Amp put up a list of privilege lists on Alas. For those not familiar with the format, most are based on Peggy McIntosh’s White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.

When they stick to the specifics these lists can be illuminating - I’m probably not the only white person who had never had to think about the colour of ‘flesh-coloured’ bandages. But seeing all those lists together raised some real questions for me.

This is partly because I think there’s a real problem with the way privilege is framed in these lists - anything which one group of people have and another doesn’t is considered a privilege. I’m fine with describing a man who doesn’t do his share of housework and has women around him picking up the slack as privileged. I’m much less OK with describing a man who doesn’t have to worry about being raped, if he walks home after dark, as privileged. Not being afraid of rape is a right, not a privilege.

I disagree with the content of some of the lists. I think an extremely large proportion of the average sized person are not true for many women - whatever their size (particularly this one: I do not have to be afraid that when I talk to my friends or family they will mention the size of my body in a critical manner, or suggest unsolicited diet products and exercise programs - I find the idea that ‘average-sized’ women can be free from this fear almost ridiculous). The white-privilege list seems to assume that the white-people in question are middle-class. Some of the non-trans-privilege list also apply to many non-trans women (particularly the stuff about gender and medical care). This is from a social class privilege check-list: “There are places where I can be among those exclusively from my social class” - which suggests he’s never been to a factory, poor neighbourhood, or a prison. I get that it’s a blunt instrument, but a lot of these lists are obscuring more than they’re illuminating.

I also think there’s a real problem in treating different sorts of oppression as if they operate the same way. I’ve written about this before. But these lists, which are all based on each other in some respect really seem to suggest that privilege all works in the same way. For example, representation in media plays a part in most lists, but I would say the role media plays in upholding different oppressions is really different.

But most fundamentally I just don’t have much time for analysing the world through privilege. It so often leads to individualistic non-action - to someone interupting a conversation to say “but even having this conversation is a privilege.” On an individual level I think it’s important to know where you come from, to know what you’ve been given, and to analyse how you benefit from this system. I absolutely think that everyone has a responsibility to not use the privilege, and power, society gives us - over people we know. But you can’t give up privilege as an individual - you can just fight to end it by working collectively.

*********

Note: I’ve had a disturbing amount of support from right-wing assholes for this post. I think they glided over this sentance:

On an individual level I think it’s important to know where you come from, to know what you’ve been given, and to analyse how you benefit from this system. I absolutely think that everyone has a responsibility to not use the privilege, and power, society gives us - over people we know.

I think I should make the point more explicit. I believe that when you interact with someone who has less power and resources tha you do you have a duty not to wield your advantages over them, or to act like you’re superior because you have that power and those resources. Snapping at workers in the service industry? Absolutely unacceptable for anyone who believes in any kind of equal society. Asking why those in poverty get hire purchaces (when you can always get credit from your parents)? Equally obnoxious. Obviously in order to do this, you need to understand what power and resources our society has given you.

However, I believe this step is only a necessary pre-requisite for meaningful political action, it is not meaningful political action in and of itself. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t realise what society gives you, it’s just that realising it doesn’t doing anyone any good at all unless you organise.

Also posted at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Admin’s Note: This is something I have been wanting to post for a while, but I was inspired by a big old blog fight among feminists this past week. The fight started in a debate over bikini waxing, but the larger issue is social class and standards of beauty and femininity. I was on the outskirts of it, so I missed much of the controversy, but I just had to get my two cents in now that I finally figured out whats going on. My primary exposure to this debate was over at Bitch|Lab’s spot. I left this comment on her blog, which basically sums up my feelings about the femininity issue:

I’m completely and utterly tired of hearing the word choice bantered around like it is the be all and end all of feminism. A week long moratorium on the word would be nice. It might get some folks to think outside the box.

In my experience people who talk about choices are the people who have the most choices to talk about.

The rhetoric of choice erases any sort of meso or macro level understanding of constraints on human behavior. It’s this overly individualistic mentality that drives me nuts.

I’m also tired of graduate students complaining about how poor they are, especially when so many of them have the money to travel abroad, have nice cars, and have an alcohol and weed budget in excess of $50 dollars a week. (If you fit this description, you ain’t poor.) Hell, I wasn’t poor in grad school (well not in my PhD program). I got paid $18,000 a year for a grad student stipend and managed to carved enough adjuncts together to make $30,000. Having grown up without indoor plumbing in Appalachia, I felt like I was in hog heaven. I was even able to buy a condo and a car.

My friend told me about leg waxing in grad school (people in southern Ohio just don’t do such things), and she said it was relatively affordable only $30-50 every 6 weeks. I remember thinking that I could get a pack of 15 razors, for $10.

Yes, this is an all over the place rant, but reading the post will address where the slightly unrelated thoughts are coming from.  I also think people may like to follow the discussion on this post over at Rachel’s Tavern since the discussion over at my place always seems be different from the one here at Alas.

A Little Piece of My Social Class Story

I have experienced a great deal of class mobility in my life, and I am the poster child for the idea that getting a good education can move you up the class ladder. For me this worked in two ways, through my mother’s education and through my own. See my mother’s family is the quintessential white working class family. Almost all of the stereotypes about working class white people apply to them. Unlike her 6 siblings, my mother managed to get a college degree. To this day, I don’t really know how she financed it. My Dad, on the other hand, came from a GI bill middle class family. My grandfather was able to go to college thanks to the GI bill, and he became a chemist, which allowed my grandmother to be a homemaker who raised 4 children. When her children left home, my Grandma went to college and started a career as a teacher. Even though they didn’t grow up well to do, my grandparents were vaulted into the middle class, and my father benefited from it.

It took a long time for my parents to enter the middle class because they came of age in the economic recession era of the 70s and early 80s, so most of my childhood, we were poor and our neighborhood was even poorer. (For those who don’t know, I grew up in Appalachia, southern Ohio to be precise.) But, we had an ace in the hole my Mom’s college degree. After years of substitute teaching, my mother finally got a full time teaching job in the mid-1980s (I think with a pathetic starting salary of $17,000.). Once my father’s income from a small business was added in we were over the $20,000 dollar mark right around the time I finished high school.

I have also benefited greatly from my own education. In spite of going to a low income school and having high school guidance counselors, who were incompetent, I went to college. My parents did a tremendous job of picking up the slack for my less than stellar school. I had the advantage of having a teacher mother, and a father who got me hooked on National Public Radio, sometime around kindergarten. I am not dissing my teachers, but they were expected to perform without many resources that other schools had.

