2014 Shaping the Future of New York Fridays: 11:00-1:45 Boylan Hall, 2231

As I read these chapters, I can’t help but think to myself- maybe my parents should be reading this. That’s not because they’re racist, but because when I express a desire to leave the country for just one month, they tell me it’s unsafe. “Well, what if people there are racist?” they ask. “What if something bad happens to you?” My automatic response to them at the time was, “what you think America is all good? Bad things happen here all the time.” However, then, to prove to my parents that it isn’t that safe here, I would just point to the statistics of crime and incarceration rates. Little did I pay attention to (or want to pay attention, after I got the results that I was hoping for) what kind of crimes these were, who was committing them, etc. Now, rather than point to the crimes of citizens here, maybe I should focus on the government. We think it’s all safe and everyone’s being made and treated equally, but as the author points out, this is definitely not the case. Sure, we may be better than many other countries as well. And rather than just losing all faith in our country and moving away, we should try to promote equality and stop the illogical doings of our leaders. We can make a difference!

At first, as others have mentioned, I thought that the reading would be giving crazy ideas that couldn’t possibly true in America today. Sure, not everyone is treated completely equally, but to say that racial prejudice is as bad as it has been seemed to be an exaggeration. This is why I found it interesting that the author actually, in a sense, proves herself to us in the beginning of the reading, explaining that she is a civil rights lawyer, who at first thought it was a ridiculous claim as well. By taking us through her “journey” of discovering how bad the incarceration problem is in America, the author allows the reader to not only trust her more, but also feel more involved in the reading, and want to help solve the problem just as she would like to do. She even says herself in the introduction that “for some, the characterization of mass incarceration as a ‘racial caste system’ may seem like a gross exaggeration (12)”.

I am appalled by the statistics that we are given about how many people are incarcerated in the US, especially African Americans, and how that compares with the crime rates, and with incarceration in other countries. As a whole society, are we really as bad as we were with Jim Crow. Are we even worse? It is frightening to even entertain the idea that we might be better off without prisons. I wonder what kind of effect that would have on our crime rates! However, we definitely need to think about what we can do to solve these problems that exist in our society, which are somewhat hidden and often overlooked.

I definitely agree with Annalisa’s post that these chapters, just as our previous readings, are disturbing. To me, learning about diseases in general, even from a strictly science perspective is scary enough. It makes me feel vulnerable. However, learning about diseases and public health in relation to politics and social activities is even scarier. Not only do I realize how easily we can all be killed, but also I realize how sometimes there isn’t really anything we can do to prevent certain diseases from affecting us. We can’t always control what we’re exposed to. Additionally, I like to believe that we can trust our doctors and scientists to, in a sense, just take care of everything. However, maybe we should be doubting these individuals, and also realize that they are not the only ones needed to protect us from diseases.

“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale. Medicine, as a social science… has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution: the politician…must find the means for their actual solutions”- Virchow (a physician in Germany in the 1800s). Virchow, however, also had really rational ideas, to the point where the Prussian government removed him from his position to investigate a disease.

We never really know what mistakes the people with authority may make. Hopefully, we can learn from the past to be more speculative, and make sure that we don’t get fixated on theories so quickly, or at all.