some highlights from the new CIRCLE survey

CIRCLE’s new survey of 2,232 young citizens (ages 18-29) is out. Among the findings:

  • “83% say they believe young people have the power to change the country, 60% feel like they’re part of a movement that will vote to express its views, and 79% of young people say the COVID-19 pandemic has helped them realize that politics impact their everyday lives.”
  • They support Biden over Trump by 58%-24%, “a staggering 34-point margin. But 18% of youth say they would like to vote for another candidate. Asian youth (78%) and Black youth (73%) are the most likely to support Biden. Meanwhile, almost three quarters of youth who support Trump (72%) are White.”
  • 27% of young people (ages 18-24) say they have attended a march or demonstration, a remarkable increase from when we asked the question [of] the same age group before the 2016 and 2018 elections (5% and 16%, respectively).”
  • For all youth, the top issues are environment and climate change (13%), racism (12%) and healthcare (12%). For Black youth, the priorities are racism (22%), policing of communities of color (15%), and healthcare (11%).
  • All measured forms of political engagement are up compared to 2018 (admittedly, not a presidential year). For instance, half say that they have tried to convince someone else to vote–which is a lot of viral marketing for the election.

Much more information is on the CIRCLE page.

PLEASE Contribute to the Florida K-12 Civics Standards Review

civicsreview2

Good morning friends. This post is a reminder that the Florida K-12 Civics Standards are open for review (and the memo on this is available here: Civics Review dps-2020-48 (1)). If you want to have input on what kids should do and should know throughout the grade levels, please please please take part in the review.

Civics Review

Public input is encouraged through an online survey platform accessible at https://www.floridacivicsreview.org/.  This online platform provides all stakeholders with open access to participate in the review process until August 5, 2020. Stakeholders are required to provide user information before providing input.

You will have the opportunity to state whether the standards should be eliminated, revised, moved, or kept as is, and you may leave your own comments as well.

If you have any questions, please contact Michael DiPierro, Director of Standards, at Michael.DiPierro@fldoe.org or 850-245-9773.

Please take part in this important process. Civics is at the heart of the social studies, and let’s keep Florida’s strong civics heart beating, as a national leader in civics education.

 

 

diversity, humility, curiosity

I recently heard about a conversation in which someone invoked the idea of a “voodoo doll,” and another in which someone said that the Chinese character for crisis also means “opportunity.”

These phrases rest on falsehoods. Sticking needles into effigies to harm real enemies derives from Western European folklore. A widow was “accused, tried and drowned at London Bridge, England, for piercing a puppet, made in the victim’s likeness, with nails, towards the end of the 10th century” (Armitage 2015, p. 88). In white popular culture in the early 1900s, such practices were attributed to Haitian religion as part of a fearful, contemptuous, and hateful depiction of Haiti–the only country with a successful slave revolt–and of Black people in general.

John F. Kennedy popularized the idea that the Chinese character for crisis also means opportunity. This is false and may perpetuate stereotypes of Asian “wisdom” as paradoxical, antique, and unscientific. A similar example is the remark attributed to Zhou Enlai that it was too early to tell whether the French Revolution was a good thing. That sounds sagacious and mysterious until you find out that he was referring to the French uprisings of 1968, less than a decade before he spoke. It actually was too early to tell.

We shouldn’t say these things, because they are wrong and they reinforce harmful stereotypes. In fact, if anything is racist, it is to depict a religion constructed by enslaved and self-liberated people under immense duress as a malevolent form of magic, characterized by enchanted dolls and walking undead that are familiar tropes in European folklore.

Yet I do not think that the best outcome is to erect warning signs around such topics. We don’t want someone to use these phrases, get corrected, and resolve never to talk about Haiti or about Chinese characters again.

Instead, we should strive for a combination of humility (knowing what we don’t know) and curiosity (striving to learn more).

For instance, the family of syncretic religions that includes Vodou, Santeria, Candomble Jeje, and others is an important topic of study. These religions are components of our social world, interesting in their own right and significant in the history of the African diaspora. To understand a phenomenon like the astounding growth of Pentecostalism in Brazil, it might be important to have some awareness of Brazilian syncretism, which Pentecostals depict as their main enemy. Fear of Haiti and its successful revolution has been important in American politics–and that, too, is valuable to understand.

To study syncretism raises general issues that might have existential significance for people from other religious backgrounds. For instance, the question “What is a religion?” is pressing for all human beings. One answer is: a system of belief defined by certain abstract tenets that are matters of faith rather than reason and that are incompatible with other systems. That definition does not apply to Vodou or explain how someone can be both Catholic and syncretic, as many people are. So maybe we should rethink what a religion is, in general.

