Author: Jazelle Hunt

Climate change can change one’s well-being

WASHINGTON (NNPA) — For most of the nearly 30 years since Dr. Nicole Brodie’s asthma diagnosis, the athlete and Army veteran has been able to maintain an uninterrupted life, continuing to teach elementary school, coach a children’s team, and remain active. She was partly able to do this by moving her family from New York State to Atlanta for the warmer climate.

“When I arrived in Atlanta, my asthma was controlled with just [an] albuterol [inhaler] as needed,” she said at a panel event last week. “But in the last 10 to 15 years, I have had to be on oral steroids…I’ve increased to daily Allegra [allergy pill] and nasal sprays. And I keep a Benadryl on me at all times. I have to take four-to-five pills a day to manage my symptoms.”

And three weeks ago, she found herself in the hospital for an emergency intervention. The heat index had risen too quickly, causing her lungs to fall to 75 percent capacity.

The issue of climate change is often discussed in terms of failing infrastructure, energy squabbles, weather disasters, and ecological concerns. But a mounting body of research is showing that individual and communal wellness is also at stake; and communities of color tend to be some of the hardest hit.

“The theories are over. We needed an insurance policy, and now it’s time to cash in,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association said at a press conference to release the report. “For years we’ve debated if [climate change] is happening, but we are now seeing it in patients.”

Two reports released last week examined how the effects of climate change can deeply affect physical and psychological health, on both individual and communal levels. (The studies’ “effects of climate change” referred to trends in extreme weather events, food and water shortages, poor air quality, etc.).

The first report is a survey of 284 physicians of color across 33 states on their experience treating people suffering as a direct or indirect result of climate change. The survey was sponsored by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communications (4C Program), and the National Medical Association (the largest and oldest professional organization of African American physicians).

In the survey, 61 percent of physicians reported that climate change is affecting the health of their patients a great deal or a moderate amount, and 88 percent have experienced climate change effects outside of their role as physicians.

The most common climate-change related illnesses doctors were seeing in their patients, with 88 respondents seeing each of these trends, were injuries because of severe weather (such as back damage from shoveling after major snowfall), and illness aggravated by air pollution (such as COPD, asthma, and pneumonia). More than half the doctors also reported increases in treating waterborne and vector-borne illnesses (transmitted by insects or microorganisms, often stirred up by heavy rains and flooding).

In the case of asthma, African Americans already disproportionately suffer from this condition. According to the Office of Minority Health, In 2011 African Americans were 20 percent more likely than Whites to have asthma and three times as likely to die from it. Add the fact that communities of color and low-income communities tend to be situated in polluted areas, and the stage is set for disaster.

“When I was working in emergency medicine, I saw lots of uninsured people, and many had done every home trick they could to stave off [an asthma] attack,” said Dr. Benjamin. “And then they still had to wait because they had no insurance.”

These physical stressors are also taking a psychological toll, according to another report. “Beyond Storms & Droughts: The Psychological Impacts of Climate Change” explores the mental, physical, and community health impacts of the effects of climate change. This compilation of existing research and expert analysis from climate change solutions nonprofit, ecoAmerica, and the American Psychological Association, finds that Americans will increasingly suffer mental health impacts at the hands of climate change.

“The impacts of climate change on human psychology and well-being arise through two main pathways,” the report reads. “Some impacts will arise from the direct physical impacts of climate change, while others will arise as a result of climate change’s more indirect impacts on human systems and infrastructure.”

The report offers several studies involving Hurricane Katrina victims as an example of a direct and severe hit to mental wellness resulting from climate change. For years after the storm, many survivors experienced post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, “complicated grief,” and increased domestic abuse.

Indirect, or gradual impacts are more difficult to quantify due to a dearth of research. In one example, the study details a loss of personal or occupational identity after losing possessions in weather events, wildfires, and floods, or being unable to continue lifelong, sometimes generational occupations due to environmental changes (such as oceanic changes that destroy shrimping families’ livelihoods). In another example, the study discusses the relationship between rising temperatures and community aggression that has been well documented, particularly in Black communities.

