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A new report from the United States Census Bureau presents data on death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The data shows that in 2019 before the onset of the pandemic, 351,097 African Americans died. In 2020, when the pandemic took hold, 456,491 African Americans died. This was an increase of 29.7 percent.
In contrast, the number of deaths for the population as a whole increased by 18.5 percent from 2019 to 2020. The number of death for White Americans increased by 16.4 percent. The number of death among Hispanic Americans rose by a whopping 44 percent. During the pandemic’s first year, every race group other than the White population experienced single-year percentage increases higher than the 18.5 percent increase in deaths for the total population.
In 2021, when vaccines became widely available, the number of Black deaths remained very similar to 2020 but the number of deaths among White Americans rose 2.7 percent. In 2022, the number of deaths for Blacks and Whites declined.
Many studies have shown that Black schoolchildren are far more likely than their White peers to be disciplined at school. But a new study published by the American Educational Research Association, finds that 5 percent of teachers most likely to refer students to the principal’s office for disciplinary action do so at such an outsized rate that they effectively double the racial gaps in such referrals.
The study was conducted by Jing Liu and Wenjing Gao of the University of Maryland, College Park and Emily K. Penner at the University of California, Irvine.
Office discipline referrals (ODRs) are typically the first formal step in the discipline process and precede the potential use of further formal consequences, including suspension. Researchers found that the top 5 percent of referring teachers issued an average of over 48 ODRs per year—roughly one ODR every four school days. That is several times greater than the rates of their average-referring colleagues, who issued less than one ODR for every two months of school. This 5 percent of teachers accounted for 34.8 percent of all ODRs. The ratio of the Black-White gap in ODRs was about 1.6-to-1 when considering all referrers but jumped to 3.4-to-1 when including top referrers.
The results suggest that teachers who are White, early career, and who serve middle schools are most likely to engage in extensive referring. As teachers accumulate more years of teaching experience, especially after three years, their likelihood of being a referrer or top referrer quickly drops.
“Given that top referrers tend to be teachers early in their careers, targeting professional development supports of classroom management skills for this group of teachers might also be a viable approach to reducing their referring frequency,” said Jing Liu the lead author of the study. “Our analysis highlights that structural supports at certain school levels are warranted.”
The full study, “Troublemakers? The Role of Frequent Teacher Referrers in Expanding Racial Disciplinary Disproportionalities,” was published on the website of the journal Educational Researcher. It may be accessed here.
A new study led by Maura L. Scott, the Dr. Persis E. and Dr. Charles E. Rockwood Eminent Scholar in Marketing in the College of Business at Florida State University, finds that Black entrepreneurs are still severely discriminated against by banks, even when they are more qualified than their White peers.
The study found that potential Black borrowers received lower-quality service than their White peers when applying for financing. This included being offered fewer loan options. The study also found that Black borrowers were treated less warmly by bank personnel than White customers.
The researchers found that when Black customers signal higher socioeconomic status, or a Black customer’s company (for which they seek the loan) has a more complex and sophisticated legal structure they are more likely to receive funding than Blacks who are sole proprietors. The results show that a more sophisticated business structure increases the employee’s trust toward Black customers, which reduces the perceived default likelihood and increases the likelihood to offer a loan. However, this difference is not the case for White applicants.
Professor Scott is the joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and a Ph.D. from Arizona State University.
The full study, “Revealing and Mitigating Racial Bias and Discrimination in Financial Services,” was published on the website of the Journal of Marketing Research. It may be accessed here.
[I delivered this paper at the conference “Figuring the Enemy” at St. Andrews University, June 6-8. Thank you to Scott Kirkland for the invitation!]
In this paper, I want to draw a comparison between the treatment of the figure of the Jew in the Pauline Epistles and the Qur’an, with the goal of illuminating the necessarily polemical nature of historical, revealed monotheism. I will begin by providing some background as to why such a juxtaposition has been only seldom attempted, explain how I came to see these two texts as related, and briefly suggest how the parallels might have come about. I will then develop a more detailed comparison and contrast, laying the groundwork for a conclusion in which I draw out some implications for our understanding of monotheism, in critical dialogue with Jan Assmann.
I.
Paul is conspicuously absent from the Qur’an. The sacred text of Islam mentions many figures from the New Testament, dwelling at great length on Jesus, Mary, Zechariah, and even mentioning that Jesus — alone among the Qur’anic prophets — had a special group of followers known as the “disciples.” All of those references, however, are solely to the Gospels, or to adjacent apocryphal literature, such as the Protoevangelium of James. Only the Gospel is mentioned alongside the Torah as an authentic earlier scripture in the Qur’an’s reckoning.
Yet even if Paul had been mentioned, the Qur’an also claims that the actual scriptural deposits held by contemporary Jews and Christians have been corrupted and that the Qur’an’s retelling of biblical stories are restoring the authentic originals. Hence there has historically been little curiosity among Islamic scholars about the Bible — why bother with the corrupt version when you have the real thing? Virtually the only extended engagement with Paul in the medieval Islamic tradition is ‘Abd al-Jabbār’s 10th-century Critique of Christian Origins, which portrays the Apostle as a scheming Jew who was instrumental in corrupting the original Gospel message. Along the way, he introduces many fanciful and sometimes offensive stories and evinces only a fragmentary knowledge of the epistles themselves.
Modern scholars of the Qur’an have largely left Paul aside as well. The motives, to the extent we can assign motives to this kind of lacuna, likely vary. On the one hand, scholars who are broadly sympathetic to Islam accept the basic traditional narrative that the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad during his lifetime and assembled within the lifetime of his close companions. Most members of this group therefore usually attempt to square the circle between a secular perspective on the Prophet’s activities and the Islamic claim that he was an “unlettered prophet” — i.e., he didn’t directly study previous scriptural texts, but may have vaguely picked them up by osmosis. On the other hand, there are more hostile scholars who often advance far-fetched and, in my view, borderline conspiratorial narratives of a late origin of the Qur’an, which cuts the figure of Muhammad out of the picture. In place of any serious engagement with the Qur’an as a theological text with cohesive themes, they attempt to trace the lost Syriac text (or whatever) that lay at the basis of it.
Nevertheless, simply as a reader who is familiar with both texts, I cannot help but think there is an important connection to be made here. I first approached the Qur’an for the sake of my teaching, as my dean called upon me to fill in a gap in our course offerings after the faculty member who taught Eastern religions retired. As a scholar of Christianity, I figured that Islam would be the nearest reach. Hence I set to work reading the suras of the Qur’an in approximate chronological order — with no particular “angle” or agenda, and perhaps even a little irritated that this demand was interfering with my summer research plans.
When I got to Sura 2, The Cow (which comes early in the printed text but relatively late in the Prophet’s ministry), I was struck by the following passage: “They say, ‘Become Jews or Christians, and you will be rightly guided.’ Say [Prophet], ‘No, [ours is] the religion of Abraham, the upright, who did not worship any god besides God’” (2:135; using Haleem translation here and throughout; all brackets represent attempted clarifications by the translator). This sounded very similar to Paul’s attempts in Galatians and Romans to get back behind the Law of Moses by connecting his preaching to the more primordial figure of Abraham. When I got to Sura 3, The Family of Imran, the parallel had become unmistakable:
People of the Book, why do you argue about Abraham when the Torah and the Gospels were not revealed until after his time? … Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian. He was upright and devoted to God, never an idolater, and the people who are closest to him are those who truly follow his ways, this Prophets, and [true] believers—God is close to [true] believers. (3:65-68)
How can one not think of the passages where Paul argues for the priority of Abraham’s pure faith over against the later covenant of Moses? In Galatians, he specifies that “the law, which came four hundred thirty years later, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God” (Galatians 3:17), and in Romans he points out that Abraham’s faith was reckoned to him as righteousness “not after, but before he was circumcized” (4:10), so that he can be the ancestor of both uncircumcised and circumcised believers.