Likewise, it is worthwhile to understand more about Chinese writing. In addition to its intrinsic significance, this topic also raises questions that generalize to other contexts. For example, the word ji, misleadingly translated as “opportunity,” is polysemous: it has a whole family of loosely related meanings. Many English words are polysemous, too. What should we make of polysemy in general?

Also, the claim that the Chinese character for crisis means opportunity is an example–in this case, a spurious example–of arguing from etymology. People make etymological arguments all the time. I, for example, have noted that the roots of “citizen” and “political” are Latin and Greek words related to the city (civitas and polis). They share a history with the words “urbane” and “civilized,” which also distinguish cities from the inferior countryside. But do we get any guidance for today by understanding what ancient Greeks and Romans meant by these words? How, in general, should we think about original meanings, given that languages and societies change?

In short, let us turn mistakes into quests for more and better knowledge. That means encouraging further forays into fraught topics instead of warning people away from them. When we err, as we all do, we should respond by learning, not by apologizing and turning away. Incidentally, this means keeping the focus on the original topic of conversation (e.g., Haitian religion), not on our feelings about being corrected. I take the main problem with “white fragility” to be a tendency to distort conversations by directing attention to the question of how the white person feels.

My thesis is that cultural diversity requires humility plus curiosity. I would acknowledge two challenges to this thesis–not to discourage curiosity but to remind us what to be careful of.

First, by digging more deeply into fraught topics, we may make additional mistakes. I wrote above that the Haitian Revolution was the only successful revolt of enslaved people. Arguably, that is a false statement. In an earlier draft, I wrote that white people depicted Vodou as “black magic,” thereby repeating a racist trope in my own voice. It can be safer to erect warning signs around such issues than to compound our initial mistakes with more. I think we should take this risk but be appropriately careful about it. Humility should not diminish with added knowledge.

Second, knowledge confers power. To understand more about other peoples and cultures can allow you to profit from them or even dominate them. Often in durable cases of imperialism, the conquerors learned about, and even admired, the people whom they controlled.

For instance, I am not sure that Britain would have been motivated to dominate India, or capable of doing so, if some British people had not become learned and appreciative about India. A classic case is Rudyard Kipling. His first language was Hindi, he knew a lot about India, he disparaged racist stereotypes about Indians, and he believed that Britain should rule India just because it was a magnificent civilization. In stark contrast, Donald Trump displays ignorance and contempt for almost the whole world. One result is a reluctance to use US military power overseas. Trump has arguably been less imperialistic than his predecessors because he is more ignorant. This is a warning about curiosity.

Leaving aside literal imperialism, we might also worry about profiting from knowledge about other cultures. One could imagine a privileged American who starts with an idea about voodoo dolls, is corrected, learns more about Haitian syncretism, and makes money by writing about it or by importing and selling real Haitian art. Although I would defend cultural appropriation in many circumstances (and I disagree that profit is a mark of sin), one should at least be mindful about monetizing other people’s experiences.

These are caveats, but I don’t think they rebut the basic presumption that we should address ignorance by learning more–with curiosity born of humility and guided by ethics.

Source: Armitage, Natalie, “European and African Figural Ritual Magic: The Beginnings of the Voodoo Doll Myth,” in Armitage & Ceri Houlbrook, editors, The Materiality of Magic: An Artifactual Investigation into Ritual Practices and Popular Beliefs, Oxbow Books, 2015, pp. 85–102.) See also: is everyone religious?; Kipling: understanding and control; what is cultural appropriation?; and when is cultural appropriation good or bad?.

Civics in Real Life Updates

Good morning, friends in Civics! Have you been keeping up with our Civics in Real Life materials? The most recent two CRL readings concern natural law and the social contract and consent of the governed. You can check out these and other readings over at Florida Citizen!

Consent of the Governed
con crl

Natural Law and the Social Contract
NL and SC CRL

We hope that you find this, and others in the series, useful!

Check out the new series here. 

