scholarly journals My Life Matters

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Youth ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
The Public ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Cost

White supremacy presents Black communities with numerous challenges. We are constantly being injured by the anti-black racism that is deeply entrenched in the policies and practices of dominant institutions. These establishments, including, if not especially, the criminal justice system, purport to be responsible for ensuring the well-being and welfare of all, but only ever protect the rich and white. The recent re-mobilization of the Black Lives Matter movement worldwide has reminded the public of the urgency of tackling anti-black racism, but much work still needs to be done if we want future generations of Black people to live freely. Like Black adults, Black youth are not immune from racist encounters. In such a time of racial crisis, the experiences of Black youth need to be centralized in a movement that opposes racial injustice and white supremacy. Accordingly, this poem adopts the lens of a Black youth to speak to the cost of growing up Black immersed in the dominant anti-black culture of our society, underscoring the troubling realities of what it means to be a Black youth in today’s world. 

Creating Fair (Economic) Space for Social Innovation? A Capabilities Perspective

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-79
Author(s):  
Rafael Ziegler ◽  
Nadia von Jacobi
Keyword(s):  
Social Innovation ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Public Provision ◽  
Economic Space ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Social Innovations ◽  
The Rich

Economic space for social innovation is not bounded by markets. Further to the money-based exchange relations in markets, there is self and informal provision based on social norms such as reciprocity, community, public provision of entitlements and of public goods organized via political processes, and professional provision based on expert knowledge. Although these ideal-types blur in practice, they show the rich contours and collaborative pluralism of economic space. Fostering fair space for social innovation requires taking all these modes and their relations into account. Social innovations as messages signal to the public where a change in mode or a reconfiguration of modes is demanded. Fairness as a matter of taking the perspective of those marginalized and least advantaged, calls for evaluative scrutiny with respect to such messages: do social innovations empower beneficiaries to become agents; and do they consider their well-being as patients?

A Politics Worthy of the Name

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Orr
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Biological Diversity ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Public ◽  
Urban Decay ◽  
The Rich ◽  
To Receive

Relative to the problems we face, our politics are about the most miserable that can be imagined. Those who purport to represent us and who on rare occasions try to lead us have been unable to take even the smallest steps to promote energy efficiency to avoid possibly catastrophic climatic change a few decades from now. They have failed to stop the hemorrhaging of life and protect biological diversity, soils, and forests. They ignore problems of urban decay, suburban sprawl, the poisoning of our children by persistent toxins, the destruction of rural communities, and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. They cannot find the wherewithal to defend the public interest in matters of global trade or even in the financing of public elections. Indeed, the more potentially catastrophic the issue, the less likely it is to receive serious and sustained attention from political leaders at any level. Our public priorities, in other words, are upside down. Issues that will seem trivial or even nonsensical to our progeny are given great attention, while problems crucial to their well-being are ignored and allowed to grow into global catastrophes. At best they will regard us with pity, at worst as derelict and perhaps criminally so. The situation was not always this way. The leadership of this country was once capable of responding to threats to our security and health with alacrity and sometimes with intelligence. In light of the dismal performance of the U.S. political system relative to the large environmental and social issues looming ahead, we have, broadly speaking, three possible courses of action (assuming that we choose to act). The first is to turn the management of our environmental affairs over to a kind of permanent technocracy—a priesthood of global managers. The idea that experts ought to manage public affairs is at least as old as Plato. In its current incarnation, some propose to turn the management of the earth over to a group of global experts. Stripped to its essentials, this means smarter exploitation of nature culminating in the global administration of the planet with lots of satellites, remote sensing, and geographic information systems experts mapping one thing or another.

scholarly journals reflections on the negation of Blackness//affirmations of our clairvoyance through creative healing praxes

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 18-40
Author(s):  
P. Ife Williams
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Youth ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Youth Identities ◽  
Movement Politics

The negation of Black people is pervasive in the historical genealogy of white supremacy. Black society, and Blackness, as defined and fabricated by Western thought and action, exists in “outer-space” (Sexton, 2011). However, white constructs of Blackness are merely that—constructs. This piece acts in three parts: 1) an intellectual conversation with scholarly thought holders, 2) a space of personal reflection and interpersonal dialogue, and 3) pieces of prose and imagery that embody various forms of Blackness. This piece explores Black clairvoyance through examples of Black youth identities, social movement politics and practices, and affirmations of our creations, sacred spaces, and rituals. Our praxes are visible in our daily gestures even as we hold trauma—sometimes informal or episodic—but always seeped in love, creativity, ancestry, and spirituality, existing as moments of movement and healing resistance.

