Health Equity (And All Equities) Won’t Get Better On Their Own

Posted on by gracesmuggler
 Figure 3 from The Misperception of Racial Economic Inequality by Michael Kraus et. al. Underestimates of the Black–White wealth gap from 1963 to 2016. Each of the small colored dots represents one respondent’s estimate. The large black dots represent mean respondent estimates of Black wealth when White wealth is set to $100. The diamonds represent the actual median Black wealth when White wealth is set to $100, calculated using federal data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (Bricker et al., 2017). Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals around the mean estimates.

I recently attended a lecture at the University of Michigan by Dr. Michael Kraus, a Professor at Northwestern University, titled The Narrative of Racial Progress. His research challenges how we understand progress, and how our assumptions about progress can work against actual change.

One powerful part of the lecture involved a question Dr. Kraus asks his research subjects: “In the United States, if an average white family has $100 in wealth, how much does the average Black family have?” He asks participants to estimate this answer across various years in our history and to project it into the future. The answers are revealing.

As Dr. Kraus shared, every U.S. racial and ethnic group overestimates the level of racial wealth equality in our country, but white Americans overestimate it the most. The truth is stark: from 1963 to the present day, the average wealth of Black families has hovered around $8 for every $100 held by white families. The number has moved slightly up or down, but it has never moved steadily upward as we might hope.

This gap between perception and reality speaks volumes. Many of us have internalized the belief that racial progress is natural—that it simply happens as time goes on. But Dr. Kraus challenged this narrative directly. He asked, “If you expect that progress happens naturally, why would you think policies are needed to increase equity?”

It’s a sobering reminder that the story we tell ourselves about progress is often a comforting one, but it isn’t necessarily true. Progress doesn’t happen without effort, and without policies and community-driven action, inequities persist or even worsen.

This connects directly to the work we do at the Epilepsy Foundation of Michigan and within our national Epilepsy Foundation network. We are continually seeking to understand the data and personal experiences around health inequities, so we can close these gaps and build health equity. If the average Black household holds only 8-10% of the wealth of the average white household, is it any wonder that these inequities echo across our health systems, education systems, and social services? Wealth shapes access to care, stability, and opportunities, and disparities in wealth contribute to disparities in health outcomes.

Dr. Kraus’s lecture was a crucial reminder: Equity, whether in health or economics, will not improve on its own. It requires foresight, intention, research, and tangible action. We can’t afford to be passive; progress demands our active participation.

The disparities we face today weren’t created by chance, and they won’t be dismantled by chance either. It will take all of us, committed to recognizing inequities, understanding their roots, and working intentionally to create a fairer future.

Reference: The Misperception of Racial Economic Inequality by Michael W. Kraus, Ivuoma N. Onyeador, Natalie M. Daumeyer, Julian M. Rucker, Jennifer A. Richeson.

— Renee Roederer

Farm Church Ceasefire Statement

Posted on by gracesmuggler
Farm Church logo, http://www.farmchurch.org

December 17, 2023

A Call to Christians, from Farm Church:

As Christians in North Carolina celebrate the Advent season, stringing lights, decorating trees, and exchanging gifts, our Christian siblings in Bethlehem have canceled their public festivities. They’ve said that they are unable and unwilling to celebrate amidst Israel’s relentless bombardment in Gaza.

Knowing this, we at Farm Church feel compelled to interrogate our role and responsibility in this moment. This statement is an outward demonstration of our internal, ongoing commitment to such interrogation.

We are heartbroken. Since October 7th (and as of this writing), nearly 19,000 Palestinians (many of them children) and 1,200 Israelis have been killed. Nearly 2,000,000 Palestinians have been displaced by carpet bombing and vital resources being cut off. We know that there is no justification for genocide —ever. In the land where Jesus was born, we are seeing horrific violence enacted against communities as bombs level whole city blocks and people are killed, injured, trapped, and traumatized. Settler colonialism, Christian Zionism, and U.S. imperial aims are driving forces in this conflict. As a church located on the occupied lands of the Occaneechi, Cheraw, Shakori, Catawba, and Lumbee peoples; as a congregation largely made up of people who are descendants of white settler colonizers; and as inheritors of a faith tradition that has often fueled both antisemitic and anti-Muslim violence, we recognize our culpability in what’s . We also recognize our obligation to do something.

Farm Church is a community informed by Jesus’s example, centered in the sacred work of growing and sharing food, and committed to honoring God’s image in all people. We meet on a farm and leverage our resources to address food insecurity in Durham. In short: we grow food and give it away.

The work we do in the garden necessitates that we pay attention to the world around us: the micro life and death inherent to a garden’s ecosystem, the threats of the climate crisis, the realities of systemic hunger and poverty, as well as the potential for abundance and the power of transformation. As a community, we are convinced that all things are interconnected in nature and in our communities; as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Our church’s primary spiritual practice is tending to a little patch of dirt in the center of Durham, North Carolina. As such, we relate to land — all land — as sacred, and we honor the holiness of all beings, past and present and future, who traverse the land that we call home.

We understand, as Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat said, that “land doesn’t belong to us but we belong to the land.” We dream of a future — here in Durham, in Palestine, and everywhere — where the bounty of a well-cared for earth is sufficient to the health and wellbeing of all its inhabitants — Christians, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, everyone — and that they would know a deep sense of safety, freedom, and belonging to the soil upon which they reside. We invite you into that vision.

We call upon our Christian siblings — and all people who understand land as sacred — to take action with us.

  • We invite you to follow the leadership and strategy of those at the forefront of the movement for a free Palestine. Locally, Farm Church is following the leadership of the Triangle Chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, Muslim Women For, and the UNC and Duke chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine — among others — as they call on our elected officials to demand a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, an end to all US military aid to Israel, and an end to the Israeli occupation.

  • For people living, working, and worshiping on the occupied lands of Turtle Island, we invite you to give directly to the Indigenous peoples upon whose land you reside. The Farm Church Council is committed to giving to the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation in our next budget. May this be part of a deeper practice of land-back and decolonization.

  • We recognize the harm that Christianity causes when it is used in pursuit of domination, rather than liberation. One way this shows up is in the form of Christian Zionism, an antisemitic ideology that ultimately uses Jews as formulaic pawns in an apocalyptic end times theology. As Farm Church, we are learning together about Christian Zionism and how we can work to dismantle it, and we invite you to join us.

    May we lament, protest, grieve, and relentlessly work for justice until all people everywhere are free.