I really noticed the social class gap in junior high and high school after I managed to get myself into this program at Northwestern University (thanks largely to John Smith the county gifted education coordinator and my teacher for the gifted class Mrs. Evans). The program was wonderful, and I got to be around other nerdy kids. However, it would not have been possible for me to go to this program, if I didn’t get need based scholarships (I believe from the University and a local foundation.). When I got there, I quickly realized I was the poorest kid around. In fact, one of the teachers decided that I had a self esteem problem (which is very far from the truth) when I noted that the other kids were way ahead of me. I never thought that I was slow. I knew that these kids were from rich suburbs around Chicago, Detroit, and Columbus, and they had schools with many counselors, AP classes, and all of the other advantages that wealthy people had (Most of the kids were also Asian Americans which was another interesting aspect of the camp that I should probably write about someday.). Truthfully, I thought I was pretty damn smart because I was in the same place as these wealthier gifted kids, and I had fewer resources. In fact, one of the things that angered me the most was when I saw other students getting a year’s worth of high school credit for taking these courses and the guidance counselors at my school said that they couldn’t do this because “it had never been done at our high school.”

The Northwestern program along with my other outside of the classroom experiences motivated me to get great grades in high school, and sometime around 10th grade, I started my college search. To make a long story short, I got into the University of Detroit Mercy with a full scholarship, and subsequently earned assistantships, which paid for my master’s degree program at Bowling Green and my PhD at the University of Connecticut. I had to pay small sums for fees and books, but somehow I managed to get a PhD and not pay any tuition. I was happy to earn scholarships, because I was worried that my parents were not going to be able to help me finance my education. (I suppose one of the more ironic twists to this story is that my father’s business took off while I was in college, and my parents moved into a very comfortable middle class status.)

Tying it All Together–My Feminism and My Social Class

Each step in my education has marked a step up the class ladder. With every degree that I earned, I helped buffer myself from poverty. Moving up the ladder like this, gave me a different take on social inequality and ways of fighting it (i.e. socialism, feminism, anti-racism, heterosexism, and so on).

I don’t personally blog much about feminism and body hair or high heels, and I’m not going to put down people who do. However, I do worry that we need to stop framing everything in the language of choice, as it frequently, implies a smorgasbord feminism, where everything is laid out and we just pick from it. When I was young and we were poor, my concern wasn’t about choices I made, it was about opportunities–the opportunity to go to college, the opportunity to play sports, and admittedly, the opportunity to get out of southern Ohio and find a place that had a shopping mall, more than one TV channel, and good schools. Now that I have a middle class job and live in a county that is one of the wealthiest in the US; I have many more opportunities, and with those new found opportunities I get to make choices–whether or not to buy a designer handbag, whether or not to get digital cable and high speed Internet, whether or not to go to dye my hair, and whether or not to live in a wealthier community or a poorer community. Hell, I even get to choose which mall to go to or which gym to be a member of. Having many choices is the product of having many opportunities, and having many opportunities is the product of being a privileged class/group. This is something I have to remind myself all the time, and the best way to do it is to go back to high school and elementary school when my choices were more limited.

Endnote: I appreciate anybody who took the time to read this looooooong post.  I pledge to myself and my readers that I will try to post more short and fun posts. I have been producing long treatises lately. LOL!

This was going to be a tale of two protests - since I went on two protests today. But two protests in one day is tiring, so I only have time to write about one of them, more tomorrow.

Clean Start for Cleaners

Today is international anti-poverty day (a concept I find a little weird - today we’ll have international anti-poverty day - tomorrow we’ll go back to ignoring international poverty). The Clean Start for Cleaners campaign organised rallies in Australia and New Zealand today, which is appropriate because to be a cleaner is to live in poverty.

All around the world Cleaners are mostly immigrant and indigenous women. Despite the fact that cleaning needs to be done everywhere, everday and it is completely devalued. The union rate for commercial cleaners is just 70 cents an hour above minimum wage. Cleaners work two or three jobs to get their hours up and have no security of employment. Subcontracting makes it so hard for cleaners to fight for better wages and conditions, because the employer can always hire someone else.

All these points were made at the rally, of course. Plus some interesting facts I didn’t know (90,000 workers got a pay increase when the minimum wage went up -60,000 of them were women - low-wages, poverty and capitalism are all feminist issues). The most powerful speakers were cleaners themselves. There is no service recognition for cleaners, so two women who had cleaned for forty years were still only getting $10.95 an hour. Another woman spoke angrily about always being blamed for being a burden on the tax-payer because she got government assistance - even though she worked over 40 hours a week - she is blamed rather than the employer who won’t pay a living wage.

One of the women also talked about being involved in previous cleaning struggles, and strikes. It must be so hard to have struggled and won, but seen the victory slowly eroded over the last twenty years. Particularly as you’d know that if anything was going to get better you need to fight that fight again.

Now I have some problems with the Clean Start campaign - most notably that no-one really understands what its principles are (and last I heard these principles haven’t actually been translated into the first language of many of the cleaners). But I was really glad to be at this rally, in support of the cleaners.

(Part of my good feeling towards this protest is because I left before Ruth Dyson - (minister of labour) spoke. I needed to get to the other protest, and if you’ve heard Ruth Dyson say once that she’d like to change things, but she can’t - you’ve heard it once too many times).
Also posted at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Alas readers who saw Whale Rider might remember Keisha Castle Hughes, she was the young Maori actress who was nominated for a best Actress Oscar for her role as Paikea. It has just been announced that she is pregnant at 16. Span and Cactus Kate (of all people), have already covered some of the ways the coverage of these facts has been extremely offensive. But I want to look at this discourse in a little more detail, because it is pissing me off. From the NZ Herald:

National MP Paula Bennett, a mother at 17, said whichever way you looked at the situation, 16 was far too young to have a baby.

She believed there was no way a 16-year-old had the maturity to cope with the demands of raising a baby.

and from The Dominion Post

Family Planning executive director Jackie Edmond said New Zealand had the third-highest rate of teen pregnancy in the world. She hoped other teens would not want to “copy” the actress.

This level of tsk-tsking has a very clear subtext about young Maori girls who get pregnant. It’s part of a concerted strategy to blame poor people for being poor.

Look I’m a middle-class white girl, I find the idea of having a baby before I’m economically and socially secure terrifying, but I get to think that one day I will be economically and socially secure. Not everyone grows up with those set of assumptions about their life, and if you don’t have those assumptions your feelings about pregnancy and motherhoood are going to be qutie different.