THE PEDIATRICIAN AND THE PUBLIC

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1954 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 487-495
Keyword(s):  
Health Service ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Well Being ◽  
National Medical ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
The People ◽  
Special Value ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Cost

Our National Health Service is provided by all the people for all the people and not by the rich for the poor (although those who pay heavy income taxes pay more), and not only by the provident themselves. Medical investigation and treatment were becoming more and more complex and costly, but under our Health Service modern hospital facilities are available to all, and the medical expenses of an illness need no longer cause a financial crisis in any home. In times of depression the medical and social services should be of special value. There were bound to be faults and anomalies in a service introduced quickly—some would say too quickly—but these will be removed in time. Hospitals need to be enlarged and improved in many Regions but this will be done when our national financial and material shortages are overcome. It may be that major adjustments will be required in our national medical set-up, but it is better that these should come, in the British way, after trial and error than after apparent perfection on paper at the onset. The cost of the Hospital Service is great, and needless expenditure must be cut out. Some feel that the cost of administration is too high and that there is some needless filling-in of forms and reports by office staffs. There is a tendency for uniformity to develop in the methods of approach to problems, and we in Britain should remember ember that there is no need for uniformity in all matters in the different Regions, for they have different geographies, histories and cultures. It is felt by our profession that in any national service we must be on our guard to preserve the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship, to preserve the opportunities already given to the medical profession to play an active part in the management of the Health Service, to hold fast to the traditions and spirit of the different hospitals, and to keep the Service from being the plaything of party politics. In any national scheme it is necessary to safeguard our freedom; freedom, I mean, to do what we ought to do. There is a tendency at times for the actual administration to bulk too largely in the minds of the administrators, and they must remember that medicine is not a static thing but the progressive and dynamic science and art of looking after the health and well-being of individual men, women and children. Our National Hospital and Consultant Service, I believe, is proving a success, and has been good for medicine in general and for paediatrics in particular.

The Wealth of Nature

1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Worster
Keyword(s):  
Standard Of Living ◽  
The Public ◽  
Dollar Bill ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Green Earth ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Opinion Polls

Whoever made the dollar bill green had a right instinct. There is a connection, profound and yet so easy to ignore, between the money in our pocket and the green earth, though the connection is more than color. The dollar bill needs paper, which is to say it needs trees, just as our wealth in general derives from nature, from the forest, the earth and waters, the soil. That these are all limited and finite is easy to see, and so also must be wealth; it can never be unlimited, though it can be expanded and multiplied by human ingenuity. Somewhere on the dollar bill that message might be printed, a warning that you hold in your hand a piece of the limited earth that should be handled with respect: “In God we trust; on nature we must depend.” The public is beginning to understand that connection in at least a rudimentary way and to realize that taking better care of the earth will cost money, will lower the standard of living as it is conventionally defined, and will interfere with freedom of enterprise. By the evidence of opinion polls, something like three out of four Americans say they are ready to accept those costs, a remarkable development in our history. The same can be said for almost every other nation on earth, even the poorest, who are learning that, in their own long-term self-interest, the preservation of nature is a cost they ought to pay, though they may demand that the rich nations assume some of the cost. Having money in one’s pocket, no matter how green its color, is no longer the unexamined good it once was. Many have come to realize that wealth might be a kind of poverty. The human species, according to a team of Stanford biologists, is now consuming or destroying 40 percent of the net primary terrestrial production of the planet: that is nearly one half of all the energy fixed by photosynthesis on the land. We are harvesting it, drastically reorganizing it, or losing it through urbanization and desertification in order to support our growing numbers and even faster growing demands.