No one who had attended Ted Jennings’ seminar on Romans could possibly miss these parallels. Nevertheless, I did not find much affirmation of my intuitions in the scholarship. In my admittedly far from exhaustive study of literature on the Qur’an, I have found almost zero mention of any relationship between the Qur’an’s deployment of the figure of Abraham and the Apostle Paul’s. The one exception is the biography of the Prophet by Juan Cole, probably known to some in the audience as an anti-Iraq War blogger. Breaking with both trends of the scholarship I mentioned above, Cole both accepts the historicity of the Prophet Muhammad as the vehicle for the revelation of the Qur’an over a relatively short period of time but nevertheless avoids the kid-gloves approach to the notion of the “unlettered prophet.” For Cole, Muhammad was a successful merchant and hence would have been multi-lingual as a matter of course. Moreover, he was a spiritual seeker long before he started receiving the Qur’anic revelations, and so he would have eagerly devoured any theological or scriptural literature he could get his hands on.
Hence Cole is able to make connections to texts from Judaism, Christianity, and various heretical or non-mainstream sects of both, as well as many other religious and intellectual movements — including the letters of Paul. Indeed, he takes the connection further. In an unpublished SBL paper he generously shared with me, Cole suggests that Pauline studies might provide a useable paradigm for Qur’anic studies, and in fact his biography of the Prophet, which aims to use the Qur’an rather than the traditional biographical narratives as the primary source, is constructed on the model of a biography of Paul drawn from the internal timeline implied by the letters rather the account in Acts.
Although he is definitely an outlier in terms of reconstructing the Prophet’s literary borrowings, even Cole stops short of making any strong claim that Muhammad sat down and read the literal texts of Paul. I don’t want to make any strong claim, either. Instead, I want to suggest that it ultimately doesn’t matter. Even if Muhammad studied the texts of Paul, that does not, in itself, “explain” why those precise rhetorical moves appeared at such crucial moments in the Qur’an. As the man says, “the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart.” Whether they are borrowed or independently discovered, the rhetorical and theological parallels are rooted in their shared rhetorical and theological situation as messengers who have arrived “too late” and must shore up their legitimacy in the face of a pre-existing monotheistic tradition (or range of traditions).
The situation is doubtless more complicated in Muhammad’s case given that the centuries that separate him from Paul saw the rise of Christianity, in all of its bewildering and mutually antagonistic forms. In a sense, though, Paul himself is already dealing with multiple versions of Christianity as well, as shown in his “so I says to the guy”-style account of his debate with Peter in Galatians or the delicate tightrope he walks with Apollos in 1 Corinthians. For both Paul and Muhammad, one would initially assume that the debate with Christians is the more salient one—in Paul’s case because he is primarily concerned with the requirements for Gentile believers to join the Christian movement and in Muhammad’s because orthodox Trinitarianism and Christology clearly violate the Qur’anic prohibition of “associating partners with God” — yet both focus much more on the original bearers of the monotheistic revelation: the Jews.
II.
At first glance, Paul and Muhammad’s respective position with regard to the Jews could not be more different. Most notably, Paul is himself a Jew of impeccable credentials: “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:5-6). As the Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul has the role of bringing an essentially Jewish message to the previously excluded nations. Muhammad, for his part, claims no Jewish descent, and the Qur’an proudly declares itself an Arabic revelation for Arabs. Paul is also preaching a message that he understands to be the culmination or fulfillment of the Jewish revelation, whereas—at least until the later years of Muhammad’s career — the Qur’an presents the Prophet’s message as merely the latest in a series of such messages to individual nations.
Despite those very important differences, however, both Paul and Muhammad are clearly rankled by the failure of the Jews to accept their respective messages—albeit not to the same degree. Whereas the Prophet recognizes that the Jews have a special relationship to God and to the Scriptural heritage, making their failure to acknowledge his prophetic message a clear challenge to his prophetic legitimacy, that is not as pressing an issue as the refusal of Paul’s fellow countrymen’s to accept their own ostensible messiah. The gap begins to close as Muhammad becomes a political leader in Medina, where some Jewish groups explicitly ally with him and thus become quasi-insiders, but even then, Muhammad’s ultimate goal is to establish an ecumenical community of monotheists: “The [Muslim] believers, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians—all those who believe in God and the Last Day and do good—will have their rewards with their Lord. No fear for them, nor will they grieve” (2:62). (No one is quite sure who the Sabians are, but surely that only highlights the open-ended inclusiveness of the Qur’an’s vision!)
Once we take into account those key differences in their respective situation and degree of emotional investment in Jewish acceptance of their message, what’s remarkable is how similar their strategies are for negotiating their relationship with the Jewish monotheistic heritage. For the sake of imposing some order on two infamously disorganized bodies of literature, I will assess their approach to three interrelated issues in turn: the question of Jewish privilege, the place of the Jewish law, and the prospects of salvation for the Jews.
So first, Jewish privilege. As we have seen, both Paul and the Qur’an attempt to displace Jewish privilege by using Abraham to make an end-run around Moses. Both also deploy the primal scene of the Garden of Eden to emphasize the universality of their respective messages, though this move is much more prominent in Paul than in the Qur’an. This likely reflects the fact that the Prophet’s mission in the Qur’an is not initially envisioned as having the same universal scope as Christ’s. Indeed, the very fact that no prophet is fully definitive, that each is part of an open-ended series, seems to displace the privilege of previous prophets such as Moses or Jesus.
This strategy is especially evident in the earlier revelations, which intersperse the familiar biblical prophets with messengers to various ancient cities of Arabia — whose ruins would regularly be seen by traveling merchants — and radically downplay the fact that the biblical prophets are all part of the same family tree. For the Qur’an, a perennial monotheistic message has come down through many prophets at many places and times, and only very late in the Qur’anic revelation do we get any hint that Muhammad, as “seal of the prophets” (33:40), is anything other than one prophet among many.
Yet a form of particularism does return, precisely through the figure of Abraham. As we have seen, Paul turns Abraham into the father of those who believe in Christ and, in Galatians, reinterprets Christ as the singular “offspring” who will receive God’s promises to Abraham (3:16). Similarly, the Qur’an introduces a Muslim particularism into the Abraham story by stealthily replacing Isaac with Ishmael on Mount Moriah (37:99-111) and then has the father-son pair found the shrine at Mecca (2:125-129). Hence the “religion of Abraham” is both the perennial monotheism announced by all the prophets and the specific Mecca-centered rites preached by the Seal of the Prophets. In both cases, Jewish privilege is displaced and then reappropriated for the new movement.
This brings us to my second point, namely the role of the Jewish law as the most visible marker of Jewish particularism. Here the convergence between Paul and the Qur’an is most remarkable, given their very different starting points. For his part, Paul has two core concerns that bring him into collision with the Jewish law. Like all Jesus-followers, he must account for how the messiah’s shameful crucifixion and death as an outlaw fit into the economy of salvation, and in terms of his specific mission, he is deeply committed to the idea that Gentiles share in the messianic reality precisely as Gentiles—not as converts to Judaism. In Galatians, that leads him to identify the law as a curse (3:10-14) and a form of slavery (4:22-5:1) and to joke darkly that anyone who is interested in circumcision “would castrate themselves” (5:12). In the later epistle to the Romans, this view has softened: though the law is “holy and just and good” (7:12), its role is the fundamentally negative one of highlighting the omnipresence of sin. In both letters, then, Paul concludes that one is better off joining Christ outside the sphere of the law.
