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Parallel pandemics of illness, racial inequality must be acknowledged for progress, law professor writes
LAWRENCE – In an article titled “Parallel Pandemics: The American Problem of Anti-Enforcement-ism, Rational Distrust and COVID-19,” a University of Kansas associate professor of law argues that health care systems — as well as other aspects of American society, including law and policy — have historically combined to create rational distrust among racially marginalized communities that must be addressed to effectively manage the COVID-19 pandemic.
KU astronomers help point the way forward for America’s research priorities
LAWRENCE — Each decade, prominent scientists convene and produce a kind of research roadmap for astronomy and astrophysics under the sponsorship of the National Academies of Sciences. The “decadal survey” is meant to ensure the United States stays at the forefront of astronomy and astrophysics. Two scientists from the University of Kansas contributed to the new report, published in November, which includes recommendations on topics ranging from “a large-scale next-generation Hubble Space Telescope” to building a more diverse workforce.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
Parallel pandemics of illness, racial inequality must be acknowledged for progress, law professor writes
LAWRENCE — As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, officials are struggling to convince large numbers of Americans to be vaccinated. Yet, even before COVID-19 existed, the United States was dealing with another pandemic — that of racial inequality, which has led to a current state of parallel pandemics that must be acknowledged and understood before real progress can be made, a University of Kansas law researcher argues in a recent publication.
“The hesitancy at the beginning, as well as some of the residual skepticism, comes out of what I call rational distrust,” said Najarian Peters, associate professor of law at KU. “We are navigating rational distrust during the pandemic because prior to COVID-19, America was dealing with the pandemic of racial inequality sustained by the anti-enforcement approach to laws and policies that would bring inequity to heel.”
Throughout its history, the United States has had an unequal society for “racially marginalized communities in general and Black people-descendant of enslaved people specifically. The imposed lived experience of racially marginalized people had the effect of creating rational distrust in the systems that create and reproduce the lived marginality,” Peters said.
In “Parallel Pandemics: The American Problem of Anti-Enforcement-ism, Rational Distrust and COVID-19,” her essay in the Seton Hall Law Review, Peters argues that the health care systems — as well as several other aspects of American society, including law and policy — combine to create rational distrust.
For example, Peters said, the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment ended slavery, so in theory, African Americans were free. Yet the Civil War was followed by Red Summers — including racial terrorism, lynchings, plunder and destructions of Black communities that were self-sufficient and thriving. Jim Crow laws propagated segregation for decades to come. Then new laws followed, including the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act and others. But a backlash followed each of those movements, Peters said, as it did when Barack Obama was elected as the nation’s first Black president.
All of those instances illustrate the “lived experience of anti-enforcement.” “Fits and starts of progress followed by the retreat and deep compromise,” Peters said, “in which laws on the books to prevent anti-Black subjugation and oppression are not followed, and new ones enacted are also not followed to allow for remedy or relief in a consistent and sustainable way.”
“We’ve had these fits and starts and knew what to do as a country, but yet we’ve always retracted and stepped back,” Peters said. “As Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘All we are asking America to do is be true to what it said on paper.’ Furthermore, let’s enforce what we claim in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.”
That unequal application and anti-enforcement have resulted in two Americas: a democracy and an oligarchy, Peters wrote. The former benefits and serves those in power, while the latter establishes a society in which laws are made in favor of some, at the expense of racialized, minoritized and poor communities.
These pervasive inequalities are baked into our health system, Peters said. Today, Black women are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. The research also indicates that when newborn Black babies are tended by Black doctors, their mortality rates are halved in comparison with white babies.
“Health care disparities for racially marginalized people seeking assistance and care in health care facilities is a historical fact — the most famous of which include the Tuskegee experiments and Henrietta Lacks,” Peters said.
“Before COVID-19, we were in a pandemic of racial marginality. Recently, we’ve heard of people of color expressing concern about getting vaccinated,” Peters said. “To not understand why communities might be skeptical is ignoring the history. The unwillingness to understand it’s natural for some to be distrustful of the health care system in America is extremely problematic. Even vaccinated people still do not trust the health care system. History tells us there are deep and abiding differences in health outcomes. If we accept that, we see that there is rational distrust in situations like vaccination campaigns that initially lacked due regard for the types of concerns racially marginalized people had as a result of their lived experience in America.”
For example, consider the fact that Black children and their families still have “the talk,” Peters said. “Black parents still have to tell their children about the fact that police will mischaracterize them as criminals, dangerous and provoking their own demise even when they comply. The vaccine doesn’t protect against having to navigate delusional behavior triggered by seeing a Black person where you have decided they should not be.”