Augustus Granville Dill: A Case Study in the Conceptualization of a Black Public Sociology

2020 ◽  
pp. 233264922094225
Author(s):  
Marcus A. Brooks ◽  
Earl Wright
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Public Sociology ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Sociological Practice ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
Contemporary Practice ◽  
Unites States ◽  
Black Sociology

Black sociology developed as a response to mainstream, white sociology’s failures to address the condition of Black people in the Unites States. Central to the practice of Black sociology is that it necessitates sociological work be used, where possible, for the benefit of Black people. The contemporary practice of public sociology has similar aims of bringing sociological knowledges to various publics to address their particular issues. The public sociology literature, though, fails to conceptualize or articulate praxes of public sociology that are constructed to address the unique needs of various communities. Using the biography of the little-known Black, queer sociologist Augustus Granville Dill (1881–1956) as a case study, the authors conceptualize a practice of Black public sociology as one of many public sociologies. Like Black sociology before, Black public sociology is a rearticulation of established sociological practice that centers on Black people and Black communities. Using the most comprehensive biography of Dill published to date, the authors examine how he transitioned from knowledge producer to knowledge disseminator via the practice of Black public sociology. This article, then, serves to highlight a Black, queer foreparent of the discipline and to use his forgotten story to inform the practice of contemporary public sociology.

Impact of new technologies on health-care costs and on the nation's "health"

1990 ◽  
Vol 36 (8) ◽  
pp. 1612-1616 ◽  
Author(s):  
T A Massaro
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Cost Of Care ◽  
American Health Care System ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Health Care ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Care Costs

Abstract By virtually all criteria, the American health-care system has the largest and most widely distributed technology base of any in the world. The impact of this emphasis on technology on the cost of care, the rate of health-care inflation, and the well-being of the population is reviewed from the perspective of the patient, the provider, and the public health analyst.

A Conceptual Framework for Utilizing Black History Knowledge as a Path to Psychological Liberation for Black Youth

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 479-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Collette Chapman-Hilliard ◽  
Valerie Adams-Bass
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Racial Socialization ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Youth ◽  
Black History ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Psychological Strength ◽  
Interactional Processes

Several scholars suggest that Black history knowledge (BHK) is a significant psychological strength that facilitates mental health for Black people, and Black youth in particular, as they face racial injustice and adversity. Yet no framework has been presented in the psychological literature to advance scholarship regarding the significance of BHK. While other constructs (e.g., racial identity and racial socialization) importantly highlight the significance of history, they are limited in accounting for the multifaceted nature of BHK. The purpose of this article is to present a conceptual framework that demonstrates the utility of BHK in facilitating mental health and psychological liberation among Black youth. Toward this goal, this article highlights theory and research related to definitions of BHK, liberation tasks associated with BHK, and interactional processes significant to coping and mental health among Black youth, particularly as they navigate racial encounters.

“Oh, You’re Pretty for a Dark-Skinned Girl”: Black Adolescent Girls’ Identities and Resistance to Colorism

2021 ◽  
pp. 074355842110282
Author(s):  
R. Josiah Rosario ◽  
Imani Minor ◽  
Leoandra Onnie Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Skin Color ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Youth ◽  
Positive Association ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Body Type ◽  
And Gender

The current analysis explored the relevance of colorism among Black girls enrolled at a predominately Black, all-girls high school, with a specific focus on their identities and well-being. Fifty-nine Black girls ( Mage = 16.97) completed a survey and semi-structured interview. Results from a two-step quant-qual analysis indicate a strong positive association between rejecting colorist ideology and positive self-esteem. Open coding of semi-structured interviews showed that 75% ( n = 44) of the sample spontaneously mentioned colorist ideology when describing their racial and gender identities, including references to skin color (56%), hair texture/style (50%), attractiveness/femininity (38%), and body type (18%). More importantly, 74% of these discussions indicated resistance to colorism illustrating Black girls’ engagement with and denouncement of ideologies of white supremacy, patriarchy, and anti-blackness. This critical qualitative analysis illustrates and offers guidance for practicing anti-racist adolescent research. We offer four insights: (a) consider the research spaces in which Black youth in our research are situated to better represent the diversity (and potential) of Black youth; (b) listen to and and follow the voices of Black girls; (c) attend to agency and resistance in development; and (d) recognize intersectionality as integral to anti-racist research.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. H. Stallings
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Health ◽  
Black People ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Body ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Cultural Centers ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
Sexual Cultures

This concluding chapter focuses on Herukhuti's explanation of why he founded the Black Funk Center. His states that black people can and do create revolutionary sexual cultures that can become the foundation for centers of sexual health, well-being, and decolonization. Black communities need more sexual cultural centers like Black Funk, but since sexuality and eroticism tend to be ignored, there are few political ideologies or organizations that see such centers as a part of black revolutionary movements. By exploring spaces and sites where narratives and performances of the body provocatively intersect with expressions of interior movement, the chapter argues that the need for such centers has already been articulated elsewhere—in profane sites of memory.

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