For the Qur’an, the conflict arises from a repeated concern that people should not simply make up prohibitions that God has not actually revealed. In the case of dietary restrictions, the Qur’an repeatedly states that God “has only forbidden you carrion, blood, pig’s meat, and animals over which any name other than God’s has been invoked” (2:173). This raises the question of whether the Torah’s much more restrictive dietary rules represent the kind of imposture that the Qur’an decries. Though the Qur’an is generally comfortable performing a line-item veto of individual laws or plot points from biblical stories, disqualifying the majority of Jewish practice as a fraud is apparently a bridge too far. It decides that the restrictions are real, but they apply only to the Jews, as a form of punishment: “For the wrongdoings done by the Jews, we forbade them certain good things that had been permitted to them before” (4:160). The Qur’an also suggests that the Sabbath may have a similar punitive origin, claiming that “The Sabbath was made obligatory only for those who differed about it” (16:124).
For both the radical messianist and the Seal of the Prophets, then, the Jewish law is reversed from a blessing to a curse, or at least from a privilege to a burden. This obviously complicates my third point of comparison, the ultimate fate of the Jewish people, which is also the place where their strategy most differs. The key passage here in Paul is the labyrinthine Romans 9-11. On the one hand, Paul is unequivocal that “gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). Jesus is and always remains the Jewish messiah, and his death and resurrection make possible the unexpected extension to all nations of God’s promises to the Jewish people. Even the fact that they have rejected the messiah and become “enemies for your sake” (11:28) only highlights the Jews’ special role in the economy of salvation—they had to step aside temporarily in order to make room for Gentiles to come in. Yet Jewish particularism is only redeemed through accepting Christian particularism, as their jealousy at seeing the Gentiles enjoy the benefit of God’s promises will lead them to relent and accept that Jesus is the messiah (11:11). Only in that sense can Paul say, “all Israel will be saved” (11:26).
By contrast, in the Qur’an, the standards for the salvation of a Jewish person are the same as for anyone else: believe in God and the last day, pray, and live a righteous life. The prophetic message provides no information about what happens if they don’t fulfill their special dietary obligations, though it does include an enigmatic story in which God tests the Jews’ faithfulness by sending them a fish that surfaced only on the Sabbath (7:163-167). They give into temptation, leading God to declare that “until the Day of Resurrection, He would send people against them to inflict terrible suffering on them” (7:167) — a dire punishment, to be sure, but one that only applies to the life of this world. One assumes, as with every commandment in the Qur’an, that the faithful Jew’s duty is to do their best to obey their extra commandments and not be too hard on themselves if some necessity or misunderstanding prevents them. The displacement of Jewish privilege thus leads to a situation where they have no particular advantage or disadvantage in salvation. Indeed, the Qur’an, in a distant echo of Paul’s rude comment from Galatians, can sometimes taunt Jews who believe that their special relationship to God means they are automatically saved that they should therefore wish for death (62:6).
Nevertheless, this live-and-let-live attitude does not exclude a bitter enmity, at least for a certain subset of Jews. The direct cause here is the fact that some Jewish groups explicitly submitted to Muhammad’s leadership through the so-called “Constitution of Medina,” then failed to fulfill their obligations. As Juan Cole is at pains to clarify, many verses that seem to vent fury at the Jews as a whole should instead be interpreted as applying only to specific groups who behave in the specific ways described. That contextualization is helpful, yet it does not dispel my impression that the Qur’an’s attitude toward the Jews is on something of a hair trigger—their presumed favor and cooperation is especially coveted, making their opposition all the more galling. The fact that Christians, who on the face of it violate the Qur’an’s radical monotheism, do not face the same love-hate dynamic only heightens this suspicion. That may simply be a result of a lower or less unified Christian population in the Hijaz — or it may reflect a sense that Christians, as another post-Jewish monotheistic movement, are more natural allies.
III.
Overall, then, both the Apostle Paul and the Prophet Muhammad arrive at very similar strategies for negotiating their relationship with the original bearers of the monotheistic message. Both tend to displace Jewish particularism and replace it with their new movement’s own particularism. Both reinterpret the Jewish law as a burden or punishment rather than a sign of God’s blessing. Thankfully, these negative moves do not lead either to exclude the Jews from salvation, but both nonetheless insist that any redemption they experience will conform to the standards of their new revelation—which was of course the true meaning of the old revelation all along. The specific theological paths they take to get there differ based on their respective historical contexts and emotional investment in the Jewish community, but the fact that such different starting points can lead to such similar results is, at the very least, unexpected—especially for two texts that the medieval and modern scholarly traditions have taken to be completely unrelated.
My contention is that this convergence ultimately stems from the very nature of historical, revealed monotheism. Here I am drawing on the work of Jan Assmann. In The Price of Monotheism, Assmann argues that revealed monotheistic traditions represent “secondary” religions. Whereas the “primary” traditions, retrospectively called polytheism, have an open-ended and inclusive quality — new gods can always be added to the pantheon, and the gods of other groups can be “translated” into their local equivalents—the secondary religions style themselves as the correction of the errors of paganism and have a built-in intolerance. This intolerance extends not only to the unwashed masses outside the monotheistic circle, but to the backsliders and compromisers within it, who fall short of the monotheistic demand encapsulated in a scriptural deposit. Living traditions will inevitably lapse into such “betrayals,” and they will just as inevitably be met with Reformation-like demands to “return” to the pure religion represented in scripture.
All of this seems to me to be basically right, and classroom use has showed me that students find Assmann’s concepts helpful for negotiating the differences between polytheistic and monotheistic traditions. Where Assmann seems to me to stumble is in his account of the relationships among the existing monotheistic traditions, which for him grows out of the tensions between universalism and particularism in the monotheistic idea. On the one hand, monotheism has universal implications—the God it reveals is the God of everyone. On the other hand, monotheism insists on particularity—the God is reveals is a particular named God who has participated in specific historical events, and all other gods are false and/or demonic. Judaism manages this tension in a straightforward way:
In Judaism, the universalism inherent to monotheism is deferred until a messianic end-time; in the world as we know it, the Jews are the guardians of a truth that concerns everyone, but that has been entrusted to them for the time being as to a kind of spiritual avant-garde. For Christians, of course, this end-time dawned some two thousand years ago, putting an end to the need for such distinctions. That is why Christian theology has blinded itself to the need for such distinctions. (17)
He then adds, almost as an afterthought, that Islam suffers from a similar blindness, which is why both traditions have at times embraced an intolerance and violence that seems to contradict their universal message.
This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t seem to provide much explanation for why so much of that intolerance and violence has been directed at a group that both traditions agree to be fellow worshippers of the one true God: namely, the Jews. Here the problem doesn’t seem to me that Christianity and Islam can’t admit that their universal message is rooted in particularism. It’s that they can’t admit that their new revelation is new. This is not merely bad faith or willful blindness, but a structural necessity of participating in the revealed monotheistic tradition. The one true God is not a vague philosophical principle of unity or a trans-historical ideal that may be reflected in many different ways — he is a particular, named deity who has reportedly done particular things at particular times and places. The claim to follow this God therefore requires maintaining some form of continuity with the existing deposit of revelation, even as the felt demand for a new approach demands some critical distance.
The ideal outcome from the perspective of a budding new prophet would of course be that the Jews accept the new “purified” version of monotheism en masse. Every new monotheistic movement seems to include a moment of delusional optimism that this will occur — even Martin Luther expected that Jews would rush to embrace the “real” Christianity that had been obscured for so many centuries. This blessed outcome somehow never occurs, leading to the kinds of mental gymnastics I have documented above.
The necessarily polemical nature of revealed monotheism is therefore directed precisely at the original bearers of the monotheistic demand. Their very faithfulness to the divine command is recast as a form of stubbornness or arrogance. Their entire history — here drawing on authentic threads in the Hebrew Bible — is interpreted as one of rebellion and disbelief. In the Qur’an, which proclaims to the Jews that God has “blessed you and favored you over other people” (2:47), the chosen nation is reduced to a perpetual object lesson for the believers. Even worse, the Christian tradition of typological exegesis that finds its beginning in the Pauline epistles reads the entire history of Israel as a series of unwitting anticipatory pantomimes of the life of Christ.
