Whitewashing

The term "whitewashed" is often used today to describe someone who acts like a white person (whatever that's supposed to mean, considering that Caucasians can come from multiple cultures as well). In the days of Tom Sawyer, it used to refer to white paint made using chalk and lime that was often used to paint houses.

Well, now that old definition has some new meaning. A mural painted on the wall of an elementary school in Prescott, Arizona included the faces of children who actually attend the school. The school has a diverse ethnic mix, and the mural as a matter of course included white, black, and brown faces.

Some members of the community (beginning with a city councilman) apparently took offense to that. While the artists and the children helping them were painting the mural, they drove by the school screaming racist slurs for two months. Don't forget, this is an elementary school. Since when has shouting racist slurs at children become the best way to exercise your right to free speech?

In the end, the principal of the school decided the best way to handle the matter would be to ask the artists to lighten up the color of the children's skin. Make them more white, in other words.

And also don't forget that the faces in the mural are those of real kids. Isn't that a great message to send to your children? We don't like the skin color you were born with. If you manage to make it a little bit lighter, though, we might tolerate you a little better.

It seems like nowadays I'm reading about racism and discrimination every day. I live in the Bay Area, where most people respect other skin tones, at least in public. So I haven't been as exposed to this. And it sickens me that these problems are still out there. I thought we'd gotten past slavery and Jim Crowe. Hell, I thought we'd even gotten past World War II and Hitler and the Nazis, where we were fighting on the side of equality (kind of) and justice. What happened?

Another Failure

Aww man, BP...

The top kill operation has failed too. Next up is another try at capping the tube, but that first requires slicing off the bent portion that is currently restricting the flow of oil. If they slice it off and fail to put the cap in place, the leak will be even worse. Considering the last 6 tries have ended in failure, I don't hold out much hope that the cap will work this time, and I think it's extremely risky to do something that could so easily increase the amount of damage done.

This should have stopped at the first try - why didn't those blowout preventer valves work? Were they never tested under realistic conditions (i.e., the equivalent of 5000 ft under the ocean surface)? That seems highly irresponsible to me.

A Little Perspective

With the Gulf oil spill, attention is being brought to the other indiscretions of oil companies. Spills happen routinely in other countries that don't have even our level of legal protection for the environment. Guess where all these countries are? In the "developing" world. Where our media fails to pay attention.

Kazakhstan, for one, had no comprehensive environmental laws until 2007, and Nigeria has suffered spills equivalent to that of the Exxon Valdez every year since 1969. (As of last year, Nigeria had 2,000 active spills.) Since the Santa Barbara spill of 1969, and the more than 40 Earth Days that have followed, Americans have increased by two-thirds the amount of petroleum we consume in our cars, while nearly quadrupling the quantity we import. Effectively, we’ve been importing oil and exporting spills to villages and waterways all over the world.

Ah yes, Nigeria. I remember seeing a film about oil in Nigeria in one of my classes. Beyond the violence and huge rich-poor disparities it causes, it leaves behind a lot of environmental problems. Oil pipelines are constantly leaky, and the people who live near them in the Niger Delta deal with a lack of clean water all the time (along with a preponderance of dead fish).

In Nigeria, the oil has been leaking for so long that it has spread everywhere. Doesn't "oil everywhere" sound like a bit of a fire hazard to you? Well, it is. How do you deal with fires springing up around your house all the time if you don't even have non-oily water to put it out with? I don't know, but to the villagers there, a leaky pipe might even be a good thing despite the fire, because it gives them a chance to tap some oil for themselves and even out the inequality a little bit.

And back to the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf, I've found you a little video (you'll have to click through to the actual post if you're using a feed reader):

Greasy Hands

It's always about oil and money. Can't corporations look past that for a minute to think about their effect on the environment around them? Corporations are made up of people, right? Those people have to live in this world same as we do. Throw off the mob mentality a little.

If you haven't heard of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, well, that's what I'm talking about. It's not even a spill, really, but a leak from the underwater oil well. This is worse, because it means that it's not just however many barrels of oil the Exxon Valdez or some other ship was carrying, but a continuous gushing of oil into the sea until the hole is plugged, which, over 3 weeks later, has still not happened. It is an ongoing spill, and it has been ongoing for 3 whole weeks. However much oil has made it to the surface of the water is barely the tip of the oil iceberg. There will be plenty of problems with things like tar balls on the sea floor, as there were in the San Francisco Bay in 2007.