But there’s actually a bigger issue here. Anika Moa has a song on her new album about the abortion she had when her music career was taking off, that she now regrets. She was told from all sides that if she continued the pregnancy she wouldn’t be able to have a music career - that she had to choose.

That’s why I hate the rhetoric of ‘choice’. Women shouldn’t have to choose between being a musician and a mother. Obviously in the months immediately after you give birth you do have physical restrictions on what you are going to do (longer the longer you breast feed). But so? Why does that mean that you can’t make music - and if you make music people want to listen to, why can’t they get to listen to it?

The answer is, of course, ‘capitalism’. I get that - most women do have to make that choice. But the way most people talk about it you’d think these choices forced on us by something people have no control over, rather than our economic system. You’d think that there was some law laid down that once you had a child you couldn’t do anything else, or if you did it would be 100 times harder. The reason that having a child at 16 is so very hard is that having a child is seen as an individualised project. Parenting gets no economic resouces and no support. It’s hard enough to do with a reasonable amount of money - if you don’t have a reasonable amount of money being able to do anything but parent when you have a child is really difficult.

We could organise our world so that parenting wasn’t just supported, but treated as the necessary work that it is. If we did that, if parents didn’t have to work huge amounts of outside hours (or live on the DPB, and all the poverty that that implies), then parenting wouldn’t be the end or your life. Women who were mothers, whether at 16 or 40, could do other things as well, parenting wouldn’t be seen as the end of your life, and your chance to develop.*

Maybe if we lived in a non-capitalist world that valued parenting women would have children young - when they had lots of energy. Maybe women would have them late, because they wanted to grow up first. Maybe women would make a wide variety decisions based from what they want from life.

But until we build that new world I wish people would just stop judging young women.

Note for commenters: This is not the place for a discussion about Keisha Castle-Hughes or her pregnancy - please keep the discussion general rather than specific, or on the discourse rather than the event.

Also published on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Jill at Feministe wrote a good post about abortion called Beyond Legality. She was responding to a fascinating Alternet article, from a hotline which tries to help women get access to abortion:

“Could you ask your friends for $40? If they say ‘no,’ maybe ask for 20 or even 10?” I hear her ask in her calm voice. Later she tells me that this woman has been evicted from her house for lack of rent, and is crashing with her three children at a friend’s. To another caller, I hear her say, “Well, do you have anything you might pawn? Some jewelry? A TV set?” And to another, “Is it possible you could postpone your car payment until after the abortion?”

Laura’s case management is strikingly labor intensive. She averages about 15 phone calls per case — with the client herself, with the various abortion funds, with the clinic that is the potential site of the abortion — whether in the end the woman successfully obtains sufficient funds for an abortion or not.

Jill puts together a really cogent argument about everything which is wrong with abortion access in the united states, but begins:

With all the focus on simply keeping abortion legal, we often miss the fact that access to abortion remains highly limited and even impossible for some women.

I have to confess that I don’t understand abortion politics in the united states. I don’t understand why access is something that you need to be reminded about. Access means whether or not women can get abortions - I think that’s actually the only way to evaluate abortion policy.

Legally abortion is treated as a crime in New Zealand. It is covered under the crimes act and considered a crime except under circumstances:

(1)For the purposes of sections 183 and 186 of this Act, any act specified in either of those sections is done unlawfully unless, in the case of a pregnancy of not more than 20 weeks’ gestation, the person doing the act believes—
(a)That the continuance of the pregnancy would result in serious danger (not being danger normally attendant upon childbirth) to the life, or to the physical or mental health, of the woman or girl . . .; or
(aa)That there is a substantial risk that the child, if born, would be so physically or mentally abnormal as to be seriously handicapped; or
(b)That the pregnancy is the result of sexual intercourse between—
(i)A parent and child; or
(ii)A brother and sister, whether of the whole blood or of the half blood; or (iii)A grandparent and grandchild; or
(c)That the pregnancy is the result of sexual intercourse that constitutes an offence against section 131(1) of this Act [sexual contact with a dependent family member]; or
(d)That the woman or girl is severely subnormal within the meaning of section 138(2) of this Act.

In order to have a legal abortion in this country you have to have two specially licensed doctors verify that you meet those conditions. I don’t have a right to an abortion in this country. But I’d rather have an unwanted pregnancy here than anywhere in the United States.

If I got a positive pregnancy test I’d go to the doctor (that’d be free because I’m pregnant), then I’d go to the local hospital for two seperate appointments (they’d both be free). At these appointments the required number of doctors would sign up that continuing the pregnancy would damage my mental health and we’d be away (98% of abortion in NZ are done under the mental health provisions). It may not be what it used to be, but we do have a socialised health system and New Zealand - and that does far more for abortion access than any statement of rights.

Now I am lucky, I live in a large city, other areas of New Zealand aren’t so well served (this post gives all the details). But New Zealand women who need to travel to get abortions, and can’t afford to, should be able to get money from their district health board or work and income (our welfare service). It’s not ideal, but it’s far better than having someone at the end of a phone line asking you what you could pawn.

In New Zealand we lost the rights battle so concentrated on winning access (which we did), it seems to me that it worked the other way round - and this has hurt reproductive rights in really serious ways.

In the United States we lost on access as soon as the Hyde Amendment was passed. It became clear that the only women who had a right to choose were women who could afford it. Even if Roe vs. Wade were repealed it would be a difference in scale, not a difference in kind - rich women would be able to make it to New York. Maybe publicly funded abortion for all women aren’t winnable in the US now. But maybe they would have been if that had been what abortion rights groups concentrated on since 1973. Maybe access would be more secure too, because all women would feel like they had something to fight to protect, not just the ones with money.

Also posted at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty.

In the post about the dangers of baby blogging, I alluded to a child protection conference that had thrown up several essay-worthy subjects, then lapsed back into silence. Now, over a month later, I’m finally organised enough to tackle some of those subjects.

The child allegedly being protected by the conference was, in case there was any doubt, my daughter. By all measures health professionals have devised, she’s thriving, but I’ve struggled to cope with single parenting on top of my long-standing depression and my rocky financial situation. There are days when I feel overwhelmed with guilt and say that my daughter would be better off in someone else’s care, or even that my fragile mental state will do some concrete harm to her; these comments have been interpreted by people with responsibility for child protection as evidence that my daughter is in danger.

At first, I was happy for social services to be involved. I knew I was coping badly on my own, and I thought they could help me cope better, especially as everyone I spoke to insisted they only wanted to give me the support I needed to look after my daughter on my own. But as they called meeting after meeting and produced reams of paperwork, that objective seemed to get lost in the noise.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve started watching Grey’s Anatomy really regularly (they’re repeating Season 1 in NZ), I’m not quite sure why - because I don’t really like it that much. I don’t think it’s well-written, by half-way through season two I hated almost all the characters. But watch it I do, if nothing else it gets things to blog about it.

