some way, but for the most part they are avoidable. That is what separates us from the Londoners in the 1850’s plagued with cholera.
These individuals lived in complete filth, among an intolerable stench that would not go away. People were living on top of each other in spaces meant for much smaller numbers. There were cesspools of waste just sitting there, collecting even more waste. Farm animals literally ran rampant in the streets, while dozens of domestic animals were shoved into the same living spaces as their human owners. Oh, and if they thought it was bad enough that they couldn’t breathe fresh air, let’s add the fact that they couldn’t drink clean water either and not only was it contaminated, it was deadly. Those who contracted cholera were dead within days. Though we don’t know exactly how they felt at this time, we use our imaginations (as Johnson explained on page 32) to recreate the cholera stricken city and what the experience would have been like for them. As I continued to read, I kept picturing myself holding my breath on the bus, and how that was the worst thing in the world for me at 9:30 on a Thursday morning. To say that there is much worse would be an understatement. With that being said, I pose this question: Just how foul do you think it was? How do you think the Londoners felt, and why would they have stayed?
-Amanda Strano
Comments for chapters 1-3 of The Ghost Map
As I read the first three chapters of The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, I was pleased with Johnson’s narrative, but disappointed to see how the novel did not relate to the “modern world.” That being said, it was only the first three chapters so it is too early to go into the implications of what Dr. John Snow accomplished. I am amazed at how Johnson was able to convey the cholera outbreak in an engaging narrative. He also touched upon the social class and the society of 1854 London through his use of anecdotes. Specifically, in pages 36-39, he explains the effects of cholera in laypeople’s terms. Instead of giving data, Johnson would merely use anecdotes get his point across. He brought up the topic of disinformation where the London Times would have advertisements for the “cures” for chorea from fraudsters.
Something that I wondered as I read this was how strangely it felt reading someone’s documentation of a disease outbreak from the 19th century in the 21st century. It is akin to reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the present day. If The Ghost Map were written in the late 19th century, it would be a very powerful narrative that speaks about the importance of clean water, similar to Carson’s message about how reliance on pesticides is a bad thing, but without the backlash from Silent Spring. The actions of Dr. Snow and how he would record the households that had cholera and the sampling of the water pumps from different locations can be compared to Carson’s findings about the hazards of DDT and other chemicals. The part that makes this awkward was that these events took place a while ago and because the reader is looking at the events in hindsight, it can make the readers wonder why such simple truths were so hard to find out. A few people in this class expressed disbelief that it was so hard to figure out the cure to cholera was clean water and I think it is because we are reading this in hindsight and with that, I will end on this note: Do you think reading about something new to us such as the discovery and invention of smartphones and cloud storage right now would be as interesting to our future generations a few hundred years from now where such technology will probably be extremely taken for granted or obsolete as it is to us?
A Medical Mystery-The Ghost Map Chapters 1-3
I found it fascinating to read how varied the possible explanations for cholera were at the time. I like how Johnson wove in names and personal stories in with the medical progressions, to give us a better understanding of life at the time. I think it’s easy for us to belittle the knowledge or lack thereof during the outbreak, but I found myself asking whether I would have truly reached the proper conclusion given the circumstances. Sure, drinking water as a temporary solution for losing so much water feels very intuitive, but medical thinking at the time operated according to vastly different beliefs. I couldn’t help but think of how we are dealing with modern epidemics like cancer, for which we have links but no true cause or cure. No society feels archaic in its time, there are always medical mysteries that will later be unraveled.
I was especially impressed by the descriptions on page thirty-seven of just how minuscule the virus would be, despite requiring consumption of literally millions of organisms to fall ill to cholera. How cruel that the pump with the cleanest and clearest appearing water was in fact the most deadly. In this sense, it is perfectly understandable that next to know one would question its toxicity.
However, the question that stuck with me as I read, is why did so many choose to stay, boarded up in their homes? I understand that many did not have the means to leave, but it was contained in such a small area, with many who were well off enough, and I was confused why fleeing the Golden Square (if not London completely) was not a more popular decision.
-Jacqui Larsen
Cholera: An efficient killer that can be efficiently killed!
Prior to reading the book, I knew that cholera was a disease that was transmitted through water. However, I did not know very much about how cholera affected the human body or how deadly of a disease it was. As such, I was thoroughly eager to start reading the book. The most interesting aspect to me was those that discussed the characteristics of the cholera bacterium and what in particular made the disease so deadly. The horizontal transfer of genetic material among cholera bacteria allows for recombination at rates that are nonexistent in eukaryotes. For this reason, it is quite simple for cholera bacteria to transfer from one host to another and to quickly multiply. Reading about this was absolutely fascinating, yet also enlightening, as I began to grasp the gravity of cholera reproducing so rapidly and subsequently killing the host in a matter of a few days.