It's nice that people are all ready to help out and BP is taking responsibility and all, but it would have been much better if we could have prevented this disaster in the first place. Perhaps if those extensive safety regulations that the oil companies fought so hard against had been put into place, this wouldn't have been a problem.

And damn it, water is not supposed to be black:

The effect on wildlife will be devastating.

Just, oh my god.

Pictures from Boston.com's Big Picture series.

Icy Hot

A volcano under a glacier? That sounds like an oxymoron. Or maybe a Katy Perry song.

But it erupted in Iceland a week ago. I, not being one to watch the news and not knowing anyone  trying to travel from Europe, didn't hear about it until a couple of days ago.

If you want to see some breathtaking photographs of the volcano and sigh-inducing pictures of poor weary travelers stranded in airports, check these out.

Scientists Study Band-Aid Removal

Science is often misreported in the media because it doesn't work the way news is supposed to work. Scientists don't always get clear, obvious results, and even when they do, they are not supposed to draw conclusions beyond what they see. Hypothesizing is fine, but when the media reports such things, they tend to state things as cold, hard facts. The subtleties, things like the reliability of the data or the characteristics of the sample used or the caveats given by the researchers as they explain their findings, can often be ignored. An experiment should give a simple, single answer, actual science be damned!

This representation of scientific conclusions means that when the results change, or when the findings of other groups of scientists are at odds with the first, people stop believing in science. Never mind that the initial experiment may have been conducted under different conditions, or that better equipment may have come around since the first time.

And then there are the cases where the reporters say something completely different from what the scientists are saying. This tends to happen mainly when reporters try to create sensational headlines that don't match what's actually in the story.

The inspiration for this post was this silly little article: "Fast is best for Band-Aid removal". The reporter begins by stating the raw data:

A study at Queensland's James Cook University used 65 medical students who removed Band-Aids either quickly or slowly, and ranked their pain reaction from zero to 10.

Quick removal returned a pain score of 0.92 in comparison with 1.58 for those who chose the slow approach.

That sounds simple and obvious, right? But there's more to it.

Researcher Dr Carl O'Kane says the research found the cause of pain to be more of a psychological issue.

"It's fascinating that if you had a preconception that slow was going to be more painful in fact it was, so it also suggests that pain is not just what you perceive but what you think you will perceive when you get the painful stimulus," he said.

Wait, so what they really found was that it's not simply the speed of Band-aid removal that matters, but your expectations? So maybe the pain numbers really reflect the prevalence of the thinking in the sample population that faster removal is less painful. Either way, it's nowhere near as clear as the headline says. Fast is best - but maybe only if you already believed it to be.

Try To Feel Again

Are pictures of suffering still effective in raising emotions in our society? Have we all become desensitized by the images of violence and death and victimization we see everyday, on TV, on the internet?

Yes and no. I think pictures can still affect us. A picture of a single starving child is still much better at encouraging people to be generous than figures on the debilitating reach of malnourishment throughout the world.

But I think our attention spans have shortened to the point that we no longer think about what the pictures mean (I mean, this is why I use short paragraphs). This is not to say that we think or feel nothing. We feel our initial reaction, our gut instinct of awe or sadness or pity as our mind processes the situation represented by the picture. Look at this photograph:

What was your reaction upon seeing this photo? Mine was initially, 'Oh, another starving child, how sad.' My attention was divided between this and the text and what the professor was saying, but it still seems to provide support for the "we are desensitized" theory, right? As the picture continued to stay up on the Powerpoint, however, I kept looking at it. And then I saw the vulture. 

I was transfixed by horror. All I could think was 'Oh my god.'


But if the professor had put the picture on the screen and flipped to the next slide with a few words, leaving it up only for a few seconds, I wouldn't have understood the context. Then again though, isn't that the kind of environment we usually see these pictures in? On TV, with the anchor or a narrator speaking, and some sort of text every now and then, a quick flash of a picture in between to highlight the subject? Or online in an article, surrounded by text and flashing click-me ads?