The Jews are wrong, yet necessary, indeed necessarily wrong. They become, in Paul’s words, “enemies for your sake,” constitutive enemies at the foundation of a new tradition that can structurally never understand itself to be new. And so the new revelation’s declaration that the Jews’ special favor with God, represented by the divine law that structures their lives and sets them apart from all nations, is actually a burden and a curse becomes a grim self-fulfilling prophecy. For the crime of bringing revealed monotheism into the world and sustaining its demand against all odds, the Jews are condemned to perpetual suspicion, exclusion, and persecution—precisely by their fellow monotheists. The dynamic may be more virulent (as in Christianity) or less (as in Islam), but it is nonetheless real and destructive.
I began this paper by considering the understandable reasons that scholars have ignored the possible connection between Paul and the Qur’an, and I will end by asking why Assmann might downplay the toxic theological dynamic that my comparison has highlighed. The answer, it seems to me, is that he is attempting to extract some redemptive core to the monotheistic revolution, which will allow him to declare it, despite everything, a progressive step toward the inclusive secular world order he is clearly hoping for. That core, he claims, is the universal demand for justice, which could form the basis of a universal law, though never a universal religion. Yet the dynamics I trace in this paper call the justice of God deeply into question, as an entire nation’s history is reduced to an object lesson or a ladder to truth that can be safely kicked away. It is no mistake that Romans 9-11, where Paul grapples with the salvation of the Jews, is also Christian theology’s locus classicus for the doctrine of predestination, which seems to reduce God to an arbitrary monster. The hope for a universal justice is surely a valid one, but to get there, we need to break more definitively with the habits of thought that the secondary monotheisms have bequeathed to us.
quran
akotsko
In the wake of the killing of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway, a new meme has emerged on the right: the killer, Daniel Penny, was acting as a “Good Samaritan.” A more craven and blasphemous distortion of Jesus’s parable is hardly imaginable. In fact, I almost hesitate to dignify it with a response. Neely himself is so obviously the victimized party here, and if anything, his murder shows what happens when a “Good Samaritan” doesn’t show up. Moreover, the fact that the story a story that is so obviously about moral decency that crosses lines of ethnic enmity and distrust — the Jewish victim’s co-religionists pass him by, while a member of a hated, supposedly half-breed sect provides generous help — can be deployed to apply to a member of a privileged in-group using lethal violence against a multiply marginalized person displays the kind of willful, spiteful ignorance that only committed racists can pull off.
This isn’t the first time the story has been misunderstood. There are numerous accounts of preachers crafting a contemporary version of the parable where a priest and a deacon pass the victim by, while an atheist (or an illegal immigrant, or a trans person, or whoever else) generously helps. The punchline is always that the parishoners — who have presumably known this story all their lives — inevitably find this retelling offensive and insulting.
This misunderstanding is all the more puzzling given that Jesus clearly intends for the listener to identify with the victim. The interlocutor asks Jesus “who is my neighbor,” presumably to get out of the exhorbitant demands of Jesus’s teaching by applying them only to a limited in-group. Jesus tells the story and then asks essentially, “Okay, who was that guy’s neighbor?” The pride and presumption of the interlocutor, who wants to be able to pick and choose his neighbors, is undercut by a scenario in which he is radically vulnerable and is no position to turn away any neighborly assistance.
Except! Yes, that’s right, there is a catch, and it’s the fateful last exchange: “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’” Go and do likewise — suddenly the interlocutor is no longer identified with the victim, but with the hero. What’s more, this isn’t just any guy off the street, but a teacher of the law. There is nothing a teacher of the law knows better than how to get out of things, so we can imagine the gears turning: “Go and do likewise — but in what respect? Was it not the case that the Samaritan was helping my fellow Jew, filling in for the neglectful priest and Levite? Perhaps I, like the Samaritan, should help Jews in need so that they aren’t put in the embarrassing position of relying on the help of a Samaritan, who surely has his own Samaritan problems to attend to. And if I’m supposed to take away the message that Samaritans are worthy of respect, surely the best kind of respect is not to impose on them, right?” And so it goes.
There are other trap doors as well. Could we not see the scenario as precisely a failure of policing? Again, we wouldn’t have needed to bother the poor Samaritan if our Roman men in uniform had done their jobs! Better, perhaps, than cleaning up after someone is victimized would be to intervene before it gets to that point, right? In this interpretation — presupposing, of course, the racist premise that Neely was somehow primed for violence, which no empirical evidence supports — Penny was a true neighbor to everyone on that train, a kind of super-Samaritan! And the fact that he is being persecuted for his actions by the usual rogue’s gallery of liberals and reporters and various social jusice warriors shows that he must have done the right thing. Maybe he’s even a little bit like Jesus! In fact, I wonder if we can detect some Christ-like imagery in these dramatic photos portraying Penny between two subordinate figures, like Christ crucified between two thieves:
All these various plot holes and “outs” may be an indication that entrusting the moral formation of one’s society on a half-remembered story that may have been told by an apocalyptic preacher in first-century Palestine is a questionable move. This is not, I hasten to add, because those stories are garbled or incoherent. No, the reason this is a risky procedure is that they are designed as traps. At one point, the disciples ask Jesus why he preaches in parables. His answer is not that they are more memorable or easier to understand or anything we might expect on a common-sense level. Instead, he offers a more paradoxical answer:
He answered, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says:
“You will indeed listen, but never understand,
and you will indeed look, but never perceive.
For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and their ears are hard of hearing,
and they have shut their eyes;
so that they might not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and understand with their heart and turn—
and I would heal them.”
As my theology professor Craig Keen loved to paraphrase this passage, Jesus is saying, “I tell them parables rather than preaching straightforwardly because otherwise they might turn and be saved.”
A parable, in other words, is not a memorable tale or a moral lesson. It is a judgment — or better, it is a way to get people to pass judgment on themselves. We can try all we want to point out to these people identifying a cold-blooded murderer as a Good Samaritan how much they have misunderstood the text, but the text is doing what it is meant to do — it is giving them the opportunity to demonstrate that they are well and truly lost. What we do with that information is unclear, given that we do not expect the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God, but the information itself is unequivocal. Anyone who could bring themselves to utter such a blasphemous thing is beyond help, beyond hope. They are damned, and to live as they do is surely a living hell.
the-good-samaritan
akotsko
What are the most-assigned films in college classrooms? Three film studies professors talk about the rankings and what they mean.
The post What Films Should We Teach?: A conversation about the Canon appeared first on Public Books.
Women in the history of linguistics—from marginalization to recognition
Women’s History Month raises issues of erasure and marginalization, authority and power which, sadly, are still relevant for women today. Much can be learnt from the experience of women in the past. We find inspiring stories of women who overcame prejudice and constraints of all kinds and who sometimes managed to gain recognition from their peers, only to be excluded from the history of their discipline.
In the field of linguistics, this marginalization relates to some extent to what is today considered part of linguistics and the current valuing above all of theoretical work. Words matter: a broader definition of linguistics allows women across the centuries to be included in this scholarly field. Given the cultural and practical limitations imposed on their access to education across all cultures, we need to look outside more institutionalized and traditional frameworks to discover the contributions made by women to the study of language structure and function.
“Words matter: a broader definition of linguistics allows women across the centuries to be included in this scholarly field.”