As a reminder, our topics so far have addressed

The Food and Drug Administration
the fda crl

Judicial Review
judicial review crl

The Appointment Process
the appt process crl

Tariffs
tariffscrl

National Institutes of Health.
NIH

Government Task Forces.
task forces
The 2020 Censuscensuscrl
Unemployment InsuranceUI

The Defense Production Act
DPA

Essential Workers

CRLEW

The First Amendment1st amndcrl

Government Power

GP

Nongovernmental OrganizationsNGO

Propaganda and Symbolism

prop

The National Guard

NG

The CARES Act

CARES

Primary Sources

primary sources

Federalism in Action

federalism

The Preamble in Action

Preamble
Executive Orders
CRL EO

the Common Good,
CG1

and Public Health and the Social Contract.
PH1

We hope that you will find these useful. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us at anytime! And don’t forget, you can find the ‘Civics in Real Life’ resource on the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship website here. Be sure also to check out Civics360 for videos and readings that explore additional civics concepts and ideas within a more traditional framework!

Update on LFI/FJCC Staff Transitions

Without a doubt, it is the people that make an organization what it is. And we here at the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute would not be what we are today without the hard work of the staff here. It is with that note that we wish our wonderful Professional Development director and all around fantastic civics educator, Peggy Renihan, the best of luck as she transitions to a new position in Bay County.

peggy_headshot
Peggy has worked at the Lou Frey Institute for more than a decade. In many ways, she IS the face of the Institute and FJCC in certain parts of the state. Her approach to both relationship building and working with teachers and districts, especially but not exclusively in the northern part of Florida, is one that will not be duplicated.

We wish we could keep her, and we envy Bay County for getting someone with such incredible talents and expertise. Peggy, thank you so much for all that you have done, for civics, for the Center and the Institute, and for your family here. You are appreciated beyond words, and our community will not be the same without you.

 

the significance of the progressive primary victories

Representative Eliot L. Engel, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, appears to have lost a primary to Jamaal Bowman, a middle school principal:

This is part of a significant trend: relatively conservative incumbent Democrats in relatively safe Democratic states and districts are falling to more progressive newcomers, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.-14), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.-07), and Marie Newman (IL-3). These insurgents are more diverse and younger than the incumbents. To be sure, a majority of progressive primary challengers have lost, but the net shift is toward a larger bloc within the Democratic caucus.

We should now see assertive progressive caucuses grow in the US House and in many city councils and state legislatures–mirror-images of the House Freedom Caucus on the right. They should and will help to maintain and expand Democratic Party control of as many legislative chambers as possible, while acting as the sharp, leading edge of Democratic majorities. (Jamelle Bouie made this argument in the New York Times.)

The country is becoming more diverse, and people of color tilt heavily toward the Democratic Party. As a result, the Democrats are about to cease being a white-majority party, although many of their national leaders still are white, especially in the Senate.

In 2016, half of the voting delegates at the Democratic National Convention were people of color. These delegates were not appointed as a gesture to symbolic representation or diversity. They were elected by their own power bases. When a party that elects these delegates wins national elections, white dominance is at risk. That is potentially a shift of global significance, bookending 1492 and 1619.

But the party’s leadership must represent its own electorate better. A 58% white Democratic House caucus is a bit too white for a 54% white party, and the party is getting more diverse. The main opportunities to diversify the caucus are districts with Black or Latino majorities. (The Senate represents a bigger problem.)

If you’re not as far as left some of the progressive insurgents, I still think you should welcome their voices in government. The national deliberation is enriched by their ideas, experiences, and agendas. A legislature that excludes such perspectives lacks legitimacy.

What if you were a Bernie voter in 2020? Do a few primary victories offer a disappointing consolation prize? I think not. Electing progressive Democrats in left-leaning districts was always a more promising strategy.

I’ll acknowledge that if you are a democratic socialist, you should have voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. He is, after all, a socialist. I didn’t vote for him because my political philosophy–for whatever that’s worth–does not fully align with his. At the same time, if you are a democratic socialist, you would have fundamental reasons not to expect the Sanders campaign to carry your agenda forward. You should be primarily interested in the path that AOC, Jamaal Bowman, and others represent.

Although socialist thought is vast and varied and mostly beyond my personal knowledge, I have never heard of a socialist theorist or strategist who believed that capitalists would back down in response to an individual politician who won a majority vote in a national election. Just because actual socialism would cost the ruling class trillions of dollars, they would be expected to resist it with all their power. That is why socialist strategists have often emphasized strong unions linked to a broad-based left party with internal democracy and ideological discipline (a hard pair of principles to combine), plus a left version of the mass media. Once you build that combination, you have a chance at a more-than-symbolic political campaign.

