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This week we collaborated with the Graduate Seminar to discuss the California Propositions 51 through 67 and how they would impact health equity. Some of the graduate students presented on each proposition and the graduate and undergraduate students all discussed items including its benefits, its adverse effects, who endorses it, what groups oppose it, and its impact on health equity. Following our discussion, we took a straw poll with the people in the room to get a general sense of how people may vote in the upcoming election. Some controversial topics and great dialogues ensued regarding plastic bags, marijuana legalization, condom use in adult films, the death penalty, and more.
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We began with watching a short clip about the Inner Harbor Project, which gives teenagers the opportunity to engage with their community and come together to find solutions to divisive concerns of race, class, and culture. One reaction to the video was skepticism with getting police involved or rather only one officer involved. This may be harmful if the teenagers involved assume all officers are like them because unfortunately, not everyone is open to conversations about police brutality and discrimination. Another response pointed out how some people find protests destructive but others want a platform to say what they want to say. This segued into how people may care deeply about a place but feel as though they don't belong there.
We discussed the connections between gentrification, displacement, and health. Gentrification is the influx of wealth into a community of lower income and resources and new demography (younger, less diversity) which results in rent and property values rising, observed lower crime rates, general economic prosperity for large businesses, and displacement. The existing population is pushed out of their community due to the rent inflation and experience negative physical, emotional, and environmental changes such as an increased allostatic load, lowered immune response, new environmental exposures, and less access to healthy foods and resources. The Silicon Valley and its impacts on not only San Francisco but also Oakland was brought up as well. Oakland lost 50% of its African American population between 1990 and 2011. Now, people most in need are not getting housing due to increase in rent and housing costs, so vouchers are no longer sustained in the housing market; the government is not matching these rising rent and housing costs. Winifred Curran in his TedX video criticizes the dominant discourse surrounding gentrification as a means to "improve a neighborhood" that used to be filled with crimes, drugs, etc. while ignoring the people who are already there. Curran points out how something is clearly wrong with this mentality of property values over people. She goes on to encourage the audience that everyone is involved in "communities of care" which extends to "communities of responsibility" by encouraging people to reach out and get to know their neighbors and mobilize that way. However, some reactions from HEAL students were that sheer optimism cannot change everything and should not reduce the experiences or complexities of gentrification today. Getting to know your neighbors won't stop your landlord from raising rent prices. Someone also commented on specific language Curran used about the "gentrifier settling the pioneering frontier" which sounds like colonialism. Nowadays, people want to move to the Mission because of its culture, which displaces current residents there. Then 50 years later, these displaced people are displaced again because of another influx of people which perpetuates the cyclical nature of gentrification. Art specifically has a role in trauma; often times, when a place experiences trauma, in order to process it or spread its awareness, art comes out of it which makes that place attractive to people. Historically, people of color and LGBT community members were confined to the Mission, but now people are "choosing" to go there. It is important to make visible the history, the culture of survival, and the beauty that was created out of that trauma rather simply seeing the fascination of the beauty the grew in spite of its history. Some solutions to gentrification we brainstormed include:
This week we began with sharing our Professional Development Plans (PDPs) in small groups. Then we collectively named common themes:
We discussed redlining as a way to historically rate neighborhoods according to a criteria based on what people wanted to invest in i.e., race. We pointed to the juxtaposition between more affluent people who were often White living in the suburbs while minorities would reside in the inner cities where there was divestment from banks, companies, businesses, making land worth less so there would be less money allocated for schools due to the connection between education funding and property taxes. We watched Michelle Alexander's TedX video comparing the criminal justice system to a modern day caste system and a system of racial control. Although crime rates have fluctuated, incarcerations have steadily increased from 300,000 in the 1970's to now over 2 million. Federal drug forfeiture laws allow officers to keep 80% of the money, car, and valuables if someone is simply suspected of having drugs; there is a monetary interest in the longevity of drugs on war among law enforcement. According to recent statistics, 70% of released inmates return to prison within a matter of months. After hearing this, we discussed our frustrations with how private prisons are making money from ruining people's lives and that there is a monetary incentive to keep the prison population up. Watching "Millionaire or Felon?" and following Wanda James who is the only African American woman to own a dispensary points to how a zipped determines whether someone will become a millionaire or a felon. There was open criticism in the video and in the classroom on white males profiting off of black males using a product and being incarcerated for what the white males themselves are selling. One of the HEAL members pointed out how easy it is to not have to think about the criminal justice system if you are not part of it. However, not everyone gets the choice to not be shuttled toward it. |
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