Racism and Xenophobia in Italy

Italy's first ever black cabinet member is Cécile Kyenge, an immigrant from the Congo who earned her doctorate in opthalmology in Italy and married an Italian citizen. On the surface it would seem like her appointment to the cabinet would be a sign of racial tolerance in Italy. Apparently not. This week's Economist reports on the attacks that she has suffered, but it seems that the story is not one simply about race. The animosity is aimed at her priority as Minister of Integration:

to make citizenship dependent on birth, not blood ties to Italy. That would make it easier for the children of immigrants to acquire citizenship.

The Northern League opposition party is not happy about this and is attempting to block it.

The row has exposed the hollowness of the League’s claim that it is not xenophobic, only against illegal immigrants. It would be hard to find a shinier success story than Ms Kyenge’s. She entered Italy legally in 1983 to study medicine (though she lived illegally in the country for about a year after a university scholarship she had been led to expect failed to materialise). In 1994, she married an Italian engineer and became a citizen. 

The shameful treatment of the country’s first black minister, and the limited condemnation of it, not only hurts Italy’s image. It also jars with Italians’ widespread belief that they are free of racism. Using data from 2005-07, the World Values Survey found 11.1% of Italians saying they did not want neighbours of a different race, against 4.9% in Britain. Even among Spaniards, who have had a similar experience of rapid, recent and largely unauthorised immigration, the proportion was 6.9%. Ms Kyenge has a tough job ahead of her, in every sense.

Are You Having a Healthy and Sustainable Meal Today?

You may recall that the United Nations Population Division recently upped the size of its medium population forecast, suggesting that we may hit 10 billion if things continue as they are. The problem of feeding this number of people in a healthy and sustainable way is clearly a huge item on the global agenda. As we push for higher yields per acre and implement the kinds of changes that helped the food supply so far keep pace with population growth, we are confronted by the fact that having food is not necessarily the same as having healthy food. In the past few decades the western diet of more processed foods and more meat has gone hand-in-hand with higher levels of obesity and hypertension. Foottank.org just brought my attention to a new online magazine by the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition (yes, the pasta people) that has a lot of interesting reading--far too much too summarize. You have to go read it for yourself. In particular, Foodtank's co-founder, Ellen Gustafson, has an article in which she asks some important questions:

- Is yield the most important value of our agricultural output, or should we be measuring other things, like nutrition or community health? 

- If we want a healthy population, what foods should we be focused on growing to feed people?

- How can we ensure that we are growing food for people today, but also setting up our grandchildren for food security tomorrow?

Some of the healthiest foods are those that are indigenous to different regions of the world and have been staples in the diets of peasants for hundreds or thousands of years. Now, the high mortality among these people traditionally might lull us into the belief that they didn't have a good diet. But it appears that they died from communicable disease despite having a good diet. We know how to control most communicable diseases, so if we can add a good diet back on top of that, we should be healthier down the road. Foodtank.org has a list of some of these, and before you say "Oh, these will never catch on" think about the way in which the quinoa of the Incas has all of a sudden become world famous.  

Mapping the Latino Population

Pew Hispanic Research Center has over the years become the go-to place for demographic information about Latinos in the US, and today they hit another home run with a set of maps allowing you to visualize what's happening with Latinos. There is a report to accompany the maps which reminds us why these maps are important:

Latinos are the nation’s largest minority group and among its fastest growing populations. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2013), the Latino population in 2012 was 53 million, making up 17% of the U.S. population. Latino population growth between 2000 and 2010 accounted for more than half of the nation’s population growth.

Latinos are the nation’s largest minority group and among its fastest growing populations. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2013), the Latino population in 2012 was 53 million, making up 17% of the U.S. population.1 Latino population growth between 2000 and 2010 accounted for more than half of the nation’s population growth.

Half (52%) of those counties are in three states—California, Texas and Florida. Along with Arizona, New Mexico, New York, New Jersey and Illinois, these eight states contain three-quarters (74%) of the nation’s Latino population. But with the dispersal of the U.S. Latino population across the country, this share too is down from 79% in 2000 and 84% in 1990.

The map and accompanying table of metro areas is especially interesting, so that you can put your own area into context. Since I live in San Diego, contiguous to the US-Mexico border, you might expect that we would be among the very highest in terms of the Latino population, but in fact we are #11 on the list, with cities like New York and Chicago ahead of us.  

How is the Dream Fifty Years Later?

Today is the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington in which Martin Luther King gave his famous "I have a dream" speech. This was a turning point in race relations in the US, but "race" is such an unfortunately volatile topic that we need to keep track of progress. Figure 10.5 in the 11th edition of my text shows the gap in family income of Whites and Blacks in the US since data were first collected by the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey in 1947. From 1947 to the early 1960s, black family income hovered around 55 percent of white family income. In the mid-1960s the ratio jumped up to nearly 70 percent, but it has since slipped back down to 63 percent, according to data from the 2011 Current Population Survey (the latest available data). This means that since Martin Luther King's speech and the changes that came along with the Civil Rights Movement, the income of the average black family has risen slightly faster than white family income, but the gap in absolute income has actually widened and, importantly, there has not been much improvement lately.

Some of the gap is due to the different family structures between whites and blacks, as conservative pundits such as Bill O'Reilly have been pushing. While it is true that a higher fraction of black than white families are headed by females (pushing down income because there is only one earner and she is likely to earn less than a male), even among married-couple households, black families are earning only 86 percent of what white families earn. Education, as always, is a good predictor of income, and for both black and white families we can see that the more educated is the head of household, the higher is the income, yet the income gap exists at every educational level. The gap is greatest among those with less than a high school diploma--where blacks earn only 60 percent of what whites earn. But even for those holding a doctorate, blacks are earning only 89 percent of what whites make. An improvement, to be sure, but still a gap. What explains the gap? In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it seems reasonable to conclude that discrimination is the causal factor. There is still work to do here.

How Important Are Vaccinations? Ask a Church in Texas

Among the many tools that science has developed to combat disease, vaccinations are among the most powerful, because they essentially train your body to resist a particular disease. Yet, the success of vaccinations seems to have lulled a lot of people to sleep about their importance, and some of those people go so far as to believe that the vaccination does more harm than good. Today NBC News reported on what amounts to a field experiment in this idea. More than 20 members of a mega church in Texas recently contracted measles and apparently 16 of them had not been immunized against the disease. It appears that a visitor to the church from another country was the carrier--bringing the disease into an unprotected population. According to a more detailed story on MSNBC, this is a church in which the pastor preaches out against vaccinations. Perhaps most startling is that a local physician interviewed by NBC indicated that fear of "contracting" autism from the vaccination was a major reason given for avoiding the shot--even though there is absolutely not a shred of evidence to connect the two. The Enlightenment brought us the kind of science that has led to the control of disease, but we seem not to be all equally enlightened.