Generations of poverty have made Detroit residents ...



Honors Contemporary Issues- Ms. McIntosh2019-2020- Q3 Extra Credit Instructions and Rubric Questions: email: mcintoshm@; The Extra Credit Assignment for Honors Contemporary Issues will be the analysis of several articles and response to questions on those articles. Successful completion of the requirements of this assignment will result in 3 to 5 points being added to your Quarter 3 grade. Depending upon how many points you wish to earn, you can complete some or all parts of the assignment. The topic you will be studying is: “Why is the Coronavirus Disproportionately Impacting Black Americans?”This topic builds on the concepts of historical and institutional racism that we have been studying all year- topics like Eugenics, systemic racism, the criminal justice ideas we studied in Just Mercy and EJI’s idea that slavery did not end but evolved. Please think through the knowledge you already have around institutional and historic injustice and racism. Feel free to email me with any questions. If you wish, we can set up a video conference in Microsoft TEAMS to talk through any questions or ideas. Due by email (you can take pictures and send those or you can complete in Word document and email that) to my email above by May 11, 2020 at 11:59 pm (No late work accepted.)3 points: Complete Handout #1 and Handout #24 points: Complete Handout #1 and Handout #2 PLUS Handout #35 points: Complete ALL Handouts-- # 1-4See rubric on the next page for exact requirements to earn your full points. Rubric for Extra Credit Assignment.You may download the Handouts and answer them in the Word Doc, or create your own Word doc that answers the questions or write the answers on notebook paper and take pictures to send to me.Be sure to label the handouts with your name and the number of the handout you are completing. ComponentsRequirement met? For 3 points: Handouts # 1 and #2- must answer all questions fully using paragraphs that include text evidence and explanation of evidence in your own words Yes NoFor 4 points: Handouts 1, 2, and 3- must answer all questions fully using paragraphs that include text evidence and explanation of evidence in your own words Yes NoFor 5 points: Handouts 1-4- must answer all questions fully using paragraphs that include text evidence and explanation of evidence in your own word. Yes NoFinal Extra Credit Points Earned: _______________Handout # 1-- read and study graph; questions for this handout are at the end of the articleThe coronavirus is infecting and killing black Americans at an alarmingly high rateBy Reis Thebault , Andrew Ba Tran and Vanessa Williams April 7Excerpted from The Washington Post (accessed April 28, 2020)As the novel coronavirus sweeps across the United States, it appears to be infecting and killing black Americans at a disproportionately high rate, according to a Washington Post analysis of early data from jurisdictions across the country.The emerging stark racial disparity led the surgeon general Tuesday to acknowledge in personal terms the increased risk for African Americans amid growing demands that public-health officials release more data on the race of those who are sick, hospitalized and dying of a contagion that has killed more than 12,000 people in the United States.A Post analysis of available data and census demographics shows that counties that are majority-black have three times the rate of infections and almost six times the rate of deaths as counties where white residents are in the majority.In Milwaukee County, home to Wisconsin’s largest city, African Americans account for about 70 percent of the dead but just 26 percent of the population. The disparity is similar in Louisiana, where 70 percent of the people who have died were black, although African Americans make up just 32 percent of the state’s population.In Michigan, where the state’s 845 reported deaths outrank all but New York’s and New Jersey’s, African Americans account for 33 percent of cases and roughly 40 percent of deaths, despite comprising only 14 percent of the population. The state does not offer a breakdown of race by county or city, but more than a quarter of deaths occurred in Detroit, where African Americans make up 79 percent of the population.And in Illinois, a disparity nearly identical to Michigan’s exists at the state level, but the picture becomes far starker when looking at data just from Chicago, where black residents have died at a rate six times that of white residents. Of the city’s 118 reported deaths, nearly 70 percent were black — a share 40 points greater than the percentage of African Americans living in Chicago.President Trump publicly acknowledged for the first time the racial disparity at the White House task force briefing Tuesday.“We are doing everything in our power to address this challenge, and it’s a tremendous challenge,” Trump said. “It’s terrible.” He added that Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “is looking at it very strongly."