Michael Walzer writes:

Socialist politicians usually emerge from powerful social movements like the old labor movement or from political parties like the Labour Party in the United Kingdom or the Social Democrats in Germany. Sanders does not come out of, nor has he done anything to build, a significant social movement. That wouldn’t be an easy task in the United States today; in any case, it hasn’t been his task. He has, moreover, never been a member of a political party—not even of the Democratic Party whose nomination he is now seeking. He has never attempted to create a democratic socialist caucus within the party. For all the enthusiasm he has generated, he has no organized, cohesive social or political force behind his candidacy. If he were elected, it is hard to see how he could enact any part of his announced program.

One response is that Sanders is not a socialist in a significant sense, and therefore socialist theory would accept that he could have won the election. He just needed to play his cards a bit differently and receive more help from people like me (and millions of others) who resisted him.

As I once noted, Sanders’ platform is less radical than Harry Truman’s was in 1948. In that sense, Sanders stands in the mainstream of the 20th century Democratic Party. Richard Wright puts Bernie Sanders in the tradition of Victorian moralizing socialists, like William Dean Howells (who voted Republican) or Frances Willard. This is a highly mainstream American tradition, and Bernie’s only difference is the “socialist” brand. To explain socialism, Sanders sometimes cites Denmark, which the Heritage Foundation ranks very high on measures of business freedom, investment freedom, and property rights. I like Denmark’s social contract but would describe it as liberal.

Sanders has never passed any socialist legislation but is part of Chuck Schumer’s leadership team in the Senate. In the 115th Congress, Sanders and, e.g, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) agreed on 90% of their votes–all their rare divergences relating to Trump’s executive branch appointments, plus H.R. 2430, “a bill to amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act,” and H.R. 3364; “A bill to … counter aggression by the Governments of Iran, the Russian Federation, and North Korea.” You could argue that if Sanders is a socialist, so is Merkley and most of the Democratic caucus.

Although Sanders made major economic proposals, they had little chance of passage, which made him sort of a notional or symbolic socialist. Yes, if Bernie had won in a landslide–carried to the White House by a wave of grassroots enthusiasm and activism for the substance of his agenda–he could have passed his bills. But the primary campaign showed no evidence of a dramatically new electorate. A capable Democratic administration pressured skillfully from a growing leftwing caucus can do much more.

See also three views of the Democratic Party when democracy is at risk; Bernie Sanders runs on the 1948 Democratic Party Platform; and democracy is coming to the USA

Civic Saturday Fellowship Deadline Extended Until July 3rd

Citizen University announced they are extending the deadline for their Civic Saturday Fellowship application for one more week until Friday, July 3rd.

“The Civic Saturday Fellowship prepares motivated, local leaders (or, as we like to say, civic catalysts!) to start their own Civic Saturday gatherings in their home communities. In this nine-month fellowship, civic catalysts will attend the Civic Seminary, a three-day training in Seattle with Citizen University staff, and return home ready to create lasting impact in the civic life of their communities.” You can read more in the announcement below and find the original information on the CU site here.


Civic Saturday Fellowship Program

All around the country, we are facing a crisis in civic life – people are becoming more socially isolated, disconnected from a sense of common purpose, and cynical about their own ability to affect change. Enter Civic Saturday: a gathering that brings communities together to cultivate a sense of shared civic purpose and moral clarity. At Civic Saturday share a meaningful communal experience, and leave inspired to become more powerful, responsible citizens.

The Civic Saturday Fellowship prepares motivated, local leaders (or, as we like to say, civic catalysts!) to start their own Civic Saturday gatherings in their home communities. In this nine-month fellowship, civic catalysts will attend the Civic Seminary, a three-day training in Seattle with Citizen University staff, and return home ready to create lasting impact in the civic life of their communities.

Applications Open Now!

Applications are now open for the Civic Saturday Fellowship Fall sessions! The Fellowship begins with the Civic Seminary, a three-day training, then continues as you organize your own Civic Saturday gatherings in the following months. Apply now for Fall sessions: September 15-18 or October 20-23, 2020.

2020 Fellowship Informational Packet
Application Submission Form

Deadline extended!

Priority Deadline: June 19, 2020
Regular Deadline: June 26, 2020 – extended to July 3, 2020

Informational Webinar

Watch the pre-recorded Informational Webinar from June 3, 2020.

You can find the original version of this announcement on Citizen University’s site at www.citizenuniversity.us/civicsaturdayfellowship/.

more data on police interactions by race

We reported on June 17:

Sixty-eight percent of African Americans say they know someone who has been unfairly stopped, searched, questioned, physically threatened or abused by the police, and 43 percent say they personally have had this experience—with 22 percent saying the mistreatment occurred within the past year alone, according to survey results from Tufts University’s Research Group on Equity in Health, Wealth and Civic Engagement.