Shonda Rhimes (Creator of the show) said that she wanted Grey’s Anatomy to look like America, and she did quite well. Of the four authority figures we see most regularly, three are african-american, and one of those is female. This is a world where you can live in a trailer park and grow up to be surgeon. Rich or poor, male of female, Korean, African-American or white - anyone can work at Seattle Grace.

Compare this to Scrubs, the authority figures are all white men, and while you can be a doctor and female or a doctor and African-American, the women of colour are all nurses.

There was this episode of Scrubs where all the main characters were speaking to the camera about their lives. I don’t remember the reason but Carla (the Latina Nurse) was telling a story about when she was a girl, and how she came to be in the job she was in. She was in a store and someone was injured in some way and a doctor came in and saved the patient. Her segment ended with her saying “That’s when I realised I wanted to be a doctor.”

The show didn’t have to tell us why Carla didn’t become a doctor, because it was really clear. What I loved about Scrubs is that it showed a society where racism, sexism, and the class system were all problems.

I don’t believe that individuals can overcome racism, sexism and their position in the class system by themselves, even if you do manage to achieve a position of power despite belonging to and oppressed group then there are going to be scars.

When Izzie told a girl from her trailer park to give up her baby, because Izzie had given up her baby and become a doctor - the show is arguing that anyone can make it. In our society it’s simply not true, and any show that pretends it is is lying to us.** Give me a show set in a world I can recognise.

*Or at least the first couple of seasons of Scrubs, I haven’t watched the show in years, and suspect it has gone downhill.

** Grace Paley, short story writer activist, said of writing that all your characters had to have blood and money. Meaning that everyone comes from somewhere, and where that is shapes who you are, and that everyone is also shaped by the way they meet their material needs . Most TV shows ignore the second rule, and the worlds they create are that much poorer because of it (and, Firefly excepted, Joss Whedon was unfortunately no exception).

Also posted on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

From a notice on a disability listserv:

I am forwarding this on behalf of Feminist Response in Disability Activism (FRIDA), a newly established feminist disability rights organization based in Chicago, founded by a collective of highly skilled and committed disability rights community organizers.

On August 3, 2006, F.R.I.D.A (Feminist Response in Disability Activism) held a Town Hall meeting in Chicago for women with disabilities. One of the issues that emerged from the Town Hall was the fact that many women with disabilities living in nursing homes and institutions are:

1. Not provided with pads and tampons (even though this is required by federal regulations mandating that nursing homes provide certain supplies for residents on Medicaid or Medicare, including sanitary napkins and related supplies);

2. Told they have to buy pads and tampons out of the $30 they receive monthly from their SSI allowance (yep, the rest of their money - $603/month – goes to the nursing home and institution);

3. Not allowed to leave the facility to purchase the pads and tampons due to a “level policy” recently instituted in many Chicago nursing homes that prohibits residents from going on “family visits or independent passes” unless several strict requirements are met; and

4. As a result, some nursing home/institution staff are forcibly suppressing the periods of women with disabilities through continual DepoProvera and other methods so staff don’t have to “deal with the mess.”

DOES THIS INFURIATE YOU?

It should! Access to feminine products is a fundamental aspect of reproductive choice!

WANNA DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?
THEN JOIN THE PAD PATROL/TAMPONS FOR JUSTICE PROJECT!
SEND US YOUR TAMPONS AND PADS!

You can help by donating a box of pads or tampons to the F.R.I.D.A. Pad Patrol. We will make sure the items get into the hands of the women with disabilities who need them.

FRIDA can also take checks or cash to pay for these items; checks should be made out to FRIDA with a note for “pads and tampons”.

Send your pads/tampons to:

F.R.I.D.A. Pad Patrol Distribution Center
C/o Sarah Triano, Access Living
614 W. Roosevelt Road
Chicago, IL 60607

Know a woman with a disability who is being denied access to pads/tampons? Then send her our way and we’ll set her up!

At the FRIDA website, they explain why this isn’t simply a matter to be put to legal action:

In response to some questions about the Pad Patrol, FRIDA is fully aware that in cases where nursing homes or institutions fail to provide sanitary napkins as dictated by federal law, legal recourse is necessary in case where informal negotiation is not successful. We are in full agreement that systemic change is the only way to ensure long term justice. We do, however, feel that systemic change can be achieved on multiple levels. Some folks have asked whether, in distributing sanitary napkins and tampons to nursing homes, we would enable the nursing homes to continue evading the law.

Our viewpoint is as follows… First, in conducting outreach for a pad drive (which has reached as far as Australia) we are exposing a problem in a system, a problem that many feel a personal connection to. Anyone would be shocked by the idea that someone would have to blow their whole allowance on sanitary napkins or else sit in a crust of their own blood. Add to that the fact that showers are often regulated and you must bathe on a schedule. Sometimes, by relating to something so graphically everyday, we can push awareness of the problem to a critical mass of public opinion.

Second, the larger problem beyond the lack of sanitary napkins and the suppression of periods is the entire system of nursing homes and institutions in which so many people with disabilities become trapped. While the average person will be shocked by the pad issue, they will hopefully also learn a little to care about the wider problems of institutionalization. FRIDA feels, as does ADAPT and many other groups, that we would much prefer to live in our own homes with community supports for our needs, rather than in nursing homes, institutions or group homes. In the end, we see that a feminist issue is really a human issue.

Third, and maybe most pragmatically, the woman who is having her period in 3 days cannot wait for a lawsuit to be settled in five years. There is a final question which FRIDA needs to answer to the public, and that is whether this problem really exists, and whether there are women who are willing to speak out about this issue. There are in fact such women but at this time their identities are protected by confidentiality. FRIDA is working to identify women who are willing to speak out. If you or someone you know is willing to testify and let people know what’s really going on with women’s rights in nursing homes and institutions, get in touch….

More contact information available at the FRIDA site.

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade
Check there for more comments

• “Pimp my gimp.” Recent Doonesbury strips showing B.D.’s efforts to decorate his prosthetic leg are the latest in good crip giggles.

• Sage of Persephone’s Box has an announcement about blog color choices and the her ability to read what is offered. While we’re on the topic, I can’t remember who posted on it recently, but the CAPTCHA function for spam-proofing comments at many sites is troublesome for many of the sight-impaired. I’ve turned mine off and so far the spam on my little site is only about 2 per day.