Both reports find that women (particularly mothers), children, the elderly, and low-income families are the most vulnerable to climate change effects. They also both outline suggestions for people and communities to guard themselves against the adverse effects.

Dr. Christie Manning, co-author of the second report and visiting assistant professor of Environmental Studies at Macalester College, asserts that strong neighborhood networks and an emergency plan set in advance are the greatest defenses, for example.

“At the national level we see a lot of stalling and stalemate, but at the local and city level they realize this is something people need to be prepared for,” she explains. “Cities are seeing the infrastructure costs. Municipalities are really engaged in this idea of being prepared, and resilient.”

The good news is that most communities are bracing for impact by beefing up support services. In the beginning of May, The White House released the Third Annual Climate Assessment, and extensively reviewed report, created by a team of more than 300 experts, and guided by a 60-member Federal Advisory Committee. Almost all science professionals have come to the same conclusion as the report: that climate change is affecting this generation now, and that most Americans are feeling the changes.

“Not a lot of people know a climate scientist, so when you say 98 percent of climate scientists say this is happening…it might not mean much to you,” said Dr. Mona Sarfaty, director of the 4C Program at George Mason. “But everybody knows a doctor.”

Movie inspires students to think about college

WASHINGTON (NNPA) — Every day of Dontay Gray’s senior year began at 5 a.m. The early start gave him enough time to catch the two buses and two trains to David Starr Jordan High School in Long Beach, California.

Although his family had moved a 90-minute commute away, Gray had his reasons for finishing high school at Jordan. He wanted to make a name for himself on the nationally-ranked football team, in hopes of earning a scholarship and becoming the first person in his family to attend college. If the sports angle didn’t work, he had been doing well academically, slowly raising a 2.8 GPA with a semester full of As and Bs. Plus, it was the first school he had attended since serving his sentence for gun possession in tenth grade.

“I started my road to college my 11th grade year. It’s never too late,” says Gray, now a senior at California State University, Sacramento. “It doesn’t matter where you come from, where your family is from, or what you’ve been through. College is for everybody.”

Gray is one of four students profiled in a new documentary titled, First Generation. The film seeks to shed light on the college access gap, which is often widest for those who are first in their families to pursue higher education.

According to the National College Access Network, full college access is achieved when every student receives sufficient academic preparation and personal support, to begin, and successfully complete post-secondary education. NCAN reports that only8.3 percent of low-income students earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24 (compared to 73 percent of students from high-income families).

“Both my parents went to college and both their parents went to college. My parents hired a private counselor for me because they knew my public school wasn’t helping me,” says the film’s co-director, Adam Fenderson. The genesis of the film came through his wife and co-director Jaye, who was a low-income student at Columbia University, and later became an admissions officer for the school. According to Jaye, the handful of applications from low-income students simply couldn’t compete with the gilded submissions from more well-off students.

Adam explains, “I had a lot of support and it was something I took for granted as a kid. For people [like me], it’s hard to teach them that that’s not necessarily normal, and that’s not necessarily what others are dealing with.”

One of the film’s goals is to show how complex the college access problem can be; a range of factors contributes to the disparity. NCAN cites rising tuition costs; the confusing, unstandardized admissions process; application fees; lack of academic and emotional support; and, a 471-to-1 average ratio of students to guidance counselors.

On top of this, would-be first generation students may never even consider college as a viable option.

“For [first-generation students] college is a foreign thing. Nobody in your immediate family knows about it, most of them didn’t finish high school,” says Gray, adding that he had thought the only people who could go to college were wealthy, or had exceptional grades.

After being released from juvenile hall, he was connected with a mentor who was the first to suggest college as an option for him. “Your family doesn’t know, so they can’t tell you. So they don’t talk about it, so you never bring it up. And in not talking about it, you start to figure it’s OK not to go to college. Nobody else went, and they seem fine. The less you talk about it, the less you plan to go.”