“Why is it three or four times more so for the black community as opposed to other people?” Trump said. “It doesn’t make sense, and I don’t like it, and we are going to have statistics over the next probably two to three days.”Detailed data on the race of coronavirus patients has been reported publicly in fewer than a dozen states and several more counties.African Americans’ higher rates of diabetes, heart disease and lung disease are well-documented, and Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) noted that those health problems make people more vulnerable to the new respiratory disease. But there never has been a pandemic that brought the disparities so vividly into focus.The crisis is “shining a bright light on how unacceptable” those disparities are, Fauci said at the briefing. “There is nothing we can do about it right now except to try and give” African Americans “the best possible care to avoid complications.”“I’ve shared myself personally that I have high blood pressure,” said Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who is 45, “that I have heart disease and spent a week in the [intensive care unit] due to a heart condition, that I actually have asthma and I’m prediabetic, and so I represent that legacy of growing up poor and black in America.”Graph that Reflects the Information in the article aboveExplanation of percentages below: Left hand side percentage reflects the percentage of African Americans in each city’s total population and the right hand side percentage reflects the percentage of COVID-19 deaths who are African American. For example: In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin: 26% of the people in the county are African American but 73% of the coronavirus deaths are people who are African American. Handout #1 Questions: Using information from the article and the graph, answer the questions below. Full credit will be awarded for answers that are written in complete sentences using evidence from the graph or article. EACH ANSWER SHOULD BE AT LEAST A PARAGRAPH LONG. According to the article, how is the coronavirus impacting African Americans?According to the article, why does the coronavirus impact the African American communities differently? Using the graph, explain the results for TWO different cities. What question does the information in this graph raise for you? Explain your thinking.Handout #2--read and study; questions for this Handout are at the end of the article- but you will need to stop halfway to complete the first questions.“How Racism and Poverty Made Detroit a Coronavirus Hotspot”Excerpted from Vox : (accessed April 28, 2020)The rising death toll, disproportionately among black residents, has led Michigan to create a racial disparities task force.By Khushbu Shah Apr 10, 2020, 11:15am EDTAn aunt, an uncle, and a cousin have tested positive for coronavirus, says Cassandra Spratling. A friend’s husband died. Her brother’s friend, like her aunt and uncle, is hospitalized.“I’m almost afraid, I almost hate turning on my Facebook page, or even sometimes answering my phone,” says the 64-year-old Detroit native, once a journalist at the Detroit Free Press. As the number of deaths from Covid-19 rise in the city, she says, “it makes me a little nervous when I get a phone call because I’m always afraid that it’s going to be somebody I know.”Spratling, in her northwest Detroit neighborhood, is like many African Americans nationwide, watching in fear as the coronavirus rapidly spreads in her hometown and in other black communities across the US.As states have begun to release data on coronavirus deaths by race, what Spratling sees among her own community, and what she and others across the country have feared is confirmed: Black people have been particularly vulnerable to the ravages of the pandemic. Though African Americans make up nearly 14 percent of the population in Michigan, they account for around 40 percent of the state’s 1,076 coronavirus deaths as of April 9.The disproportionate deaths from coronavirus among African Americans is a recurring pattern nationally. In Chicago, 67 percent of deaths have been black people. In Louisiana, that figure is 70 percent, with one-third of the state’s population being black. The death rates from Covid-19 by race are also disproportionate in places like Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and New York City. Even in states like Georgia, which has not released infection rates and deaths by race, the pattern re-appears: A large concentration of infections and deaths are in the southwestern part of the state, in a county that is nearly three-quarters black. A Pew Research Center report found in March that nearly half of black people see coronavirus as a major threat to their health, compared to a fifth of white people.Detroit has one of the largest African American populations in the country — 79 percent of the city’s residents are black. And as residents like Spratling have noted, the city has seen a sudden, drastic rise of Covid-19 cases over the past week and a half. More than 80 percent of the state’s coronavirus cases are now in metro Detroit, making it Michigan’s epicenter. Even the country’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told ABC last week that “Detroit is starting to show some signs that they’re gonna take off.”Instructions from Ms. McIntosh: Complete the Top section of the Iceberg Handout now that is at the end of this article (refer to examples from the text but use your own words also)Residents, as well as health and elected officials, point to the city’s underlying inequalities as a reason.The health disparities are stark for the community: Black people, from infants to older individuals, already die in disproportionately higher numbers than white people in Detroit, according to the city’s health department. The risk of diabetes is 77 percent higher for African Americans than white or Latinx communities in the city, a 2016 National Medical Association report found. