Un-Fair is Un-Wise – White Privilege Campaign

I am proud of our College today. It took the difficult stance not to participate in a local campaign against racism – and I think they made the right choice.

Un-Fair Campaign Flyer

A consortium of local agencies, and most colleges & universities in the area, are supporting an anti-racism campaign in the region. We need it: Duluth is an unrelentingly white city (90%). People of color report that it’s not very friendly – and white people are oblivious.

But how do you design an anti-racism campaign? This is different than the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It seems a change of awareness, a change of heart.  Delicate business, making people aware of their privilege.

Peggy McIntosh‘s article “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” inspired the campaign. I use her article often in my sociology classes, teaching about white privilege in a classroom where most students are white and middle class.  I know just how tough it is to get the conversation going in a way that’s effective. This campaign isn’t it.

Racism: Engage the Head and the Heart

Any time race is the topic, the heart – the emotions – are engaged. Feelings can swamp cognitive processing – people don’t even take in the information. If the first message is received as “You’re a racist!” it’s more likely to evoke defensiveness, not introspection. The  image of photos defaced with writing evokes strong negative emotions. But not emotions in the service of inclusiveness and awareness.

The genius of Peggy McIntosh’s article – and her presentation at UMD about a decade ago – is her personal journey. She was unaware of white privilege: she was aware of male privilege in the English department where she taught.  A colleague – a person of color – pointed out that she had the same privilege based on her white skin.

Her first reaction was to say, “No, that’s not true.”

But then she

Snapshot of Volatile Political Scene Becomes Real

I am always stunned when people – especially media pundits – fail ti understand the basic statistical concept of variability. I was hit by this awareness again as I hear the Iowa Caucus results interpreted.

Commentators act as though each snapshot point in time just might be enduring reality. Nothing was further from the truth. There was no stable reality in those caucus results.

One poll reported that 41% of Iowans were still undecided when they walked into the caucus. So 4 in 10 votes were cast by people who planned to be swayed by the emotional speeches of candidates’ supporters: an emotional state that would cease to exist within minutes of the vote. The dominant pattern in the results – more than any of the leading candidates – was the pattern

Starting a New Year for better health

Image via Wikipedia

The media give plenty of air time to New Year’s Resolutions. This year, many folks focused on the fact that most of them fail.  A lengthy interview with  Kelly McGonigal, PhD on The People’s Pharmacy was one of the best I heard. She’s the Stanford psychologist whose work focuses on willpower and how it works; her suggestions are grounded in data and designed to be practical.  She writes The Science of Willpower blog at Psychology Today. (The audio of the interview will be posted later this week.)

One of the known problems with resolutions is that we make them too big – and are prone to giving up as soon as we miss the mark.  This certainly matches my experience.

If you only do one thing for your health, let it be exercise.

I have been most successful with a goal of walking more that I made several years ago.  I’ve used two tools to help me with this goal; when I stop using them, I also walk a lot less.

1. A good pedometer – one I can carry comfortably and quietly in my pocket (Omron HJ-113).  My sense of how much I’ve walked is really inaccurate: days that seem similar may register 10,000 steps for one and only 3,000 for the other.  The pedometer keeps me honest.
2. WalkerTracker.com – an online site that logs my steps.  It has many types of built-in motivators.  WT displays a “Diligence” percentage based on the last 50 days. It awards points and ranks you with color-coded levels for the number of days you’ve logged your steps – with a bonus point if you achieved at least 95% of your goal for the day.  Eventually I decided to participate in a few of the social media aspects – especially after some of my real-world friends also joined WT.

There’s growing evidence that getting a bit of exercise is the single best thing you can do for your health (see 23 1/2 Hours for a quick fun overview).  But then there are so many other things to do: eat healthy (in hundreds of ways!), reduce stress, sleep more, increase social contacts… it seems hopeless to tackle them all.  And so, for the most part, I haven’t done much.

Until now.

For 2012, I’ve decided to try out MeYouHealth -another online service designed to slowly build better health in six domains – including exercise.  Every morning, MeYouHealth sends a small