Although most of the parents in the film were excited about the prospect of their child going to college, unmistakable worry lurked below their smiles. During the film, one mother (who did not complete high school), burst into tears while setting up the Christmas tree, torn between having to say goodbye, and the prospect of not being able to afford the opportunity.

Another mother (and widow) quietly asked her slightly more-knowledgeable son whether she would need to pay for all four years at once. Gray’s mom, who had beaten a drug addiction but was unemployed during applications season, simply quipped, “We’ll figure it out.”

Most first-generation students are part of low-income or middle-class homes that cannot afford any college costs out-of-pocket.

“[The cost] was one of the biggest problems I had on my mind. I was broke. My family couldn’t pay a dime, and that’s when they told me about the FAFSA,” Gray says. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid lays out a family’s income information (as reported to the Internal Revenue Service), and the government, schools, and organizations use it to gauge how much financial help will be given, based on need. “If I didn’t know about that, I wouldn’t have even applied for college. I wouldn’t want to put my mom through that, I’d rather go to work to help her out.”

This deal-breaking level of concern is not unfounded. College costs are rising across the country, particularly at public four-year institutions, which tend to attract low-income and first-generation students.

As a result, grants and scholarships (if a student is even aware of them) don’t cover as much, and families take on loans to supplement. The Center for American Progress reports that 81 percent of Black students who earned a bachelor’s in 2012 had student debt, with 27 percent of them responsible for repaying $30,500 or more.

The dark cloud of college cost begins to overshadow the other factors in choosing the right college. This overshadowing leads to “poor matching,” which occurs when students, especially first generation students, assume they won’t be able to attend their personal-first-choice school (or even upper-tier schools they hadn’t considered) because of finances and/or grades. So they set their sights lower.

All four students in the documentary fell prey to this in some way. Gray, for example, originally wanted to attend Clark Atlanta University, but was discouraged by the application question that inquired about his criminal record.

“Students who end up over-qualified for their college get less rigorous training than they might during their time in college,” states a 2009 study by researchers at the University of Michigan. “This may lead to lower earnings once they enter the market, and is an inefficient use of educational resources, since some of our most able students are not being pushed to expand their knowledge and skills.”

With demand for skilled workers on the rise and the United States plummeting in international education and economic rankings, the underdevelopment of these talented students may stunt national growth.

Adam and Jaye have partnered with Wells Fargo to take First Generation on the road as part of a “Go College!” Tour, screening the film for high school students and education advocates. Adam says, “For students in high school who feel like they can’t make it to college because of their circumstances…seeing the kids [in the film] make it in their own way gives them hope, a sense of power.”

Blacks drowning in swim help

WASHINGTON (NNPA) — In the two weeks leading up the to unofficial start of summer, reports of accidental drowning deaths had already begun, including at least three victims under the age of four, and a 21 year-old Grambling State University senior, Alexandria Shelton.

Like clockwork, a lack of water safety resurfaces each year – especially for African Americans.

African Americans over the age of four are significantly more likely to drown than White Americans. Black children ages 5 to 14 —70 percent of whom can’t swim—are three times more likely than White children to drown. That doubles to six times as likely when teens are added to the picture.

And swimming pools can be particularly deadly—Black youth ages 5 to 19 are more than five times as likely as Whites to drown there. For Black 11 and 12 year-olds, that figure doubles.

“This is the first report to examine racial/ethnic disparities in fatal drowning rates by age and setting. The disparity increased when only drowning deaths in swimming pools were considered,” states the CDC research, released last week. “The disparity in self-reported swimming skills among black children and adults might help to explain the disparity in drowning rates.”

Scholars have found that the disparity is a remnant of segregation, and result of contemporary neglect on the part of city officials.

Swimming became a national pastime in the 1920s and 1930s and again in the 1950s and 1960s. Segregation kept African Americans out of the water (including public beaches). Public pools were then closed to sidestep desegregation, and the swimming boom moved to the suburban private pools and clubs.

At the same time, White neighbors and/or economic factors pushed African American families further inland, away from valuable coastal communities. Finally, public facilities that were opened in Black communities in the 1960s and 1970s were often too small or too grimy for swimming.