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said higher blood pressure is more common among black people than white, Asian, or Latinx populations.These underlying medical conditions — which also include asthma, heart disease, and other chronic lung disorders — are all more prevalent in black people than other groups because, as Fabiola Cineas pointed out for Vox, “hundreds of years of slavery, racism, and discrimination” — redlining, policing, restricting access to public health resources — “have compounded to deliver poor health and economic outcomes for black people.”And now these same health conditions also appear to lead to more severe bouts of Covid-19, according to the World Health Organization. Further compounding these vulnerabilities are the fact that black people also face a lack of adequate access to health care and experience high rates of poverty.As Michigan has seen its highest death tolls in recent days, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has acknowledged these disparities and announced the Michigan Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities on Thursday, chaired by Lieutenant Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, and consisting of local community leaders and health care professionals.”This virus is holding up a mirror to our society and reminding us of deep inequities in our country,” Whitmer said in a statement. “From basic lack of access to health care, transportation, and protections in the workplace, these inequities hit people of color and vulnerable communities the hardest. This task force will help us start addressing these disparities right now as we work to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 in Michigan.”It’s a series of inequalities that point to why black people, not just in Detroit but across the nation, are experiencing higher numbers of Covid-19 cases — and why they are more likely to die from the virus.Generations of poverty have made Detroit residents vulnerable to coronavirusExperts have long argued that the city’s history of redlining and discriminatory policies locked Detroit’s growing black population into poverty over the past century. As black people moved north in the Great Migration in the early 20th century, the federal government began using race as criteria for who could get home loans, ensuring black people were left out of the housing market. But as desegregation movements ramped up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the once-predominantly white city of Detroit saw a shift in demographics with suburbanization and “white flight.” However, that did not ease redlining practices (black people are still more likely than whites to be denied a loan today) and Detroit has remained one of the most segregated cities in the country.Add to that the auto industry’s decline over the second half of the 20th century as companies decentralized operations out of Detroit, and the significant role it played in unemployment among black residents. Then, in 2013, the city declared bankruptcy. Before that happened, though, Detroit’s public health department was privatized, with its services turned over to a nonprofit in 2014 with a full-time staff of just five. Today, nearly 37 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to 2019 Census data.Though the city’s economy had been slowly recovering post-bankruptcy, its legacy has left Detroit’s black residents especially vulnerable.“Often pathogens emerge in a way that affects everybody equally, but very quickly, it’s those who are the disadvantaged, the ones without resources, that bear the brunt of the burden,” says Joseph Eisenberg, epidemiology chair and professor at the University of Michigan.Evidence of that disadvantage is everywhere in Detroit, from its dozens of food banks to empty homes in the urban sprawl to the thousands of water shutoffs for those unable to pay their water bills.