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

What Michelle Alexander presents in chapters 2 and 3 of her book, The New Jim Crow, is brutally, honestly, hard to stomach. The idea that racism exists is not a foreign or sensational concept, unfortunately. But the idea that the people put in place to create, promote and enforce justice are failing spectacularly by creating a racial “undercaste”, as Alexander puts it, is both infuriating and depressing. And the evidence Alexander continues to present in chapter three only makes the picture bleaker. There are implicit as well as explicit biases, she explains, and the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand. You may think you are not racist, and you may vehemently oppose racism consciously, but you can, at the same time, STILL have implicit racist biases. What can we do?!

I think there are two important concepts here, one easier to start with than the other. The first, easier (yet elementary) concept, is awareness. At the most basic level, we should be trying to bring our unconscious biases into our conscious minds in order to scrutinize them- we should be aware that there is such thing as implicit racism. By reading material like this book, we call attention to the fact that racism, even in the era of colorblindness, is still an issue.

The other important concept, as alluded to in Alexander’s writing, is media. Of course, portrayal in the media is the root of many, many problems. I am by far not the first and will not be the last to suggest this idea. But if the War on Drugs originally gained momentum because of portrayals in the media of black drug users, such portrayals in the media must be stopped and countered in order for the War on Drugs to die.

            Residents on Broad Street accepted the Miasma theory because it was the most readily used explanation, despite its dearth of supporting evidence. It is very easy however to blame the environment rather than human activity, just as we discussed in class, because human activity implies that we could change the outcomes of illness. The implementation of miasma theory had only exacerbated the spread of cholera. Believing all smell was disease, the Thames River became a sewage dump in efforts to rid homes of excretions and contaminated air. Although he held the unpopular opinion John Snow continued to build on his theory that contaminated water and not air was the vector for cholera.

            One week after the outbreak of cholera in Soho was when its turning point began with the removal of the Broad Street pump handle. It was the first time an informed intervention had been made based on a scientifically sound theory surrounding cholera. The removal of the pump managed to bring a decline to the outbreak as well as prevent a second outbreak. It is interesting to see that such a simple intervention can bring the end to such a lethal disease.

It seems as though Johnson enjoys repeatedly playing on the irony of the situation that in an attempt to fix the problem, Edwin Chadwick had unknowingly made the problem much worse.

“This is the great irony of Chadwick’s life: in the process of inventing the whole idea of a social safety net, he unwittingly sent thousands of Londoners to an early grave.”

It also goes hand in hand with the amount of influence the miasma theory actually had. Looking back and thinking what was going on in their minds though, it is hard to blame the city’s leaders. As Morris Hedaya mentioned in his post, there are many diseases that are in fact airborne. What the people devoted to the miasma theory did not realize was the evolutionary purpose of being able to smell bad odors, which is to prevent people from ingesting the source of these bad odors. Little did they know, most of the time, smelling rotting flesh did not actually cause disease. Chadwick had thought getting rid of the smell would prevent disease, but he forgot that flushing the cesspools into the river would cause so many to actually ingest the disease causing agent.