Jeff Wiltse, author of Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America and explains the problem in his latest article in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues.

“As a result of limited access…swimming did not become integral to the recreation and sports culture within African American communities. Successive generations of White parents took their children to swimming pools and taught them to swim, because that is what they did as children,” he writes. “No such broad, self-perpetuating swim culture developed among Black Americans, however…. In this way, the swimming disparity created by past discrimination persists into the present.”

Today, this generational effect, plus the allotting of public resources, plays a larger role in whether Black communities learn water safety.

In 2010, Cedric Troupe, founded the East Oakland Swim Club to “restore the culture of swimming” in the Oakland area African American community, especially for young people.

“Growing up in Oakland or in the San Francisco Bay area, when we were young we used to go to the swimming pool and have fun. Our generation is failing the younger generation,” he says.

Troupe, a lifelong swimmer, took up the cause of advocating for Oakland’s high school and recreation center pools when he realized his alma mater pool at Castlemont High School had fallen into disrepair. (In 1976, its swim team won the Oakland Athletic League Championship. It’s said that students had to swim a lap of the pool as a diploma requirement).

“We have a number of obstacles for people of color…and the first part is facilities. Our kids have to travel 8 to 10 miles to swim,” Troupe explains. “We’re coming into summer 2014 and we had a 90-degree day just last week, yet these pools are not available for the children.”

Even in communities where access isn’t a problem for Black youth, there’s often one more barrier – their parents.

As the USA Swimming Foundation reports, children whose parents can’t swim have a 13 percent chance of learning to swim themselves. A parent’s inexperience with or outright fear of water often gets passed down, perpetuating the problem.

Miracle Swimming Institute, based in Sarasota, Fla. (with satellite sites around the country) caters to adults who are afraid in water. Mary Ellen “Melon” Dash, founder of the institute and creator of its methods, asserts that almost all of her students have at least one parent who is afraid in water (a thread that’s even more common than traumatic childhood experiences).

“We go to the community center to give free classes, and we find children who have never been to the beach even though it’s just five miles away. And when we offer to take them, [parents] put up a lot of resistance because they don’t know how we can make it safe for their children,” Dash explains. “[Adults] know that not only are they missing out on the fun, but they’re not safe in water. There’s so much shame about not being able to swim…but people need to know it’s perfectly understandable.”

On the other end of the attitude spectrum, some overestimate their water competency.

The Red Cross measures water competency by proficiency with five tasks: getting into the water over one’s head; returning to the surface and floating or treading water for one minute; turning around in a full circle and finding an exit; swimming at least 25 yards to an exit; and exiting the water (without a ladder if in a pool).

These are the necessary skills for surviving a water emergency. In a national survey conducted last month, the Red Cross found that 80 percent of respondents said they could swim, but only 56 percent felt they could complete all five tasks.

According to aquatics trainer and advocate, Dr. Angela Beale, many people hold inadequate ideas on what it means to be able to swim.

“If I can’t perform basic skills in terms of water safety, now I have to put that in context of whether I can swim. I have to ask myself, ‘Well enough to save my life?’” she explains. “Some swimmers overestimate their ability, especially in different bodies of water. The minute you say ‘I know’ is the minute you stop learning.”

This year, the Red Cross is commemorating 100 years of water safety education with a Centennial Campaign to teach 50,000 people how to swim. The campaign also seeks to cut the national drowning rate in half over the next three to five years by targeting 50 cities across 19 states with high drowning fatality rates. (Florida tops the list, with 18 selected cities).

Incidentally, some of the selected cities have large Black populations. In these cities—such as Birmingham, Jacksonville, and Memphis—both the overall drowning rate and the African American drowning rate are higher than the national average.

“I think a large contributor to the drowning disparity truly is a lack of knowledge in seeing aquatics as a life skill. You can save your own life, as well as someone else’s,” says Beale, who also serves on the Aquatic Sub Council of the Red Cross’ Scientific Advisory Council.