Peters wrote, “The health and well-being of America has always been bound up in its people. How and which people mattered in its racially stratified hierarchy were established by its laws, first and foremost, and from its laws came myths, illusions and pathological projections and loops that remain to this day. If, as we say, we intend to eliminate COVID-19, we cannot do so by getting back to normal, because normalcy is what created the pandemic parallels of race-based health disparities and social marginalization. The pandemic — including the deployment of the vaccine — presents opportunities to become a real version of what this nation claimed to be all along.”
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
KU astronomers help point the way forward for America’s research priorities
LAWRENCE — When the Webb Space Telescope is blasted into orbit in December, it will be partly due to a group of astronomers and astrophysicists who decided 10 years ago that creating a next-generation space telescope should be a U.S. national priority.
Each decade, in fact, prominent scientists convene and produce a kind of research roadmap for astronomy and astrophysics under the sponsorship of the National Academies of Sciences. The “decadal survey” is meant to make sure the United States stays at the forefront of astronomy and astrophysics.
Two scientists from the University of Kansas — Ian Crossfield, assistant professor of physics & astronomy, and David Besson, professor of physics & astronomy — contributed to the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020, published in November.
“The decadal survey process is how the American astronomical community identifies its top science priorities for the next decade,” Crossfield said. “The report that was produced by this committee, including me and David, is the main reference document that’s used by congressional staffers, NASA and the NSF to set top funding priorities for what needs to happen over the next 10 years.”
Besson added that aside from setting research goals on the ground and in space, other objectives of the decadal survey include keeping the American public engaged with astronomy and astrophysics and assessing and developing the workforce in these disciplines.
“The decadal survey keeps America on pace with Europe and, ultimately, that also means trying to sustain and develop the next generation of scientists in the country,” he said. “You want to keep America a country that believes in science and is interested in science, which is not a small statement.”
Scientists working on the survey were organized into several sub-panels covering different aspects of astronomy and astrophysics.
Besson, whose research centers on detection and observation of neutrinos, served on the Panel on Particle Astrophysics and Gravitation. According to the report, the panel’s purpose was to “suggest to the decadal survey committee a program of federal investment in research activities exploring areas at the interface of physics and astronomy such as gravitational radiation, gamma-ray astronomy, cosmic rays and neutrinos.”
Besson said his participation in the survey helped him to fit his own research into a broader perspective.
“For me it was certainly a learning experience,” he said. “I was impressed by the breadth of the big-picture understanding of the people leading the panel. It was also interesting for me to see the experiment that I’m on, called IceCube, in the context of all these other experiments because I rarely put it in that broad context.”
Crossfield, who leads the KU ExoLab, a research group dedicated to the discovery and characterization of nearby planetary systems, served on the Panel on Exoplanets, Astrobiology, and the Solar System. The panel focused on “the detection, demographics and physical characteristics of exoplanets, solar system observations relevant to Astro2020, astrobiology, stellar phenomena and activity that impacts detectability and characterization of exoplanets, and effects of stellar activity on the evolution and habitability of planets,” according to the survey report.
“Our science panels focused on top-priority science questions that need to be answered in the next decade,” Crossfield said. “There’s also a series of technological or observatory driven panels focused on things like cost estimates and technical capabilities. Then, there’s the overarching executive panel that synthesizes these reports, makes the final recommendations, puts the bow on it and sends it out to the national academies and to the country.”
The KU researchers said key recommendations of the decadal survey include “a large-scale next-generation Hubble Space Telescope that would be two or three times as big as Hubble” and “ground-based telescopes operating in the optical and infrared that would also be two to three times bigger than anything else currently operating.”
According to Besson, another key facet of the decadal survey’s work was to promote a diverse workforce in American astronomy and astrophysics.
“I was impressed by the appreciation of the fact that science is done within a society and there is a responsibility to be more inclusive in the scientific community as a whole,” he said. “This was certainly touched on in our sub-panel report and in the final report as well.”
Crossfield said the presence of two scientists from KU reflected the mounting strength of the Department of Physics & Astronomy.
“If you dig through the membership numbers of who is participating in different panels of the decadal process this time around, the fact that there were two KU faculty in this process puts KU astrophysics in the top two dozen universities in the country in this field,” he said. “That’s a really big statement about the positive trajectory that KU astronomy and astrophysics has been on over the last few years.”
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