{"id":125149,"date":"2018-05-10T10:28:14","date_gmt":"2018-05-10T14:28:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/?p=125149"},"modified":"2020-09-17T10:32:55","modified_gmt":"2020-09-17T14:32:55","slug":"this-is-not-new","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/news\/articles\/2018\/this-is-not-new\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018This Is Not New\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"banner-container banner-has-html\">\n<div class=\"videoWrapper\" style=\"position: relative;padding-bottom: 56.25%; \/* 16:9 *\/height: 0;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"855\" height=\"481\" src=\"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/buniverse\/interface\/embed\/embed.html?v=dFhi0\" style=\"position: absolute;top: 0;left: 0;width: 100%;height: 100%;frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen> <\/iframe><\/div>\r\n\n<\/div>\n\n<p>\n<div class=\"wp-prepress-component-metabar sphnews-prepress-layout-metabar\">\n\t<div class=\"wp-prepress-component-metabar-wrapper\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"wp-prepress-component-metabar-date\">May 10, 2018<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"wp-prepress-component-metabar-credits\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"wp-prepress-component-metabar-share js-bu-prepress-share-tools\">\n\t\t\t<span class=\"icon-twitter\"><span>Twitter<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\t<span class=\"icon-facebook\"><span>Facebook<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\t<span class=\"icon-action\"><\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n<p><span><span>Less than 18 months into the Trump administration, public health advocates say that the administration\u2019s policies have already had a dire impact on the nation<\/span><span>\u2019s health. <\/span><span>During that period, there <\/span>have<span> been<\/span> cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), threats <span>regarding funding for<\/span> Planned Parenthood, rollbacks of numerous environmental regulations, and repeated efforts to repeal the <span>Obama administration\u2019s <\/span>Affordable Care Act.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>But when Mary Travis Bassett, commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, addressed an audience of students, academics, and activists about the health effects of the Trump era thus far <span>at the\u00a0Dean<\/span><span>\u2019s Symposium, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/public-health-conversations\/deans-symposia\/the-trump-administration-and-the-health-of-the-public\/\">\u201cThe Trump Administration and the Health of the Public<\/a><\/span>,<span>\u201d<\/span>\u00a0she ha<span>d<\/span> a simple message: None of this is new.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe long, bloodstained legacy of white supremacy in this country \u2026 did not start with the current president, but reaches back beyond our founding as a nation,\u201d Bassett said.<\/p>\n<p><span>She <\/span>was the keynote speaker <span>at the daylong symposium, which <\/span>brought together public health scholars, journalists, thought leaders, and other public health professionals to dissect the health effects of Trump-era policies. <span>The <\/span><span>nonpartisan <\/span><span>event <\/span><span>was cosponsored by The Lancet Commission on Public <\/span><span>Policy and Health in the Trump Era. <\/span><\/p>\n<p>White supremacy, Bassett explained, is \u201ca built-in logic, an entitlement that undergirds all of our social and economic systems.\u201d But she argued that white supremacy in the Trump administration goes beyond explicit racism, lurking in implicit biases.<\/p>\n<p>As an example, <span>she <\/span>pointed to Trump\u2019s approach to the opioid epidemic. \u201cTrump, while talking in coded language about the burden of opioids on the white population, has been vilifying the sources of drugs,\u201d she <span>told the <\/span><span>audience<\/span>. \u201cHe said that 90 percent of heroin in America comes from south of the border. He had ICE agents come on the stage with him while he talked about the idea that there should be a death penalty for drug dealers\u2014who are all coded Latino.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Other speakers also dissected the<span> implicit<\/span> racism behind the president\u2019s policies. The revival of the War on Drugs signals a return to the policies that have overcrowded the nation\u2019s prisons while disproportionately targeting communities of color, said Lello Tesema, director of population health at Los Angeles County Correctional Health Services. \u201cThe best way to avoid the harms of jails is to keep people out of them in the first place,\u201d she said. Instead, <span>she noted, <\/span>the Trump administration has already rolled back Obama-era guidelines to close all private prisons, a profit-generating move Tesema tied to mass incarceration\u2019s \u201clegacy of slavery and the subsequent commodification of black bodies in the Jim Crow era.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Joia Mukherjee, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief medical officer <span>of the non-profit <\/span>Partners In Health<span>, <\/span>argued that Trump\u2019s reference to \u201cshithole countries\u201d was not a shocking aberration but part of the neoliberal tradition of extracting massive amounts of resources from countries and then grumbling about them being \u201cfailed\u201d and \u201cdependent\u201d on aid. \u201cThis is not new,\u201d she said, \u201cbut in the light of increased racism and increased privatization, this is becoming even more problematic.