• Dan Filler at Concurring Opinions has some legal thoughts on “Mental Illness and the Death Penalty,” followed by interesting comments.

• The Independent has an article on toxic garbage from Western nations poisoning West Africa:

All down the West Africa coast, ships registered in America and Europe unload containers filled with old computers, slops, and used medical equipment. Scrap merchants, corrupt politicians and underpaid civil servants take charge of this rubbish and, for a few dollars, will dump them off coastlines and on landfill sites.

• Another article in the same edition tells of the daily struggles of African women and how sexism and ableism work together to make life hard:

An HIV-positive woman is nearly 10 times as likely to experience violence at the hands of her partner as a woman who does not have the disease. Domestic violence causes more deaths and disability among women aged 15 to 44 worldwide than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war. In at least 20 African countries, more than half the women have also suffered female genital mutilation.

• The founder of a Swiss clinic offering assisted suicide for the terminally ill wants to widen the scope of elligible people to those who are depressed.

He claimed that such a move would help to cut the suicide rate to about 20 per cent to 25 per cent of its current level. “You could avoid the huge majority and reduce costs to the health services,” he said.

Apparently, if someone commits your suicide for you, it isn’t legally suicide. (True, btw. This also means family can cash in on insurance policytaken out on the dead person.)

• Lingual Tremors presents the impressive 23rd Carnival of Feminists on the theme of women and health care.

• A visually-impaired Atlantic City man sues the city and the “senior-transportation service” (I’m not sure why they call it that and not just paratransit like everyone else) because the driver arriving to pick him up in July, 2004, refused to let his guide dog on the bus. She was afraid of dogs.

• A respiratory disease called “popcorn lung” plagues workers in American factories where a chemical in artificial butter flavor is used on microwave popcorn.

• Some interesting Finnish blogs I can’t find a good page translator for. Anyone?

• Lene Andersen at The Seated View thinks about self-image versus objectivity and the words — like “deformity” — that can cut.

• Time magazine’s feature story, “Who pays for special ed?” begs for some disability blogging by those with more expertise than me on the squeeze between parents of disabled children and school districts feeling a desperate budget crunch.

• Larry Scott writes about the Republican plan for “Buying-out Disabled Veterans” with a lump-sum disability compensation and all the questions that brings up about eligibility for medical care through the VA.

• “The Meaning of Deafness” discusses education for deaf students and the conflicting philosophies parents of young children must chose between.

• Rochelle Gregory at Points of Praxis looks at the documentary Autism Everyday,the purpose the film is meant to serve and the disability rights critique of it.

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade

This was originally posted on both The Gimp Parade and Echidne of the Snakes in August 2006. Because it’s an election year, I thought it was appropriate to repost this now while I have a bigger audience than I usually have access to.

The first three links below are now inactive as Liz is taking a break while she focuses on her health. News about that here.

The fantastic Liz at Granny Gets a Vibrator has been blogging and slogging her way through a recent cancer diagnosis and all the medical, financial and existential fears that travel in it’s tumor-swollen baggage. (A quick and violent death to Brenda!) I can’t say enough good things about her writing and I wish her all the strength and luck she needs for this week and until this is over.

The medical worries are bad enough, but I keep thinking back to Liz’s recent rant about the financial concerns a medical crisis creates and adding her rants to the ones I work through daily in my head. (I’ve written just a little about them here.) Here’s Liz:

The system at the “charity” hospital is a total disaster, a massive fuckup, a guaranteed death sentence. Not just for me, but for 4,000 poor uninsured people who desperately need health care every month. I’m slipping through the system’s cracks: medically, there’s no continuity, I never see the same person twice, no one can figure out what’s going on, locate my records, or find out which doctor said what or why. And I’m slipping through the cracks financially: because I have a small amount of money left in my IRA, my “liquid assets” disqualify me from receiving free care, until every single penny I have is gone. Which at this rate could be in about three weeks….

And the struggle to figure out how to deal with the financial monstrosity. I deeply appreciate the Paypal offers, but you know, we’re talking about maybe $60,000 a month? Probably more. Astronomical. Impossible. Ruinous.

I’m not going into this all detail out of self-pity, or to whine about how it’s so unfair to me. This situation is not just about me. There are millions of people out there in the same sinking boat I’m in, with nowhere to turn. It’s just unimaginably horrible. I sat there and watched several hundred such people suffer today, and most of them looked completely defeated, thoroughly resigned. The tired dead-eyed hopelessness in their faces still haunts me.

It is impossible and ruinous. The health care system in America is just broken. If Bush and the international gratitude his actions create don’t kill us all, the health care crisis will destroy us economically as a country. And our independence one by one.

I was in hospital four months. Three different hospitals, actually. I’m unemployed now, but because I was insured as a baby before my impairments were evident or serious, and because I still ride on that insurance through my parents, who finance it, I have excellent insurance coverage.

Still. This hospital stay forced me to activate the full Medicare benefits I qualify for and apply for state aid for the disabled. I have no idea of the full cost of my illness and recovery, nevermind the current care I receive at home. The hospital bills exceed a half million, I know. But the paperwork goes round and round — employment of the circulators probably costs half what I owe. Medicare and my insurance company send me reports, the hospitals send me totals of various things, then they all request the others pay their share, and they all send me updates on how that’s working out. It usually isn’t working out, so it’s a self-correcting program where we go round again. I’m not sure anything has yet been paid.

There are the inevitable errors that slow this idiotic process down. At one point my medical supplier billed my insurance company, and the insurance company paid but inexplicably sent the check to some random trucking company with a slightly similar name. The trucking company cashed the check, which was a little over 20K. (Well, wouldn’t you?) The supply company demanded the money they never got, the insurance company insisted they’d paid it. Someone demanded a cancelled check. Someone refused. It got kind of pissy.

There was mention of going to court, where, of course, I would get named as the delinquent defendant. I swear this is all true. Meanwhile, I’m not speaking because I’m a lazy ass vent user and, frankly, I want some alone time from all this attention and being able to legitimately claim I can’t speak comes in quite handy sometimes. So, my father spent a week or two on hold. And because he has a talent for this, he eventually made someone see reason and they all grew up and fought this out without my needing to pay legal fees. I don’t know if the supply company actually got paid or if they agreed to add that bill to the merry-go-round again.

There was discussion while I was in the rehab hospital about whether or not my parents would need to spend down their assets to nothing so that I could receive the continuing care I need at home. My retired parents who have had the luck and good sense to cover their own aging butts as best as any upper-middle class couple in this broken system can were told they might need to give up everything so their 37-year-old daughter could live with them and get daily care. That’s a rockin’ deal for them.