Classic histories of linguistics, very rarely, if ever, include women scholars. We set about uncovering the contribution of women linguists—from European and non-European traditions— and their ideas and writings to give them the recognition they deserve. A group of equally motivated and determined scholars joined us in our quest. We looked for names, works and ideas, especially in those liminal spaces not reached by official historiography, that is, outside institutions, universities, and academies in more private and domesticated spaces. We decided to challenge categories and concepts devised for male-dominated accounts and expands our field of enquiry: we turned our attention not only to pioneers and exceptional women, but also to those non-exceptional women who nevertheless quietly moved forward our knowledge of languages, their description, analysis, codification and acquisition. Painstaking research in archives and libraries, looking at manuscripts and printed sources, gradually unearthed rich, fascinating, and often unexpected evidence of women’s contribution.
For the earlier periods, it was difficult to find women who published grammars or dictionaries, but they did exist. Marguerite Buffet in seventeenth-century France wrote a volume of observations on the good usage of French specifically aimed at women (Nouvelles observations sur la langue françoise, 1668). Similarly, in 1740, Johanna Corleva published a Dutch translation of Port-Royal’s celebrated general and rational grammar. In Portugal, in 1786, Francisca de Chantal Álvares produced a compendium of Portuguese grammar for female pupils in convent schools, the Breve Compendio da Gramatica Portugueza para uso das Meninas que se educaõ no Mosteiro da Vizitaçaõ de Lisboa, at a time when the majority of women did not have access to formal education. Further afield, women missionaries were also active in the field. Gertrud von Massenbach joined the Sudan Pioneer Mission in 1909, as a teacher of mathematics in Aswan, in Nubian territory. Her linguistic interests led her to publish a dictionary with a grammatical introduction of Kunûzi Nubian (Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes mit einer grammatischen Einleitung, 1933) and a collection of Nubian texts (Nubische Texte im Dialekt der Kunuzi und der Dongolawi, 1962).
“We need to look outside more institutionalized and traditional frameworks to discover the contributions made by women to the study of language.”
But there is much more. Women were, for instance, the intended audience or dedicatees of some of the earlier vernacular grammars in Europe. The Gramática de la lengua castellana (1492) by Antonio de Nebrija, the very first printed grammar of a vernacular language in Europe, was commissioned by Queen Isabella I of Castile and, according to Juan de Valdés, was meant to be of benefit, “para las damas de la sereníssima doña Isabel” (“for the ladies-in-waiting of Her Very Serene Highness Queen Isabel”). Women were translators, language teachers, collectors of data on endangered languages, and creators of new scripts. In Jiangyong county (Jiāngyǒng xiàn) of Hunan (Húnán) province in China, a rural territory surrounded by mountains, the nǚshū script (“female script/writing”) was used and transmitted among village women for at least one and a half centuries: a variant of the Chinese script, it represents a significant example of Chinese women’s contribution to character invention and development.
Women also assisted male members of their families, or male colleagues, in their work as linguists. Lucy Catherine Lloyd (1834-1914), the sister-in-law of the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek, was his most important collaborator. Together they created the nineteenth-century archive of ǀXam and !Kung texts (today called the Digital Bleek and Lloyd), an invaluable resource for linguists working on Khoisan languages. Cinie Louw followed her husband Andrew Louw to South Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) to work on the Morgenster Mission, learning the local language, Karanga, a Shona dialect, and becoming a fluent speaker. Their 1919 translation of the Bible into Karanga was a joint effort, preceded in 1915, by an important manual of the Chikaranga Language.
Other women’s linguistic work has been neglected or overshadowed, the men with whom they collaborated reaping the benefit of their efforts. The young Chiri Yukie (1903–1922) helped codify the oral tradition of the Ainu people of Hokkaido in northern Japan. Thanks to her bilingual and bicultural knowledge she was able to collect a wide range of oral performances, preserving them for posterity and making them accessible by translating them into Japanese. Her invaluable work ultimately ended up promoting, instead, the career of a prominent male academic who was awarded the Imperial prize for his work on the Indigenous language.
“Women’s personal and professional life cannot be separated in a way that has been possible for male scholars across the centuries.”
What came to light, piece by piece, through reading their personal stories, was the challenges women had to face in male-dominated academia. Women’s personal and professional life cannot be separated in a way that has been possible for male scholars across the centuries. Theirs are often tales of perseverance and determination. Take the example of Mary Haas, a stalwart of twentieth-century American Indian Linguistics and a central figure in the Boas-Sapir tradition, which laid the foundation for current language documentation practices. Haas found her marriage in 1931 to Morris Swadesh limited her opportunities both within linguistics and with respect to employment generally. Given the scarcity of academic appointments, she considered getting a teaching certificate to teach in public schools in Oklahoma to support herself and her fieldwork on Native American languages. However, as a married woman she was unlikely to get hired in a public school. Undeterred, she wrote to Swadesh asking for a divorce so that she might be able to support herself. Swadesh agreed. Their divorce was meant to allow Haas to pursue more avenues of employment, although her plans were ultimately interrupted by World War II.
Uncovering such stories proved complicated, but extremely rewarding. And the more we found, the more we have become convinced that there is still so much more to discover.
Read a free chapter from Women in the History of Linguistics on Oxford Academic.
Featured image from the cover of Women in the History of Linguistics by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Helena Sanson.
A new survey by the Gallup Organization for the Lumina Foundation finds that 21 percent of all Black students currently enrolled in U.S. higher education say they feel discriminated against “frequently” or “occasionally” in their program. Black students are not only more likely to say they frequently or occasionally feel discriminated against but also to say they feel disrespected and physically or psychologically unsafe.
The survey found that Black learners are more likely to feel discriminated against at institutions with the least racially diverse student bodies. Nearly one third of the Black students at the least diverse colleges and universities said they experienced discrimination compared to 17 percent of Black students at the institutions with the most diverse student bodies. Some 28 percent of Black students at the least diverse campuses said they felt physically unsafe compared to 16 percent of Black students at the most diverse institutions.
More than one third of Black students at private, for-profit educational institutions reported that they feel discriminated against “frequently” or “occasionally.”At private, not-for-profit educational institutions, 23 percent of Black students faced frequent or occasional discrimination. Only 16 percent of Black students at state-operated educational institutions were discriminated against frequently or occasionally.
The authors of the report conclude that “students’ experiences with discrimination may in some cases suggest a need for greater regulatory oversight; for example, some advocacy organizations have called for greater accountability measures that prevent for-profit colleges from targeting minority communities with inferior program qualities and predatory lending practices.”
The full report, Balancing Act: The Tradeoffs and Challenges Facing Black Students in Higher Education, may be downloaded here.
Early diagnosis of uterine cancer is known to improve a patient’s chances for survival. When diagnosed while the cancer is still confined to the uterus, nearly 95 percent of patients will survive for at least five years. But that rate drops to less than 70 percent once the cancer has spread to areas or lymph nodes nearby and plummets to around 18 percent once the cancer has spread to other parts of the body.
Previous research has found that Black patients are less likely to receive early diagnoses than people of other racial and ethnic groups. A new analysis by Yale researchers provides insights into why that is: They found that Black patients were more likely than their White counterparts to experience testing delays or to not receive recommended tests at all.
For their analysis, researchers included adult patients who had reported abnormal uterine bleeding to their healthcare providers and later received a diagnosis of uterine cancer. Abnormal uterine bleeding is the most common symptom of uterine cancer. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends several procedures to evaluate the cause of abnormal uterine bleeding, such as endometrial biopsy, transvaginal/pelvic ultrasound, and hysteroscopy, in which a physician examines the inside of the cervix and uterus with a small, telescope-like device. In the new study, researchers found that more than twice as many Black patients than White patients did not receive any of these procedures.
Further, of the patients who did receive procedures, Black patients were more likely than White patients to experience a delay of more than two months in receiving their first diagnostic procedure following their report of abnormal uterine bleeding. Ultimately, Black patients were more likely than White patients to experience a delay in receiving their cancer diagnosis. The researchers found that 11.3 percent of Black patients who had reported abnormal uterine bleeding waited more than a year to receive a uterine cancer diagnosis, compared with 8.3 percent of White patients.