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The post-<span>Hurricane <\/span>Maria situation in Puerto Rico is a result of that same neoliberal exploitation, said Olveen Carrasquillo, professor of medicine and public health sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine<span>. <\/span> Decades of American infrastructure monopolies, capped Medicaid block grants, and predatory lending had devastated the island long before the hurricane landed, Carrasquillo said, and the \u201cdisaster capitalism\u201d of the Trump administration\u2019s effort to rebuild will continue the \u201cdownward spiral\u201d of the territory<span>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>It is unclear whether the Trump administration is trying to repeat history or is ignorant of it, said Michael E. Bird, national consultant on Native American\/Alaska Native Communities<span> for the AARP.<\/span> Going forward with the <span>Dakota Access<\/span> Pipeline along Standing Rock Sioux land, and recent federal efforts to dictate how tribes should run their healthcare systems, are examples of the administration \u201cundermining tribal sovereignty,\u201d Bird said, a backslide in the relationship between the United States<span> government<\/span> and the tribes.<\/p>\n<p>A central question among speakers and panelists was how better to convey the harms of the Trump administration\u2019s policies to the public at large, especially in the current \u201cfake news\u201d climate. \u201cData needs to be supplemented with stories,\u201d said Altaf Saadi, an immigration researcher and National Clinical Scholars fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. <span>A<\/span><span>s<\/span><span> an example, she cited the case <\/span>of Rosa Maria, a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who was detained by border patrol when her parents brought her to the hospital: \u201cIt was because of national media that she was ultimately freed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But Zinzi Bailey, assistant scientist at the Jay Weiss Institute for Health Equity in the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine,\u00a0cautioned that individual stories do not always work. \u201cIn police shootings of unarmed black men<span>,<\/span> there\u2019s always a narrative that comes out around each of these individuals\u201d to suggest they were not innocent, she said. She argued instead for the use of history to contextualize current health threats\u2014for example, putting racial health disparities into the context of centuries of oppression.<span><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>D<\/span>espite the dire <span>concerns expressed about\u00a0 <\/span>the immediate and long-term impacts of Trump\u2019s policies, some speakers highlighted areas of hope, including the new era of progressivism demonstrated by the Black Lives Matter and the March for Our Lives movements. The worst outcome, many participants agreed, would be for the public health community to grow discouraged or recalcitrant in the face of so many threats.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe have a duty to play a role in the changes our country needs,\u201d said David Himmelstein, distinguished professor at the School of Urban Public Health at Hunter College. And he reminded the audience that the country\u2019s political winds are always shifting.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPendulums swing both ways,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014<a href=\"mailto:msamu@bu.edu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Michelle Samuels<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Dean\u2019s Symposium, speakers and panelists dissect health effects of Trump-era policies and how current administration reveals deep roots of injustice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10989,"featured_media":125173,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"bu_prepress_billboard":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term_manual":""},"tags":[1966,2734,2283,2371],"bu-publication":[3516],"sphnews-article-category":[3519,3531,3541],"sphnews-topic":[],"bu_edition":[],"media_type":[],"profile_tax":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/125149"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bu-article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10989"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125149"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/125149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":175232,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/125149\/revisions\/175232"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125149"},{"taxonomy":"bu-publication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-publication?post=125149"},{"taxonomy":"sphnews-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sphnews-article-category?post=125149"},{"taxonomy":"sphnews-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sphnews-topic?post=125149"},{"taxonomy":"bu_edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu_edition?post=125149"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=125149"},{"taxonomy":"profile_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile_tax?post=125149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}