The details of why this needed to be considered involve how I almost ended up in a very scary nursing home. I’ll write on that another day. A hospital social worker helped us navigate the system so that only I need to be poor. Currently I do live with my parents and have 24-hour nursing care because of the ventilator and the laws attaching to receiving aid at home.

In order to get funding for home care while using a vent, it has to be qualified nurses rather than just anyone trained as a personal assistant. Though, of course, my parents learned everything the nurses need to know for my daily care from the rehab hospital staff and they are allowed to help. Because this country has a nursing shortage, in fact, my parents were on duty half the hours of every week (84 hours shared between them, sometimes 48 at a stretch) for about a month before all my nurses were found and hired by the agency required to handle this for me. If I had enough family to be present round-the-clock without pay, no one would care they didn’t have medical degrees. (More on that, too, another day.)

In order to keep the funding that provides this constant professional care, I have to have less than $3,000 in total assets to my name. Constantly. Forever. I get a disability benefit each month. I’m not allowed to pay my parents rent and in these first few months I haven’t been out too much. So, ludicrous as it seems, it’s been a challenge to maintain my total poverty. I can’t invest. I pay for what I can around the house. And I do what is called a “spend down.”

Many disabled do it or something similar. My college roommate used to get her personal attendant funds and college funding in cash so it wouldn’t show in her financial records at the bank. And she was wicked generous with birthdays and Christmas because she couldn’t use any cash to, you know, build a future for herself.

One nurse told me of a man she used to help who had his home nursing cancelled because he had too much in the bank. He called the home health agency back a day or two later, said he’d been on a spending spree and they could come back now. He was poor again.

If I didn’t live with my parents, almost every cent of my disability benefit would go toward food and rent — or maybe just rent. I would be among the poorest of the poor at $760/month, or more likely be in that nursing home with no autonomy.

Anyone who could get hit by a bus tomorrow and need a ventilator would face all of this. Or anyone who has a tumor. Or is a soldier in the war. Because the system is broken, we’re all just that close to losing any hope of economic independence. Or life outside of an institution. Astronomical. Impossible. Ruinous. And a lurking threat.

I’ve just been reading a 2001 study by David Mustard, of the University of Georgia, called “Racial, Ethnic and Gender Disparities in Sentencing: Evidence from the US Federal Courts.”¹ Mustard’s study appears better-designed than other sentencing studies I’ve read. His sample is large and comprehensive: he essentially includes every federal sentence handed down for three consecutive years (1991 through 1993) in his analysis. Rather than focusing only on sex or on race, he simultaneously controls for the effects of race, sex, U.S. citizenship, and class on federal sentencing. (Legally, none of those four factors are supposed to have an effect on what sentence a judge hands down.)

The results aren’t pretty. Especially for drug crimes and for bank robberies, being white is a big advantage if you’re being sentenced for a federal crime:

Bank robbery and drug trafficking exhibit the largest black-white differentials. Blacks receive 9.4 and 10.5 months longer than whites in bank robbery and drug trafficking, respectively. The percentage difference is greatest for those convicted of drug trafficking, where blacks are assigned sentences 13.7 percent longer than whites. The aggregate Hispanic-white difference is driven primarily by those convicted of drug trafficking and firearm possession/trafficking, the only two crimes with significant Hispanic coefficients. For these two crimes, Hispanics receive 6.1 and 3.7 additional months compared to whites, or 8.0 percent and 7.0 percent longer in percentage terms.

Note that Mustard’s analysis only compared felons who were convicted for the same crime. So the above sentencing disparities do not include the infamous disparities caused by the much harsher sentences given for crack cocaine possession (usually a Black crime) than for powder cocaine possession (usually a white crime).

Being a woman is an even larger advantage for bank robbers:

The female-male difference is statistically significant for all six categories, the largest of which is for bank robbery, where females receive 21.6 months less than males.

Although the bank robbery differential was largest, women received a break on sentencing compared to men across the board.²

I was particularly surprised that controlling for dependents didn’t significantly alter the male/female difference - so the sentencing disparity is apparently not being caused by judges taking mercy on single mother defendants.

Class made a significant difference, but mainly for the very poor. That is, people who earned less than $5,000 a year get fewer breaks in sentencing than people who earn more than $5,000 a year; but there doesn’t appear to be much difference in the sentences given those who earn $10,000 a year and those who earn $50,000. An exception was sentencing for fraud: “Those with incomes greater than $50,000 receive significantly shorten sentences for fraud.”

Finally, being a U.S. citizen leads to lighter sentencing across the board.

Having no high school diploma resulted in an additional sentence of 1.2 months. Income had a significant impact on the sentence length. Offenders with incomes of less than $5,000 were sentenced most harshly. This group received sentences 6.2 months longer than people who had incomes between $25,000 and $35,000. Those with U.S. citizenship receive lower sentences by about 1.7 months, perhaps because they take advantage of their greater knowledge about the court systems and legal representation. Age is positively related to the sentence length. [...]

The income and education results could be generated if people with higher levels of education and income use their resources to obtain more favorable sentences. However, if offenders utilize education and income to reduce their sentences, the impact is limited. The marginal productivity of income in hiring legal resources diminishes quickly after income hits a minimum threshold, because individuals with the highest incomes do not receive reductions in sentence length.

According to Mustard’s analysis, most of the sentencing disparities are caused by judges departing from the official sentencing guidelines; when judges decide to take mercy on a felon and offer a very light sentence - or to not sentence the felon to prison at all - they are significantly more likely to do so if the felon is not poor, is white, is female, and is a U.S. citizen.

Feminist readers are likely to take particular note of the harsher sentences given to men, compared to women convicted of the same crimes. Mustard suggests that this may be caused by sexist paternalism among judges; women are seen less as full adults, and as being less capable of being responsible for their own actions, and as a result judges depart from sentencing guidelines to give women lighter sentences. Although I can’t know if that’s true or not, it certainly seems plausible to me, and also compatible with feminist analysis of how women are treated and viewed by society.

Another study, by Max Schanzenbach of the Northwestern University School of Law,³ looked at sex disparities in sentencing according to the sex of the judge. He found that, for serious crimes, female judges did not give harsher sentences to men, but male judges did:

The greater the percentage of female judges on a district’s bench, the smaller the gender disparity. These results are hard to square with the suggestion that unobserved accomplice status or blameworthiness is behind the gender disparity. At the very least, male and female judges view the dangerousness, accomplice status, or blameworthiness of female offenders differently.