Furthermore, I found it rather peculiar that doctors and physicians of the time presented solutions that directly contradicted each others’. This made me wonder whether there was a uniform school of medicine which taught the same principles of medicine. If professionals who had the same amount of education were proposing solutions that were in stark contradiction to those of their peers, then there was something explicitly wrong with the practice of uniformity in medical education. It was the conflicting ideologies of these physicians that made finding the cause of cholera all the more difficult. Whenever one physician would present his findings, many others would criticize his findings to such an astounding degree as to render the discovery useless. This is precisely what happened when John Snow presented his findings, indicating that the cause of cholera was water, not air.
Similarly, I found it rather interesting that many physicians did not think of the obvious solution when attempting to cure cholera. When a disease that causes its victims to lose substantial amounts of water presents itself, it is only logical that the first solution will be replace the lost fluids. The fact that only one doctor thought of this is rather disturbing, as this points to the ability of physicians to correctly diagnose and treat the disease. Cholera is indeed a deadly killer that kills with efficiency that is rarely matches by many other diseases, however, it is also one that can be treated rather efficiently. By providing the patients with clean water to replace the lost fluids and electrolytes, the patient can be cured.
A Not So Obvious Cure?
While reading these chapters, I was more interested in why it took so long to find a real cure for cholera than I was in the process of determining the cause of its spread. Yes, as a Pre-Med student, I was intrigued by how the disease gave seemingly contradictory facts about how it is contracted. How can an entire area be affected save a few random houses? However, I was wondering why no one thought of giving water to someone who is clearly dehydrated. Was it because there was cholera in the water supply, therefore it didn’t help? Or was it because people believed that if there was “bad blood” it should be removed, and the same idea translated into “removing diarrhea”? How did the “Waterstones” daughter recover from cholera when the rest of her family did not?
Ghost Map Ch. 1-3
Page 14 gave me pause by introducing a question I think is a
little controversial, but salvaged by the fact that it probably
won’t have influence on how we decide to deal with poverty.
“The opposition between civilization and barbarism was practically as old as [London] itself. But Engels and Dickens suggested a new Continue reading
People’s lives during an epidemic
Time and again we take for granted the development and progression of society, and modern science. From the opening lines of the novel, “ It is August 1854, and London is a city of Scavengers. Just the names alone read now like some kind of exotic zoological catalogue: bone pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud larks, sewer hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers, shoremen.”, it is clear that London has a deeply rooted social class system. The author continues to clearly delineate the horrendous “jobs” the aforementioned people perform. These hapless members of society were not only exposed to terrible “working” conditions, but also experienced an entrenched aversion during the nascence of the cholera outbreak. Many people believed that the upper class was immune to cholera, and that the “mean and bad” people were being attacked selectively. This false belief, along with many others, served as thorn in the road to discovering the true cause of the outbreak of cholera.
One of the factors that was presented by the author which had a major role in this epidemic was the gullibility of society. There were countless times in which charlatans posed quick and easy methods as the cure for cholera. Many of these “solutions,” however, proved to do more harm than good. We take for granted how far we have progressed in the medical field. As shown by the author, people didn’t know anything about medicine and were swayed by any quack. It is interesting to note that not many people were convinced at first by John Snow’s, a well known figure in the medical field, observations. It was his keen eye, along with Whitehead’s history with Soho, which helped crack the cholera epidemic. So I ask, how does it feel to live in a time period in which a gripping epidemic makes the continuation of life so uncertain?
On Humanity. The Ghost Map Chapters 1-3
I guess !’ll go first!
“Most world historic events-great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades of centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below; they can be world changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity. And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it’s often too late because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying.” (Johnson, 55)
This breathtaking paragraph from chapter 2 page 55 (your page number may be different, Im reading this as an eBook) stopped me in my tracks. This claim is bold, but after a few hours of thought it seems undoubtably true. Which leads me to my question.
Does the fact that the “common person” living through an epidemic is unaware or uncaring of their historical implications show that acts of heroism or innovation were truly for the benefit of humanity as opposed to the development of an individual’s success or legacy?
-John
P.S. Every time the term “rice water” is used I gag a little bit.
I’m looking forward to hearing what you all think about the first few chapters. i know it starts with a detailed discussion of the social organization of sewage, but given how cholera spreads that’s actually important.