The full study, “Racial Disparities in Diagnostic Evaluation of Uterine Cancer among Medicaid Beneficiaries,” was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It may be accessed here.
A new survey by the Pew Research Center documents how African Americans feel about the feminist movement. Nearly four out of every five Black adults agree that “it is very important for women to have equal rights with men.” Nearly 9 of every 10 Black adults with a college education agree that it is important to have equal rights for men and women
More than three quarters of Black adults agree that “the feminist movement has done a great deal or a fair amount to advance women’s rights.” But less than half of Black adults agree that the feminist movement has helped Black women. Black men are more likely than Black women to believe that the feminist movement has helped Black women. Among college-educated Black adults, 61 percent believe that the feminist movement has helped Black women. Only 45 percent of Black adults with only a high school education agree.
More than a quarter of all Black adults believe that the feminist movement has actually “hurt Black women.” And Black women are more likely than Black men to agree.
Some 42 percent of Black adults say feminism has helped White women a lot. Only 16 percent of Black adults agree that feminism has helped Black women a lot.
The University of Pittsburgh’s graduate program in Africana Studies has announced that it will enroll its first cohort of students in its Ph.D. program this coming fall. The new Ph.D. program will offer students the choice of three different concentrations:
Race & Equity: Drawing from various methodological and theoretical approaches, this research theme articulates an understanding of race as a social construct with material, intellectual, cultural, political, and bioethical implications. It aims to create and develop the tools to achieve social justice and equity throughout Africa and its diaspora.
Migration & Community Transformation: This research theme analyzes the causes and implications of the movements of people of African origin throughout time and space.
Culture & Creative Production: Researchers in this concentration will seek to illuminate the intersections between socio-economic, political, intellectual, and psychological transformation and Black cultural productions in music, literature, performing, and visual arts, as well as film & media.
Robin Brooks, the program’s inaugural director, is an associate professor of Africana studies. “We see that change happening nationally, where these programs are now being institutionalized as departments and recognized as departments at different institutions. We think that the impact of 2020: the collision with a pandemic, George Floyd, all of those things, are working together for the good concerning the overall field of Africana studies.”
Dr. Brooks added that “there are continually advancements in the field and different approaches, because we’re not in a silo. We’re in a moving, rolling developing world. And so, as the world transforms, so does the field, of course. At the center of our attention is always people of African descent and the lived experiences of people of African descent across the world.”
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows large racial gaps in educational attainment in 2022. That year, 27.6 percent of African Americans over the age of 25 had obtained at least a bachelor’s degree. For non-Hispanic Whites, the figure was 48.2 percent.
Some 10.1 percent of Black adults held a graduate or professional degree compared to 15.7 percent of non-Hispanic Whites.
On the other extreme, nearly one in 10 African American adults had not graduated from high school. Only 4.8 percent of non-Hispanic White adults did not have a high school diploma.
When we break the figures down by gender, we see a major advantage for Black women. In 2022, 30.1 percent of Black women had obtained at least a bachelor’s degree and 12.3 percent had earned an advanced degree. For African American men, 24.6 percent had a least a bachelor’s degree and 8.3 percent had an advanced degree.
This is is a multilingual comic that serves as a meditation on the infrastructures of COVID-19, care, and time. In the spirit of the multilingual spaces I inhabit in Tio’tia:ke/Mooninyaang/Montréal, I have chosen to write bilingually—a process that can be messy, but that speaks to my experiences of COVID-19 locally as I am thinking of COVID-19 globally.
This refusal to separate my experiences into two linguistic boxes is an experiment in thinking about both the process and products of creation through the form of comics, an art form popular in Québec, where I lived during the start of the pandemic (and still live, at the time of this writing).
A note on translation: In panel 6, I have used “vie valide” (FR) as “abled life” (EN). This is meant to emphasize the language in the source material, which emphasizes both hypocrisy and violence of ableist and eugenicist approaches to a pandemic, and also serves as a power of refusal. As someone who is disabled but who is not francophone, I welcome conversations about this language over Twitter or over email (see profile).
Il s’agit d’une bande dessinée multilingue qui sert de méditation sur les infrastructures de COVID-19, les soins et le temps. Dans l’esprit des espaces multilingues que j’habite à Tio’tia:ke/Mooninyaang/Montréal, j’ai choisi d’écrire de manière bilingue – un processus qui peut être quelque peu compliqué, mais qui parle de mes expériences de COVID-19 au niveau local tout en pensant à COVID-19 au niveau mondial.
Ce refus de séparer mes expériences en deux boîtes linguistiques est une expérience de réflexion sur le processus et les produits de la création, en utilisant la forme de la bande dessinée, une forme d’art populaire au Québec, où je vivais au début de la pandémie (et où je vis toujours, au moment d’écrire ces lignes).
Une note sur la traduction : Dans le panneau 6, j’ai utilisé “vie valide” (FR) comme “abled life” (EN). Ceci a pour but de mettre l’accent sur le langage du matériel source, qui souligne à la fois l’hypocrisie et la violence des approches “ableistes” et eugénistes d’une pandémie, et sert également de pouvoir de refus. En tant que personne handicapée mais non francophone, je suis heureux de discuter de ce langage sur Twitter ou par e-mail (voir profil).
(note: the comic uses a dark brown, light brown, and blue color palette and appears to be drawn on a textured background)
(note : la bande dessinée utilise une palette de couleurs marron foncé, marron clair et bleu et semble être dessinée sur un arrière-plan texturé)
Panel 1: A comic spread with text that reads/Une bande dessinée avec un texte qui dit: “I don’t remember the first day I noticed COVID-19 infrastructure in Québec .” “Je ne me souviens pas du premier jour où j’ai remarqué l’infrastructure COVID-19 au Québec.”
“Stickers on the floor to tell us where to stand, lines on the floor to tell us how to queue.” “Des autocollants au sol pour nous dire où nous tenir, des lignes au sol pour nous dire comment faire la queue.”
In the background, there is a light and dark brown illustration of two stickers with footprints and “2m” written on them. / En arrière-plan, il y a une illustration marron clair et marron foncé de deux autocollants avec des empreintes de pieds et “2m” écrit dessus.
Panel 2: The text reads/Un texte qui dit: “There is a phrase, translated from Italian*, that describes hope in a post-COVID-19 future:” “Il y a une phrase qui a été traduite de l’italien* et qui décrit l’espoir dans un futur post-COVID-19 :”
Below, there are signs that read / En dessous, il y a des panneaux qui disent: “Tout ira mieux” (Belgium/Belgique), “tout ira bien” (France/France), “Everything will be OK!” (US, New Zealand, États-Unis, Nouvelle Zélande)
“*« andrà tutto bene »”
Panel 3: The text reads / Un texte qui dit: “In Montréal, the phrase written by children and taped to windows, printed on stickers and put on shop doors, and placed beneath a rainbow was « ça va bien aller »”
“À Montréal, la phrase écrite par les enfants et collée aux fenêtres, imprimée sur des autocollants et collée sur les portes des magasins, et placée sous un arc-en-ciel était « ça va bien aller »”
In the frame next to it is a drawing of a rainbow in brown, white, and blue, taped to something. It reads ça va bien aller. / Dans le cadre à côté, il y a un dessin d’un arc-en-ciel en marron, blanc et bleu, collé à quelque chose. On peut lire “ça va bien aller”.
Panel 4: The text reads / Un texte qui dit: “People with different kinds of relationships to labour, different identities, and different incomes have had different experiences under COVID-19 (and capitalism). Race, immigration status, class, and more shape how COVID-19 has been felt by people around the world.”