The female offender/percent female judge effects [...] were not evident at all in the category of less serious crimes. (There was some evidence in the case of less serious crimes that more Democratic districts treated men and women alike when granting downward departures.) However, paternalistic views about the dangerousness or blameworthiness of female offenders may well be most evident in the case of serious crimes.

Schanzenbach also found that racial and ethnic disparities were only slightly decreased, or not decreased at all, in districts with more black and hispanic judges. However, he argues that this finding does not prove a lack of racial and ethnic bias in sentencing, only that if such bias exists, it’s not dependent on the race or ethnicity of the judge.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where moderation is light and frothy and tickles your nose. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

1. The Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 44, no. 1, pages 285-314. Pdf link. (back)
2. Mustard’s report didn’t include a discussion of the death penalty, but it appears that women are less likely to receive the death penalty than similarly-situated men. See, for example, Victor L. Streib (2006), “Rare and Inconsistant: The Death Penalty For Women,” Fordham Urban Law Journal, Vol 33 pp 609. (back)
3. Max M. Schanzenbach, “Racial and Gender Disparities in Prison Sentences: The Effect of District-Level Judicial Demographics” (April 2004). American Law & Economics Association Annual Meetings. American Law & Economics Association 14th Annual Meeting. Working Paper 4. Pdf link. (back)

I’m signed up for Medicare Part D, though it wasn’t by my choice. The company they chose for me sent me a huge packet filled with information, rules, disclaimers, and a partial drug formulary — that is, a partial list of the prescription drugs they’ve decided to cover at this time. Since local Republican politicians are swaggering in their campaign ads about how they helped create this giant headache, I thought I’d look at some details of which drugs my assigned company covers.

I freely admit I don’t have any professional training that informs me about prescription drugs. My observations are purely as a layperson looking at the formulary that people must refer to in order to see if what company and plan they will choose.

My particular company is in the Medicare Part D business in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., though co-pays and monthly premiums of plans vary from state to state. Here in Minnesota, the three different plans offered vary by co-pay, premium, and when the doughnut hole begins (though it’s federally-mandated that the doughnut hole end at $3,600). These three plans are named “Signature,” “Complete” and “Premier,” which, of course, tells you nothing whatsoever about how they actually compare. You can’t even determine basic versus fancy coverage from the plan names.

Drugs are categorized according to whether the plan covers them: “generic,” “preferred,” “non-preferred,” “specialty,” and not covered. Looking at the online Signature plan formulary, which has the lowest monthly premium, here’s what I can observe:

Under antidepressants, the only two brand-name drugs that are preferred are the MAO inhibitors Nardil and Parnate, both of which I’ve never heard of and were omitted from the formulary I received by mail. Every listed brand-name reuptake inhibitor (Cymbalta, Effexor, Lexapro, Paxil, and Zoloft) is non-preferred, meaning the consumer cost will be higher. They are all also listed as “SE,” which inexplicably stands for “step therapy.” This means that these drugs will not be covered by the plan unless you first try some other drug of the company’s choosing, probably a generic drug. There are many generic antidepressants covered, but if you don’t have a prescription for them or the brand-name equivalent, you need to visit the doctor for a new one or pay the non-preferred brand-name price.

Almost all vaccines listed are generic or preferred. A few are “specialty” and require prior authorization (PA) from the company in order to be covered.

All anti-HIV agents seem to be brand-name and preferred.

Under “bipolar agents” only Depakote and the generic lithium carbonate are in the formulary at all. Depakote is non-preferred here and wherever it’s listed elsewhere.

All but one “blood glucose regulator” is either generic or preferred. So diabetics get better coverage than those who are bipolar, it seems.

Under “dyslipidemics” — apparently cholesterol-lowering drugs — it’s a very mixed bag: There are generics. Crestor, Lescol, Vytorin and Zycor are all preferred, while Advicor, Lipitor and Zetia are not.

Cialis, Levitra and Viagra are all preferred, though quantity limits (QL) exist.

“Sex hormone modifiers” — birth control — are mostly generic or preferred. Plan B is non-preferred. Don’t tell me that’s not political.

The only “sedative/hypnotics” listed are Ambien and the generic chloral hydrate. Ambien is both non-preferred and has a QL.

All of this can be changed at any time, though consumers can only switch plans at certain times during the year. I haven’t been able to find any information on when those times you can switch plans occur.

A new Kaiser Family Foundation study resulted in the following information about Medicare Part D:

Eight in 10 pharmacists (81%) say that they have had customers who had problems getting their prescriptions. One in five (19%) say such problems affected “most” of their customers in Medicare drug plans.

Two in three pharmacists (67%) say they had customers leave the pharmacy without a medication because the prescribed drug was not on their Medicare drug plan’s formulary.

Almost six in 10 pharmacists (58%) say they had customers pay out-of-pocket for their drugs because they could not verify their enrollment in a Medicare drug plan.

Nearly half of pharmacists (49%) say they had customers leave without a prescription because they could not afford the co-pay charged under the Medicare drug plan.

Nearly half of pharmacists (45%) who serve “dually eligible” beneficiaries, who were previously getting coverage through state Medicaid programs, say that these customers experienced more problems filling their prescriptions than other Medicare customers.

Among doctors with patients in Medicare drug plans, 59% say that they have had patients who experienced problems getting their prescriptions, with 15% saying “most” of their patients in Medicare drug plans had such problems. One in 10 (10%) say that they had a patient who suffered a “serious medical consequence” as a result of such problems.

And on the business side:

More than one in four (27%) say that they had to take out a loan or a line of credit because of cash-flow problems related to the Medicare drug benefit. About three in four independent pharmacists say both that they have dispensed prescriptions to their customers without knowing whether they would be paid and that the reimbursements they receive from Medicare drug plans are less than what they get from commercial payers.

It’s hard to make conclusions from the formulary, though the Kaiser survey supports the idea that the program has a knack for denying some consumers the drugs they need. At the very least, it’s become much more troublesome to maintain your health if you have to use Part D. Choice really isn’t part of the plan. It’s been replaced by uncertainty.

Crossposted at The Gimp Parade

From a New York Times article about breastfeeding, class and jobs:

Doctors firmly believe that breast milk is something of a magic elixir for babies, sharply reducing the rate of infection, and quite possibly reducing the risk of allergies, obesity, and chronic disease later in life.