“When we talk about the social determinants of disease, it’s really the fact that people living in poverty, without access to high-quality work opportunities without access to good transportation, who are forced to live in homes that are in disrepair and communities that expose folks to trauma, where the air is poisoned, the water may not be clean or too expensive so it’s unaffordable, where there’s not access to high quality foods, those all come together, they’re a syndrome,” Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist who ran for Michigan governor in 2018, said of Detroit last year.Instructions from Ms. Mcintosh: return to your Iceberg Handout (at the end of this article) and complete answers to the questions BELOW the waterline level of the iceberg. (Refer to examples in the text but use your own words also)Handout #2 Questions: In the space next to the top of the iceberg, list the information the article gives about HOW the virus is impacting African Americans.For the space represented underneath the water where MOST of the iceberg is located:--Describe the policies (according to the article) that causes segregation and discrimination against African Americans (write the answer in this space below this question)--Explain (according to the article) how these policies contribute to unequal health outcomes in African American communities. (write the answer in this space below this question)Handout #3-- Read and answer the questions at the end of the article, fully in paragraphs that uses evidence from the text. Be sure to explain in your own words also. Shrinking the Racial Wealth Gap without Focusing on Race: An Interview with the Kirwan Institute’s Darrick HamiltonBy Loren BerlinMarch 26, 2019From: (accessed April 28, 2020A person’s ability to accumulate wealth is largely tied to the opportunity to build a nest egg at a young age. So why not make sure all kids have equal access to a nest egg?That’s the idea behind Darrick Hamilton’s “Baby Bonds”—trust accounts for children that could meaningfully shrink the racial wealth gap and establish federal economic policies that cover a person’s entire lifespan.What are Baby Bonds?Baby Bonds are trusts set up by the federal government when a child is born and managed by the federal government until the child becomes a young adult. The accounts are used to support activities that will increase an individual’s asset base, such as putting a down payment on a home, financing education without debt, or starting a small business.Baby Bonds emphasize establishing and growing assets because assets are critical to building wealth. For the median American, the ability to accumulate wealth has to do largely with the receipt of some transfer at some key point in their life. Receiving that capital helps set that person up for economic security because it allows them to invest in an asset that will passively appreciate over that individual’s lifetime.In other words, wealth begets more wealth. It is iterative. In order to accumulate more wealth, you need some capital. But if you have no capital to begin with, and no one who will give you capital, there’s no way to get additional capital, unless you’re lucky.The ability of some to receive a transfer of wealth, or to access to a government program with favorable terms while others have no access, is a driving source of economic inequality for most of America. Through Baby Bonds, we create a birthright to capital to give everyone the chance to receive a meaningful amount of seed capital to use to acquire critical assets.The amount of money invested in a Baby Bond—or, more accurately, a baby trust account—depends on the financial position of the family into which the child is born. Although Baby Bonds are universal to ensure that all people have a stake in our society, they are graduated based on family wealth.If the child is born into one of the nation’s wealthiest families, the child still receives a Baby Bond as part of the social contract, but the amount invested by the federal government in that account will be nominal, say $100 to $500. If the child is from one of the poorest families, the amount invested will be closer to $60,000; the average account would be seeded at roughly $25,000. Similar to our Social Security System, the funds will be federally managed and attached to a federally guaranteed interest rate to curtail inflation.Baby Bonds have been discussed as a tool for addressing the dramatic racial wealth gap. Yet the establishment of the trust is pegged to the child’s family’s financial situation, not the child’s race. So how do Baby Bonds help address the racial wealth gap?In the United States, the distribution of wealth is very uneven and breaks down largely by race. The racial wealth gap is so large that if you’re going to use a proxy for race, wealth becomes one of the best criteria. The nation’s long history of racial oppression has limited black people’s ability to accumulate wealth and pass it down from one generation to the next, and that’s a major driver of the racial wealth gap.Although Baby Bonds do not explicitly consider the child’s race, because the criteria for inclusion is wealth, and because wealth is so unevenly distributed across races, we will be hard pressed to not end up investing more money into Baby Bonds for children of color than for white kids.The thing to remember, however, is that we are talking about wealth at the median. Over time, Baby Bonds will address the racial wealth gap at the median.In contrast, if the goal was to address the mean differences in wealth among races, or the goal was to have the most parsimonious and just approach, then there would be a need for a race-based program.In your 2018 TED Talk, you said that “it is literally wealth that gives us choice, freedom, and optionality.” Can you say a little more about that? Why is it wealth and not, say, education?We overstate the value of education in terms of economic returns to the detriment of