“Des personnes ayant des relations différentes avec le travail, des identités differentes et des revenus différents ont vecu des expériences différentes dans le cadre de COVID-19 (et du capitalisme).”
“La race, le statut au regard de la législation sur l’immigration, la classe sociale et d’autres factures façonnent la manière dont le COVID-19 a étè ressenti par les gens du monde entier.”
Next to the text is an image of a healthcare worker (who appears to be not white) in blue, wearing gloves, wearing a mask, and with hair tied up. À côté du texte se trouve l’image d’un.e travailleur.se de la santé (qui semble ne pas être blanc.he) en bleu, portant des gants, un masque et les cheveux attachés.
Panel 5: There are two panels, with text around them and images inside. Il y a deux panneaux, avec du texte autour et des images à l’intérieur.
On the left, the text around the panel reads / À gauche, le texte autour du panneau dit: “Capital shapes not only our relationship to labour, but also our relationship to health (and who gets heathcare).”
On the right, the text around the panel reads / À droit, le texte autour du panneau dit: “Le capital façonne non seulement notre rélatuion au travail, mais également notre relation à la santé (et qui reçoit des soins de santé)” Under, it reads: (Adler-Bolton and Vierkant 2022)
On the left, there is a drawing of a white deliveryperson who is pushing a trolley with a number of packages on it, including / À gauche, le dessin d’un livreur blanc qui pousse un chariot sur lequel se trouvent plusieurs colis, dont “HIGH RISK LOW PAY,” “MASKS,” “N95,” “FREE? TESTS.” Below, it reads / En dessous, on peut lire: “The surplus, or surplus populations, can therefore be defined as a collective of those who fall outside of the normative principles for which state policies are designed, as well as those who are excluded from the attendant entitlements of capital.”
On the right, there is a drawing of two white people. The person on the left is white, has shoulder-length hair, is wearing glasses, and is named as “Beatrice Adler-Bolton.” The person on the right is white, is wearing less tinted glasses, has a beard, and short hair, and is named as “Artie Vierkant.” / À droite, il y a le dessin de deux personnes blanches. La personne de gauche est blanche, a les cheveux longs, porte des lunettes et s’appelle “Beatrice Adler-Bolton”. La personne à droite est blanche, porte des lunettes moins teintées, a une barbe et des cheveux courts, et s’appelle “Artie Vierkant”.
Below, it reads / En dessous, on peut lire: “Le surplus, ou les populations excédentaires, peuvent donc être définis comme un collectif de ceux ne relèvent pas des principes normatifs pour lesquels les politiques de l’État sont conçues, ainsi que de ceux qui sont exclus des droits afférents au capital.”
Panel 6: There are two panels, with text around both. On the left, it reads / Il y a deux panneaux, avec du texte autour des deux. À gauche, on peut lire: “Disability justice organizer Mia Mingus reminds us that political refusals cost disabled lives.” Inside the square is a skeleton in brown ground, with some grass. A l’intérieur du panneau se trouve un squelette dans un sol brun, avec un peu d’herbe.
Inside the right panel, the text reads / À l’intérieur du panneau droit, le texte dit: “We will not trade disabled deaths for abled life. We will not allow disabled people to be disposable or the necessary collateral damage for the status quo.” “Nous n’échangerons pas les décès d’handicapés contre une vie valide.” The right panel has a drawing of an IV hanger. Le panneau de droite présente le dessin d’un support de perfusion.
Panel 7: A spread with three panels. Two on either side have drawings of masks on the ground, with leaves and dirt. Below the left, it reads, “Que se passe-t-il lorsque les infrastructures de soins collectifs son mises au rebut, jetées au nom du “choix” individuel ?” / Une page avec trois panneaux. Deux de chaque côté ont des dessins de masques sur le sol, avec des feuilles et de la terre. En bas à gauche, on peut lire, “Que se passe-t-il lorsque les infrastructures de soins collectifs son mises au rebut, jetées au nom du “choix” individuel ?”
In the middle panel, the text reads / Dans le panneau du milieu, le texte se lit comme suit: “We will not look away from the mass illness and death that surrounds us or from a state machine that is more committed to churning out profit and privileged comfort with eugenic abandonment.” “Nous ne détournerons pas les yeux de la maladie et de la morte de masse qui nous entournent ou d’une machine d’État qui east plus déterminée à générer des profits et un confort privilégié avec un abandon eugénique.”
On the right, it reads / À droit, le texte dit: “What happens when collective care infrastructures are discarded, thrown away in the name of individual “choice”?”
Panel 8: A spread of two panels. On the left, around the panel, the text reads, “What happens when COVID-19 is still here, but the infrastructure is being torn down?” Inside, is a drawing of a sign that reads “Couvre visage obligatoire / Masks required” taped to a door. / Deux panneaux. À gauche, autour du panneau, le texte a dit : “What happens when COVID-19 is still here, but the infrastructure is being torn down?” À l’intérieur, le dessin d’un panneau indiquant “Couvre visage obligatoire / Masks required” collé sur une porte.
On the right, around the panel, it reads / A droite, autour du panneau, le texte a dit: “Que se passe-t-il lorsque le COVID1-9 est toujours là, mais que l’infrastructure est en train d’être démolie ?” Inside the panel is a drawing of the tape on the door with part of the sign still remaining, but most is missing. / À l’intérieur du panneau se trouve un dessin du ruban adhésif sur la porte. Il reste une partie du panneau, mais la majeure partie est manquante.
Panel 9: Two panels. On the left, it reads (Silverstein and Lincoln 2022). / Deux panneaux. À gauche, on peut lire (Silverstein et Lincoln 2022).
On the left around the panel, it reads / À gauche, autour du panneau, on peut lire: “Broken pandemic infrastructures were not the “ça va” many of us hoped for.” Inside the panel, it reads / À l’intérieur du panneau, le texte dit : “How did the united States end up desensitized to mass death and disability, angrily opposed to almost all means of mitigating an occasionally fatal airborne virus, and willing to accept so little from the powerful?” “Comment les États-Unis ont-ils fini par êtr désensibilisés à la mort et à l’incapacité de masse, opposés avec colère à presque tous les moyens d’atténuer un virus aérien parfois mortel, et prêts à accepter si peu des puissants?”
Around the right panel, it says / Autour du panneau de droite, le texte a dit: “Infrastructures pandémiques brisées n’ont pas été les “ça va” que beaucoup d’entre nous avaient éspérées.” Inside the panel is a drawing of two people. On the left, is a drawing of a white person with glasses and brown hair, who is named Martha Lincoln. Below, is a drawing of a white person with brown hair and a beard named Jason Silverstein. / À l’intérieur du panneau se trouve le dessin de deux personnes. À gauche, le dessin d’une personne blanche avec des lunettes et des cheveux bruns, qui s’appelle Martha Lincoln. En dessous, se trouve le dessin d’une personne blanche aux cheveux bruns et à la barbe, nommée Jason Silverstein.
Panel 10: A panel spread that has a drawing of COVID-19 case estimates in brown (data via INSPQ), and a drawing of a lung with a brown trachea with blue lungs. Un panneau avec un dessin des estimations de cas COVID-19 en brun (données via INSPQ), et un dessin d’un poumon avec une trachée brune avec des poumons bleus.
The text reads / Le texte dit: “While state infrastructure remains broken, we still take care of each other…” “Alors que l’infrastructure de l’État reste brisée, nous prenons toujours soin les un.e.s des autres…”
Below, it reads / En dessous, le texte dit: “…through wave peaks and troughs.” “…à travers les pointes et creux des vagues.”
Panel 11: Two panels. / Deux panneaux.
