A few years ago, I was leading a group at my synagogue that focused on food justice. It was really championed by a nationally renowned pediatrician who was also a member of our synagogue and started The Grow Clinic in Boston. That group's mission is to help children who suffer from "failure to thrive" due to malnourishment. While it has a food pantry, it also leads advocacy efforts and research.
My husband was similarly leading a (larger and more active) group focused on criminal justice. Because we talk a lot, he suggested to his group that they start focusing on the nexus between food insecurity and criminal justice. When I spoke to the pediatrician in question, she sent me loads of information, and it wasn't what I expected.
What I was expecting to read about was that suffering from food insecurity made you vulnerable to becoming involved in the criminal justice system. That isn't a difficult combination--the people who suffer from food insecurity are people who suffer from economic insecurity, and they tend to be the people who are over-policed and therefore more likely to be "caught". What I got instead were all kinds of research on the connection between having a parent or relative involved with the criminal justice system and suffering from food insecurity. The research also explored the problems that resulted both during and later in life, including not only physical health but mental health. It was mind-blowing, and in no small part because it explained a lot about my family of origin (but that is a story for another day). I felt like I was wading into murky waters before; now I realized that I was so far underneath it I couldn't see daylight.
That is how I felt when I came across this report on school hardening by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Wow--wow. Here I had thought that the evil connection between guns, racism, and sexism was to be found in the increased vulnerabilities of Black women to dying during or shortly after pregnancy at the hands of an intimate partner using a gun, but these are the poisonous mixtures that just keep on giving. To read this report, you can see that *another* effect is that as schools respond to gun violence with "hardening"--metal detectors, security surveillance, and on-site security guards--it is Black girls who are suffering the most, being not only over-policed (you knew that, right?) but also sexually harassed (yeah, you knew that, too).
Why was I so naive to think there was only one truly awful manifestation that acted against the most vulnerable among us? Am I just that linear? Have I not listened to my Black friends enough to understand the multitude of ways our country is a land mine for them?
Again, we are past "having a serious discussion" or "exploring the problem". We are also past pseudo-incrementalist, half-assed measures like installing security cameras in schools or anywhere else that is subject to mass-violence. (And no, arming *teachers* or sales clerks is not a solution, either.) We need to control the distribution and sales of guns, period. We need to not allow people to assemble arsenals in their homes. We need to be less interested in "the freedom" of people "exercising their Second Amendment rights" and more interested in the people suffering from that exercise.
I'm making 1000 phone calls to get people to the polls this election season. It's important for a lot of reasons, and this is one of them. Please go vote this year, please vote for the person most likely to push through gun reform, and please tell the people in office now that this is what you want. This isn't just a matter of democracy, this is a matter of life and death.
Don't worry, we'll still have a lot of work to do on racism and sexism, but at least it will be (a touch) less deadly.
Deb in the City
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