understanding the role of assets in creating economic stability. Black families headed by a person that graduated from college have less wealth than white families headed by someone who dropped out of high school. Disparities in health and finances actually increase across race at higher levels of education.There is an intrinsic value to education. But it is a misnomer to believe in this idea that if the individual would only work harder, study more, then the American economy will accommodate their social mobility.I’m making the case that, despite rhetoric, the free market won’t accommodate everyone, even if they study and work hard. I’m arguing that it is wealth that gives you freedom, choice, and optionality.In America, we think about education as an input and wealth as an output. But perhaps we need to think more about wealth as an input because the real value of wealth is what it can do for you, the choices and options it can give you, the transformative nature of economic security, financial agency. Wealth allows people to be self-determining.Do any countries offer this sort of “economic birthright,” as you have called it?For about five years, the United Kingdom offered Child Trust Funds, but the amount of capital invested in the accounts was much lower, and they weren’t analogous. They were ended as part of austerity measures.But there are models and examples that Baby Bonds have evolved from, including our Social Security system, which was created as part of the New Deal because we decided, as a nation, that we didn’t want elderly people dying in the street in poverty. The federal government established a pension program to rid our country of elderly poverty and provide our elderly with financial security. And that’s great. But Social Security is incomplete. What about all the years prior to becoming elderly?If we were to develop a continuum of financial security over an individual’s life course, Baby Bonds create asset security for young adults before they enter their twilight years. That’s what we need—economic policies over the life course.What research or data do you wish you had to help move your work forward?I think we need to do a Baby Bonds demonstration. The problem with a demonstration with something on the magnitude of Baby Bonds is that no one would not want to wait 20 years to see how the experiment would materialize. But we wouldn’t have to. We could run an experiment beginning with high school juniors and seniors. What if we seeded those accounts and tracked them for 15–20 years?Foundations and governments can play a role in the experiments. If politics at the federal level inhibit us from doing this at this current moment, why wait? States and municipalities could do it, especially well-resourced, progressive states like New York or California.It would also be interesting to look at wealthy people and see how they use their trusts accounts. Systematically, what facilitates the life of someone who is born rich and is extremely successful? I bet we would identify the transformative power of a personal endowment. Handout # 3 Questions: Be sure to answer in paragraphs using evidence from the text and also explanations in your own words.Describe what Baby Bonds are and how the program would work.What would this policy change? And how would it help promote equality?How could this policy help improve equality in health in the United States?Handout #4-- Read and answer the questions at the end of the article, fully in paragraphs that uses evidence from the text. Be sure to explain in your own words also. How Policymakers Can Plan Now for a Jobs Recovery ProgramBy Demetra Smith Nightingale, Pamela J. Loprest and Jessica ShakesprereFrom: (accessed April 28, 2020)We don’t know how long the COVID-19 public health crisis will last nor when the economy will fully recover. We can be pretty sure, though, that not all businesses and jobs will come back right away.Before the pandemic, when the nation’s February 2020 unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, more than 5 million people were out of work. The March unemployment rate had risen to 4.4 percent, based on the regular monthly survey taken mid-month before the pandemic surge; April will undoubtedly be much higher. We don’t know yet how high the rate will go in coming months, but if it increases to 7 or 10 percent or higher, we could see 10 or 20 million or more people unemployed across most sectors of the economy.In just the two final weeks of March 2020, more than 10 million people applied for unemployment insurance (PDF). Some may be out of work for a short period of time, and some may be unemployed for many months.The special payments to individuals and families and financial assistance to businesses enacted through the first three Congressional stimulus bills are critical, but we may need more federal action for workers if the economic crisis continues into the latter part of this year or beyond.Publicly subsidized jobs and large infrastructure spending have been used during some economic downturns. Congress may again decide to fund a large jobs program in addition to infrastructure investment. If so, now’s the time to carefully plan a program for workers who may have