On the left, around the box, it reads / À gauche, autour de la boîte, le texte dit: “We are not singular beings: we are social animals, and we depend on each other.” Inside (in light brown text on dark brown), it reads / À l’intérieur (en texte brun clair sur brun foncé), le texte a dit: “Interdependence acknowledges that our survival is bound up together, that we are interconnected and what you do impacts others. If this pandemic has done nothing else, it has illuminated how horrible our society is at valuing and practicing interdependence. Interdependence is the only way out of most of the most pressing issues we face today.” (Mingus 2022) is on the left / est à gauche.
Around the right panel it reads / Autour du panneau de droite, le texte a dit: “Nous ne sommes pas des êtres singuliers: nous sommes des animaux sociaux, et nous dépendons les un.e.s des autres.” Inside, it reads (in dark brown text on light brown) “L’interdépendance reconnaît que notre survie est liée, que nous sommes interconnectés et que ce que vous faites a un impact sur les autres. Si cette pandémie n’a rien fait d’autre, elle a mis en lumière à quel point notre société est horrible à valoriser et à pratiquer l’interdépendance. L’interdépendance est le seul moyen de sortir de la plupart des problèmes les plus urgents auxquels nous sommes confrontés aujourd’hui.”
Panel 12: A spread with text and images of the first panel’s stickers of feet and “2m,” but it is largely missing. Un panneau avec le texte et les images des autocollants de pieds et de “2m” du premier panneau, mais il est en grande partie absent.
The text reads / Le texte a dit: “COVID-19 infrastructure has begun to scuff, peel, and fade away. After a few years of pandemic life, I now realize: ” “L’infrastructure COVID-19 a commencé à s’érafler, às se décoller et à disparaître. Après quelques années de vie pandémique, je réalise maintenant :” “« ça va bien aller » is not a guarantee but a hope, only possible through interconnectedness.” “« ça va bien aller », ce n’est pas une garantie mais un espoir, uniquement possible grâce à l’interdépendance.”
Adler-Bolton, Beatrice, and Artie Vierkant. 2022. Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto. Verso Books.
Institute national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ). n.d. “Données COVID-19 au Québec.” INSPQ: Centre d’expertise et de référence en santé publique. Accessed February 05, 2023. https://www.inspq.qc.ca/covid-19/donnees.
Mingus, Mia. 2022. “You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence.” Blog. Leaving Evidence (blog). January 16, 2022. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2022/01/16/you-are-not-entitled-to-our-deaths-covid-abled-supremacy-interdependence/.
Silverstein, Jason, and Martha Lincoln. 2022. “Why We Fight.” Blog. Peste (blog). December 13, 2022. https://www.pestemag.com/first-row/why-we-fight-w55lm.
A new survey by the Gallup Organization for the Lumina Foundation finds that more than one in three Black bachelor’s degree students in the U.S. have major life responsibilities beyond their coursework, twice the rate for all other bachelor’s degree students. These additional duties beyond their college studies may be a significant factor in the Black-White college graduation rate gap.
About 22 percent of African American college students provide care to children, friends, seniors, or other relatives. One out of every five African American college students also has a full-time job. Both of these are about double the rate for bachelor’s degree students as a whole.
Nearly half of Black bachelor’s degree students with competing responsibilities say they have considered stopping their coursework in the past six months. This well exceeds the one third of Black students without such obligations who have contemplated pausing their studies.
The report concludes that “strategies for helping students stay enrolled while fulfilling other responsibilities may require schools to develop best practices in integrating flexibility for time and location of courses. Providing comprehensive student support services has proven to be effective in helping students with external priorities stay enrolled and succeed. These may range from on-campus child care access to advising that helps students manage scheduling and resource challenges, as well as counseling services to provide strategies for coping with the stress they may experience balancing multiple priorities.”
The full report, Balancing Act: The Tradeoffs and Challenges Facing Black Students in Higher Education, may be downloaded here.
Racial discrimination was found to be a significant force behind higher levels of depression among college-educated Black Americans, finds a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.
“Our results indicate that there is an alarming level of depression among upwardly mobile — which we define as college-educated — Black Americans,” said Darrell Hudson, an associate professor and lead author of the study.
Dr. Hudson and his colleagues surveyed a large group of African Americans who were 24 years or older and had earned at least a four-year college degree. Nearly 40 percent of the sample reported symptoms that were indicative of significant depressive symptoms. Additionally, 15.5 percent of the sample reported that they had been diagnosed with depression by a health care provider at some point in their lives.
Exposure to discrimination was assessed by major and everyday discrimination scales. Respondents were asked about restaurant service, name calling, threats, hiring and firing practices, being stopped by police, etc. The findings indicated that there is a significant association between everyday discrimination and depressive symptoms. Everyday discrimination alone accounted for 22 percent of the variance in depressive symptoms.
Dr. Hudson joined the faculty at Washington University in 2011. He is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he majored in psychology. He holds a master of public health degree and a Ph.D. in health behavior and health education from the University of Michigan.
The full study, “Understanding the Impact of Contemporary Racism on the Mental Health of Middle-Class Black Americans,” was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. It may be accessed here.
A new study led by fellows at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania used text messaged-based surveys to assess patient emergency department experience, including the impact of race. The surveys found that one of every 10 Black patients at emergency rooms believed that their race impacted the quality of care that they received.
Black patients reported that race most heavily affected the quality of care, respect, and communication. More than a quarter of Black patients reported race highly impacting being treated with respect and 22.4 percent reported a high impact on quality of service.
Anish Agarwal, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the study notes that “Inequity — specifically across race — has led to significant disparities in patient care and outcomes that persist in health care. We need to find ways to measure experiences of racism and address it. Dismantling structural racism across society, and within health care, requires specific attention. We currently do not have ways to directly address or even investigate this critical aspect of health care. Our study shines light on the nuanced challenges of asking necessary, direct questions related to racism using patient-experience surveys.”
The full study, “Assessing Experiences of Racism among Black and White Patients in the Emergency Department,” was published on the website of the Journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians. It may be accessed here.
“Burnout” is an inescapable concept these days. Its current usage, however, is a far cry from its origins in one psychologist’s appropriation of the imagery of urban arson in the 1970s, much of it instigated by landlords looking for insurance payouts. Bench Ansfield, a historian, makes the case for recognizing and reclaiming burnout’s roots as a necessary social project:
Unlike broken windows, burnout has shed its roots in the social scientific vision of urban crisis: We don’t tend to associate the term with the city and its tumultuous history. But it’s actually quite telling that Freudenberger saw himself and his burned-out coworkers as akin to burned-out buildings. Though he didn’t acknowledge it in his own exploration of the term, those torched buildings had generated value by being destroyed. In transposing the city’s creative destruction onto the bodies and minds of the urban care workers who were attending to its plight, Freudenberger’s burnout likewise telegraphed how depletion, even to the point of destruction, could be profitable. After all, Freudenberger and his coworkers at the free clinic were struggling to patch the many holes of a healthcare system that valued profit above access.
Many left critics of the burnout paradigm have faulted the concept for individualizing and naturalizing the large-scale social antagonisms of neoliberal times. “Anytime you wanna use the word burnout replace it with trauma and exploitation,” reads one representative tweet from the Nap Ministry, a project that advocates rest as a form of resistance. They’re not wrong. In Freudenberger’s chapter on preventing burnout, for instance, he exhorts us to “acknowledge that the world is the way it is” and warns, “We can’t despair over it, dwell on the pity of it, or agitate about it.” That’s psychobabble for Margaret Thatcher’s infamous slogan, “There is no alternative.” But if we excavate burnout’s infrastructural unconscious—its origins in the material conditions of conflagration—we might discover a term with an unlikely potential for subversive meaning. An artifact of an incendiary history, burnout can vividly name the disposability of targeted populations under racial capitalism—a dynamic that, over time, has ensnared ever-wider swaths of the workforce.
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