Maybe we don't really look at the world around us anymore, and the same applies to these photographs. We're too engrossed in ourselves and the people around us, and even the world around us - but all in the form of our mental construction of these things. You could argue that everything we see is a mental construction, that's true, but my point is that we see what we expect to in pictures, not what's actually going on.


So I have an assignment for you. It's probably easiest to do online, when you have some control over the pictures you see. Next time you see a photograph that invokes some kind of gut reaction in you, stop and look more closely at it. Notice the details, ask where this was taken, who it was taken by, what the situation was, who the people are. Find out not just what the photographer took a picture of, but what she meant to show.

In the News

Overturning the same-sex marriage ban is the civil rights movement of my generation. I’ve been following it since the original proposition.

Thing is, I’m straight. But having grown up in California, I have more than a couple friends who are not.

I feel bad every time I think this, but it feels like the Haiti earthquake is upstaging the fight for equality and non-discrimination. But even I know saving lives is more important.

Donate, please.

The Stupak Amendment

I’m working on a paper for my public health class right now. We’re supposed to analyze the health care reform bill passed by the house from the position of a randomly assigned stakeholder. But because the controversy over abortion rights is far-reaching and divided, our professor doesn’t want us to spend the whole paper arguing about that. Or any of the paper, for that matter. So I’ll write about it here instead.

I think the fact that the ball of health care reform has started rolling is great. We’ll get something, even if it isn’t perfect, and that can be tweaked later. America is the only developed country that doesn’t have some kind of national plan for universal coverage. The last country to share that distinction was South Africa. Good to know we’re behind the country in which a girl has a better chance of being raped than of learning how to read. Anyways, the Stupak Amendment to the House bill says that any plan paid for or subsidized by federal money cannot cover abortion unless it’s proven to be rape or incest.

That’s great for anti-choice lobbyists, but exactly how would you prove it was rape? From police reports? I’ve read from various sources that anywhere from an estimated 60-80% of rape victims don’t report the crime. Why? Because it’s often someone they know, because they’re not comfortable going to the police, because even if it wasn’t their fault, they will become ostracized. There are plenty of reasons.

What about these women, who make up the majority of rape cases even in the most conservative estimate? Will they not be able to salvage their lives and move ahead if their income is low and they are forced to use the federal subsidies? They already have enough to deal with. This amendment does nothing more than create hardship for these women. I can’t even begin to comprehend how difficult their situation would be, and it’s related to my minor! How can those mainly white male Representatives, sitting comfortably on Capitol Hill, understand the plight of these women?

Even if women are allowed to purchase a supplemental policy (assuming their income is over 400% of the Federal Poverty Level and they are not being helped by the federal subsidy), it's useless. Abortions are used when the pregnancy is unwanted or unexpected. Why would you buy a plan against that when you could just use contraceptives? Women don't expect to have abortions, it happens when the pregnancy is accidental! We need more female representation in Congress to point out the issues that are obvious to women, but invisible to men.

UC Protests

If you haven't heard yet, the UC Regents are increasing fees by 32% this year. That means a $1000 increase in fees by next fall. This is a public university! It's meant to serve everyone, including those who would be left out of a privatized system, and to serve them damn well! All of the UC campuses are extremely good schools. Berkeley alone is in the top 10 for the nation in 35 out of 36 undergraduate departments.

I understand it's not completely the Regents' fault - the economy is putting pressure on the state government, which of course begins its chopping with education. The tuition increase doesn't affect me greatly - it's inconvenient, but my family can manage it. But I know plenty of people who can't. I'm not in the situation of the Regents, but there has to be a better way to deal with this than by placing financial burdens on the faculty, workers, and students (especially without consulting them).

Including all of its campuses (according to its website), the university represents some 220,000 students and another 170,000 staff and faculty. That is a lot of people, who are all in the powerful position of being involved in higher education. We've got the students, faculty, and staff banding together. 5,000 of them marched as one during the walkout on September 24. Can we not get the administration to join us and make the state hear our voice?

At any rate, I just saw this video from AggieTV. Way to hold the fort, Davis! We need to get the administration to see that we are serious.