a hard time getting a job after the public health crisis.Subsidized jobs programs can provide useful community activitiesThough some of the demand for consumer services may not be restored after the COVID-19 crisis, demand for many public and social services will likely increase to help people and communities recover.But many public, community, and nonprofit organizations that normally provide those services may not have the budget to expand hiring or even recall or replace all their former workers. A federal jobs program could help fill those gaps, as it has during other economic downturns.During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration provided unemployed workers with jobs in public works, the arts, and community development. Some of their output is still visible today in bridges, parks, dams, and other projects.In the 1970s, nearly a million public service jobs authorized by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act supplemented strained schools, hospitals, tribal governments, community public safety agencies, social services and youth agencies, rural development agencies, and other critical supports.During the height of the Great Recession in 2009, public jobs programs subsidized hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers in private companies, as well as public and community-based organizations.National jobs programs can be complex, so planning early is critical if the program is to begin as soon as health experts say it’s safe to return to work. During the Great Recession, the federal government requested lists of “shovel-ready” projects from state and local officials that could begin when the multibillion-dollar investment in infrastructure was enacted. Hundreds of public works and infrastructure projects, such as transportation improvements and environmental projects like weatherization, began quickly, and most jobs created were in the private sector, and not formally subsidized.A separate emergency transitional jobs program directly subsidized public, private, and nonprofit jobs, mainly for low-income and unemployed workers. States designed and implemented the programs and subsidized more than a quarter million jobs from 2009 to 2010.This time, the federal government could consider asking state and local officials to identify “service-ready” community, nonprofit, and even small-business projects for subsidized jobs.A longer-term jobs program might be needed to get unemployed people back to workIf the economy recovers slowly or officially enters recession, a publicly subsidized jobs programcould supplement or support important community services, provide income to unemployed workers, and train and retrain people for new or better jobs.For workers displaced from jobs permanently or those in rural communities with few available jobs, subsidized employment could help provide important community and social services, such as in libraries, schools, and community centers that state or local governments may be unable to fund if their revenue sources decline during the crisis.As was done during the Great Recession, jobs in the hardest-hit private industries, such as retail and food service, and small businesses in nearly every sector could receive a subsidy for all or part of a worker’s wages. Jobs could be targeted to unemployed and lower-income workers and new high school or college graduates unable to find a job in the regular labor market.Growth in some fields during the pandemic—remote work, telehealth, virtual activities, “gig” platform jobs, data analytics, artificial intelligence—could lead to new types of jobs in a postpandemic market. Training and retraining combined with subsidized jobs could expand the supply of skilled workers in a rapidly changing economy.The necessary components of a federal public jobs programPast experience suggests that a federal jobs program could be an important piece of the nation’s recovery, if carefully planned in advance, keeping in mind that:jobs should not displace existing workers,wages should be set high enough to support workers and families, but not so high that people might not seek or accept a regular job, andguidelines should be in place to avoid any misuse of federal funding (such as substituting federal funds for what a state or local government would have otherwise funded).Jobs could begin quickly by identifying work projects that will be ready to go when legislation is passed and funded, deciding on a rapid-funding mechanism to distribute funds to state and local communities, and establishing a reporting system to accurately track employment, expenditures, and results.None of this will be easy, but early planning could bring economic security to workers, help businesses, and provide useful services to communities as the nation recovers.Handout #4 Questions: Be sure to answer in paragraphs using evidence from the text and also explanations in your own words. Describe and explain THREE different aspects that could be included in a Jobs Recovery Program. What would a jobs program change and how would it promote equality?How could a jobs program help improve equality in health in America? ................
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