“I hope that everyone would find out where they can access swimming programs…and that every family will make sure that at least one person can swim, until eventually, everyone can,” Beale says. “But make it a priority moving forward—not just for this summer.”

Back on the job, federal workers worry about another shutdown

WASHINGTON (NNPA) — After a little more than two weeks, things have finally gotten back to normal in the nation’s capital. At least, normal by Washington standards. The main thoroughfares connecting the District of Columbia to Maryland and Virginia – I-66, I-95. I-295, I-395, I-495 and U.S Route 1, 29 and 50 – are again crowded with rush-hour traffic. Metro trains and buses are packed and the federal government, including museums and national parks, reopened for business.

After being labeled “non-essential,” federal workers have returned to the essential job of running the government after House Republicans forced a 16-day shutdown of the federal government by trying to defund the Affordable Care Act. Senate leaders from both parties reached a deal to raise the debt ceiling, the measure quickly passed the House and Senate and was signed into law by President Obama, allowing furloughed workers to return last Thursday.

The government shutdown had a disproportionate impact on Blacks who make up 13.6 percent of the U.S. population and 17.7 percent of the federal workforce. Overall, people of color represent 34 percent of the federal workforce.

Speaking at the White House on Thursday, Obama has this message for returning federal employees: “Thank you. Thanks for your service. Welcome back. What you do is important. It matters.”

Atlanta has the highest number of federal employees outside of Washington, D.C.

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) visited federal employees in the Sam Nunn Cafeteria of the Richard Russell Federal Building in Atlanta on their first day back on the job.

“There was a huge turnout of employees,” said Lewis. “I apologized to them for what the Congress did, and I told them it must never, ever happen again. Many people came up to me. Some needed a hug, some needed a little encouragement, and some even broke down in tears because of all the stress they had been facing. I told them they would continue to have my support, and I thanked them for the good work and their commitment to public service.”

The shutdown, the first in nearly two decades, had a different impact on federal workers.

At one end was Rashonda Williams, a newlywed and the mother of a 2-year-old and a 4-month old.

“I was on edge, didn’t know what to expect,” said Williams, an employee at the General Services Administration (GSA). “We knew [Congress] would get it together, but we didn’t know if we would have retro pay.”

As has been the case in past shutdown, federal employees will receive retroactive pay for the time they lost from work through no fault of their own.

“Now I’m on track to pay my mortgage late. We would have been able to pay on time without the shutdown. We’re a new family, so we don’t have as much savings as older people might,” Williams explained.

One of those “older” people who didn’t feel as pressured by the temporary loss of wages is Penelope Dates, a U.S. Department of Agriculture employee just two years from retirement.

“I’m prepared for emergencies, and I’m really ready to retire. But I felt bad for people who were not prepared,” she said.

Being back at work, she said, is “like nothing ever happened.”

But something did happen. And creditors being creditors, were not interested in the excuses for late payment, however, legitimate or well-publicized.

The shutdown began Oct. 1, the beginning of the new fiscal year. A week later, the Department of Homeland Security provided a letter for furloughed employees to show their creditors. It stated, in part,: “…some of our employees may have difficulty in timely meeting their financial obligations…. We appreciate your organization’s understanding and flexibility toward DHS employees until this situation is resolved.”

The shutdown affected non-employees as well, including contractors and those whose businesses depended on federal workers.

Sammy Soliman, a food cart owner who has perched across the street from the Department of Transportation for the past 20 years, is one such person.

“Everyone is glad to come back, and I am glad they are back,” he said. “The whole city was dead. I lost about 70 percent of my income.”

Unlike federal workers, contractors will not be paid for the time they didn’t work.

Richard Nock, who works in materials handling at the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, said his furloughed time amounted to a paid mini-vacation, which is fine with him.

Monte Wallace, an employee at the Administration for Children and Families, is happy about returning to work but worried about the future.

“It feels good to be back but it’s left a bad taste in my mouth,” said Wallace. “Especially since things are still unsettled – this could happen again. We shouldn’t bear the brunt of Congress’ lack of coming together.”