According to the KFF Health Tracking Poll for June, 2020, about 30% of Black adults say they have “experienced unfair treatment in interactions with police” within the past year. Forty-one percent of Black adults “say they have been stopped or detained by police because of their racial or ethnic background,” and “about one in five Black adults (21%)–including 30% of Black men–say they have been a victim of police violence due to their racial background.”

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ most recent (2015) Police-Public Contact Survey, 19.8% of African Americans age 16+ had some contact with the police in the past year. This number is the total of several specific types of contact that are asked in the survey, such as riding in a car that was stopped by the police or reporting a crime, among others. The total rate of contact was down by six percentage points compared to 2011.

In the BJS survey, whites were three percentage points more likely than African Americans to report any contact with the police but were also more likely to initiate the contact. Of those who reported that they had been stopped on the street by police, two thirds of whites (67.8%) but only half of Blacks (50.1%) said that the reason for the stop was legitimate.

Of Blacks who said that they had contacted the police, 90.7% said the police behaved properly and 83.6% said they were satisfied by the outcome–very similar rates to whites. The survey implies that 2.7 million African Americans initiated contact with the police in 2015, of whom about 2.3 million were satisfied. This is a fact with some political significance in discussions of defunding the police. At the same time, 3.3% of Blacks and 1.3% of whites reported that the police had used force against them in 2015.

A significant limitation involves the samples of all these surveys. Our survey excludes people in prisons or jails. So does the BJS survey, which also excludes “homeless persons.” I am not sure about the sample of the KFF survey, but it is conducted predominantly by random-digit dialing, which would miss institutionalized people and homeless people. Rates of discriminatory contact would likely be higher if institutionalized and homeless people were included.

The statistics from these three surveys are not strictly comparable. The populations, samples, dates, and questions vary. Still, careful comparisons are interesting. BJS finds that 19.8% of Blacks reported any contact with the police in 2015, and many of those contacts were perceived as legitimate. We find that 22% of Blacks experienced discriminatory treatment by the police in 2020. There could certainly be measurement errors or biases in either survey. Or the rate of discriminatory treatment could have risen in 2020 as a result of mass protests. I would also suspect that some forms of discriminatory treatment do not occur during events that people identify as “contacts.” If a police officer yells at you while driving by but doesn’t stop, that could be an act of discrimination but not a contact.

See also: Two-thirds of African Americans know someone mistreated by police, and 22% report mistreatment in past year; on the phrase: Abolish the police!; insights on police reform from Elinor Ostrom and social choice theory; and science, law, and microagressions.

Two-thirds of African Americans know someone mistreated by police, and 22% report mistreatment in past year

Survey by Tufts University researchers also finds 42% of Latinos and 27% of Whites know victims of police mistreatment

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (June 17, 2020)—Sixty-eight percent of African Americans say they know someone who has been unfairly stopped, searched, questioned, physically threatened or abused by the police, and 43 percent say they personally have had this experience—with 22 percent saying the mistreatment occurred within the past year alone, according to survey results from Tufts University’s Research Group on Equity in Health, Wealth and Civic Engagement.

Forty-two percent of Latinos and 27 percent of Whites also say they know someone who was unfairly stopped by police, with 23 percent of Latinos and 13 percent of Whites reporting that they personally have had these experiences.

The nationally representative survey of adults, conducted between May 29 and June 10, also looked at other forms of discrimination, and found that, in all types except one, higher percentages of African Americans report being subjected to discrimination than other groups. The survey was designed and analyzed by Tufts University’s Research Group on Equity in Health, Wealth and Civic Engagement.

“Some people might think that day-to-day discrimination happens primarily during routine interactions, such as shopping. But one of the eye-opening results of our survey is that Black people are about as likely to report being stopped unfairly by police as they are to encounter discrimination in a store or in other interactions,” said Deborah J. Schildkraut, professor and chair of Political Science in Tufts’ School of Arts and Sciences.

Although African Americans are 3.3 times more likely than Whites to report that they personally have been unfairly stopped by police, 34% of all Americans say that someone they know has been unfairly treated by the police, and 18% have had such experiences themselves. “Across all races and ethnicities, many people may either feel a personal stake in reforming the police or they may be primed to believe accusations that the police are racially biased because of their own experiences, or both,” said Peter Levine, associate dean for research in Tufts’ Tisch College of Civic Life.