But as pressure to breast-feed increases, a two-class system is emerging for working mothers. For those with autonomy in their jobs — generally, well-paid professionals — breast-feeding, and the pumping it requires, is a matter of choice. It is usually an inconvenience, and it may be an embarrassing comedy of manners, involving leaky bottles tucked into briefcases and brown paper bags in the office refrigerator. But for lower-income mothers — including many who work in restaurants, factories, call centers and the military — pumping at work is close to impossible, causing many women to decline to breast-feed at all, and others to quit after a short time.

It is a particularly literal case of how well-being tends to beget further well-being, and disadvantage tends to create disadvantage — passed down in a mother’s milk, or lack thereof.

We got a few quick letters this week to make up for my absence last week. First, brownfemipower brings us an email writing campaign from the United Farm Workers about the animal abuse at Threemile Canyon Farm. To make things interesting, supervisors at the dairy “farm” (i use that term lightly here) have been passing around a petition that denies that any animal abuse has taken place. Well, they have the right to petition, but what they don’t have the right to do is to threaten to fire any worker that doesn’t sign the petition. If you want some testimony from workers about the animal abuse and some of the legal background, you can check out the Humane Farming Association’s report [pdf].

Also on the worker front, but this time from Earthjustice, we have another email writing campaign. The EPA has proposed the phase-out of Azinphos Methyl and Phosmet over the next four years. Here’s what Earthjustice has to say about these two pesticides:

Five years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency found that two pesticides — azinphos methyl and phosmet — pose “unacceptable” poisoning risks to workers exposed to them when they work in orchards. These two pesticides are highly toxic neurotoxins, derived from nerve agents used during World War II, and attack the human nervous system. Exposure can cause nausea, dizziness, vomiting, seizures, paralysis, loss of mental function, and even death. Farmworker families and communities are exposed to organophosphates through “take-home” exposures on clothing, cars, and skin.

The EPA is now holding a comment period to hear from the public. They have already waited five years to even think about taking action to protect workers, don’t let them wait any longer.

And last but certainly not least, another campaign from the UFW. As we all know, its been a hot summer. A really hot summer. But most of us don’t have to spend the day bent over in the middle of a field without so much as a tree within walking distance. That’s the fate of many California farmworkers. And that’s why on June 15, the state issued the first permanent heat stress regulation in the country. The regulation states that companies must provide workers with shade, water, training for working safely in the heat, and the right to take paid breaks when feeling the effects of such high temperatures. This was a huge victory for farmworkers, but of course its not an easy one.

Carl Borden, a lawyer for the California Farm Bureau, told a newspaper, “That could pose compliance issues for employers in certain situations where you may have dozens [and] dozens of employees out there working (and asking for shade) and essentially it requires the erection of a number of shade canopies, for example…That can be somewhat daunting if we’re talking about a field situation.” Cry me a river, Mr. Borden. Is it really asking that much for agribusiness companies to take some of the billions of taxpayer subsidies they’ve received to buy a few tents? Its in their interest, too. At least six California farmworkers have died this summer because of the heat. And it doesn’t take a genius to know that a living farmworker can harvest more produce than a dead one. But the California Farm Bureau is not Mensa, its a bunch of lawyers and, well, bureaucrats, so they need you to send them an email to inform them that you are paying them to treat their workers fairly, not so they can buy themselves a second Hummer.

I am starting a project over at Rachel’s Tavern that is a visual enthography of the local Farmer’s Market in my town. I am going to put the posts here at Alas as well, but I won’t be including the pictures here, as I always manage to jacked up Amp’s formatting. Although the ethnography starts with the Farmer’s market, what becomes clear is how the market has come to symbolize the changes in this community in particular a phenomenon I call suburban gentrification. You can come over to my blog to look at the pictures, most of which have very detailed captions and you can also look through a even more of the photos that I have posted on a Flickr stream (the link is below).

Ethnography refers to a method of studying and writing about people. Enthographers observe people in their normal settings, take notes and use thick description to explain what is going on in the environment they are observing. Ethnography is considered a qualitative method of analysis, which is just another way to say it focuses more on words than numbers or statistics. For this project, will being using pictures with detailed descriptions to show what is going on in my neighborhood. Thus, this will be a visual ethnography because of the pictures.

Here’s a little background information on the neighborhood. I think the best description of this town would be an urban suburb. I know many people think of cities and suburbs as sort of opposite neighborhoods, but this neighborhood is an older suburb, and it is big enough to have a large downtown and several neighborhoods. Unlike, many other suburbs this town was once it’s own city, and as New York City rapidly expanded it became more of a suburb. The feeling of the downtown is like that of a small city (I lived near Toledo, OH and Hartford, CT this town is a little smaller, but has a somewhat similar feeling.) The town experienced a real downturn in the 1980s, and many people abandoned the downtown, for outlying neighborhoods. The Macy’s department store, which was the anchor of the downtown went out of business, and the downtown was left in ruin. About 5-10 years ago the city decided that it would make a concerted effort to “rebuild” the downtown. Some of the small shops were moved to create an massive entertainment complex, including a movie theater, go cart track, indoor mini-golf, bowling alley, arcade, billiards room, a few restaurants, shops, and a gym. This was the beginning of the gentrification/redevelopment of the town. What many people do not realize is that a lot of these older inner ring suburbs are in similar shape to many cities. Their downtowns are suffering and the infrastructure needs upgrading. However, there may be a cost to this sort of “development.” The character of the town is definitely changing, and this is reflected in the pictures I will show you.

Let me give you a little background on the neighborhood. The median incomes for families and households were just above the average in the US in 2000 ($42,290 for this zip code and $41,994 for the US), and about 25% have a bachelor’s degree or higher and 14% live in poverty, which are also very similar to the US. Economically the neighborhood seems unremarkable, but the extremely high cost of living makes even a typical income seem low.

However, on most other demographic characteristics the town is a bit exceptional. The cost of housing is more than double the US. The area is relatively ethnically diverse. There are also many immigrants, 32% are foreign born (triple that of US average), and 39% speak a language other than English at home (double the US average). The town is also racially diverse. 56% are White, 28% are Black, 3% Asian, 8.7% are some other race, and 4% marked more than one race. Keep in mind that the Census does not consider Latinos a race, so the “Spanish origin” question is separate. About 28% of the people identified as Hispanic/Latino; based on what I know about previous data, most Latinos are identifying as White on the race question and many of the people marking some other race are Latinos.

As promised, I have uploaded pictures of the market and the neighborhood. The pictures have very long captions that help explain the significance of each picture. I’m new to Flickr, so you’ll have to excuse any oddities, including the fact that I haven’t figured out how to edit the captions, which means that have a bunch of typos. Sorry in advance. You can also go over to my site and see the captions under many of the pictures.