Other forms of discrimination are also pervasive

The survey shows that a higher percentage of African Americans report being subjected to other forms of discrimination than other groups do. For example, 28 percent of African Americans sometimes or frequently feel that other people are afraid of them. By contrast, nine percent of Latinos and six percent of Whites also have that sense.

The only form of discrimination for which African Americans are not the highest percentage involves being mistaken for someone of the same race despite having dissimilar appearances. This experience is most common for Asian-Americans in this survey, although the sample size for Asian-Americans is small.

*Includes Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and people reporting more than two races/ethnicities. The sample size does not permit reliable estimates for Asian Americans or Native Americans separately. The discrimination survey items were adapted from those developed by Williams, D. R., Yan Yu, Jackson, J. S., & Anderson, N. B. (1997). Racial Differences in Physical and Mental Health: Socio-economic Status, Stress and Discrimination. Journal of Health Psychology, 2(3), 335–351. The table and figure show the proportions of people who have ever been treated unfairly by the police, denied a service unfairly, or known someone who has faced police discrimination, and the proportions who “sometimes” or “frequently” report the other forms of discrimination. (The response options for these questions were different.)

Most people of all races and ethnicities (76 percent of the whole sample) report experiencing at least one of the forms of discrimination in the survey. However, the proportions of people who say they have never experienced any of these forms of experience varies from 11 percent of African Americans to 27 percent of Whites.

Personal experiences

In addition to answering the survey’s questions, respondents could type comments about their personal experiences with discrimination, and some described pervasive negative experiences based on feelings of racial isolation. For example, a Latina woman wrote, “It’s hard and a bit humiliating when you try to be in a town of only white people.” 

Several African American respondents offered stories of discrimination by the police. One man wrote, “[I was] walking home and got [stopped] by the police for no reason. He said ‘hey boy where are (you) going and start laughing. pull up your shirt’.  … one said this is how you plant drugs on someone” [sic].

An African American woman wrote, “I’ve been [asked] to leave a public parking lot, at an apartment complex by the police, my boyfriend resided there.” And another Black woman wrote, “I had a cop grab me by my bra for no reason other than I was doing what was asked of me.”

Forty-four percent of the people who say they have been treated unfairly by police are White.  One white man, for example, described this personal experience: “Pulled over by a police officer. He asked me to get out of the car, I did. Then he slammed me on the hood of his cruiser.” Another white man offered a more general observation: “The police almost everywhere think that they are better and more privileged than others. They think that the law does not apply to them and they act with utter impunity.”

A smaller number of respondents also provided positive comments about the police, and two respondents who are police officers said they had faced discrimination because of their law enforcement affiliations.

Tufts University’s Research Group on Equity in Health, Wealth and Civic Engagement was established in 2019 as part of a strategic effort to use resources and expertise across the university to address major global issues. It brings together researchers from across the university to discuss and investigate aspects of equity and inequity in the United States and the world. The research has been funded by Tufts University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research as one of several such initiatives.

The group’s principal investigators are Jennifer Allen, professor of Community Health in the Tufts School of Arts and Sciences;  Peter Levine, associate dean for academic affairs and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs at the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts; and Thomas Stopka, associate professor of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. Other members of the group can be found here.

By September 2020, the Research Group will launch a website at https://equityresearch.tufts.edu that will allow anyone to explore numerous dimensions of equity and inequity with an interactive data-visualization tool. Tufts’ Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life is funding the data-visualization tool.

The survey was fielded online by Ipsos using its KnowledgePanel. The sample was nationally representative, and the number of complete responses was 1,267. More technical information about the survey is at https://equityresearch.tufts.edu/the-survey/.

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About Tufts University

Tufts University, located on campuses in Boston, Medford/Somerville and Grafton, Massachusetts, and in Talloires, France, is recognized among the premier research universities in the United States. Tufts enjoys a global reputation for academic excellence and for the preparation of students as leaders in a wide range of professions. A growing number of innovative teaching and research initiatives span all Tufts campuses, and collaboration among the faculty and students in the undergraduate, graduate and professional programs across the university’s schools is widely encouraged.

Navigating the Pandemic: Inclusiveness, Addressing Bias, and Bridging Differences

This is the video from today’s session of a series for the Tufts Community (but open to the public.) The guests were Eboo Patel from Interfaith Youth Corps, Prof. Keith Maddox (Director of the Tufts University Social Cognition Lab, Prof. Sam Sommers (Director of the Tufts University Diversity and Intergroup Relations Lab) and Jessica Somogie with a meditation exercise. Deborah Donahue-Keegan and I moderated.