"The South still lags" and Other Fun Facts

Note: I have rewritten this first paragraph since I first published this post. Saturday, Nov. 21, 2009
This post is not about me. It's about what's sorry about the South, where more than six generations of my ancestors have lived. I've found myself defending the South lately, first in a conversation while on vacation, with a woman in northern California; then in response to a blog post by Kevin Drum, whose blog I read often; then to a friend who was describing what some of her friends in California say or wonder about the South. But today I'm complaining, too, about the inequities of the South.

Take salaries, for example. Over ten years ago, I taught part-time at a community college in Duluth, Minnesota. My pay? $3500 per course per quarter. Fifteen years later, adjuncts at the community college here in Georgia where I tutor part-time make $2100 per course per semester. Adjuncts at the community college in Killeen, Texas, made $1550 per course per semester when I was teaching there in 2004-2007. I have taught full-time at universities, and when I was full-time, I was a voice for adjuncts and their pay. But my voice didn't make a difference.

And now, just a few minutes ago, I read that the United Health Foundation has published its results on the healthiest and unhealthiest states in the United States. Big surprise what states are the unhealthiest. The bottom 12?

• Texas
• Arkansas
• Kentucky
• West Virginia
• Georgia
• Tennesee
• Nevada
• South Carolina
• Louisiana
• Alabama
• Oklahoma
• Mississippi

The healthiest state in the country? Vermont. Oh, and guess what, health care has something to do with that:

[E]very pediatrician in Vermont accepts Medicaid and the benefits extend to families who earn up to 300% of the poverty line.

The New England states evidently should be the role model for slacker states:

New England in general sets a benchmark for the country, the report found. All six New England states are in the top 10. These states have favorable demographics and an excellent public health infrastructure, including a large number of doctors per capita.

Eight of the ten states on the bottom of the rankings list are in the South:

In general, residents of these states are more likely to be smokers or to be obese, the report found. They also have worse health insurance coverage, fewer physicians per capita and live in areas with high violent crime and more child poverty.

Oh, and the article does report that 96% of Vermonters are Caucasian and "that health outcomes can be worse for racial and ethnic populations as well as those with lower incomes and education levels."

I read this article and couldn't help but make connections with this book I'm reading now: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.  Why does the South lag? Because the rest of the country tends to give up on the South--or what might stand in as a signifier of today's South. After the Civil War, the intransigent racism of the South led to laws that essentially re-enslaved African-Americans. How did the North respond? Well, eventually by giving up on the South until the South rose up again in the form of--no, not Johnny Reb, but the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and all those other heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson  "legitimized the contemptuous attitudes of whites," especially those whites who held power in the South, and that "new consensus

marked an extraordinary turning point in the political evolution of the nation. Thousands of northern whites had fought not because of their fondness or empathy for African Americans but because the principles of the Declaration of Independence coupled with American compulsion with honesty demanded it. The abandonment of that principle, and embrace of an obviously false mythology of citizenship for black Americans, brought an end to the concept that abstract notions of governance by law and morality could always be reconciled with reality. It marked a new level of unvarnished modern cynicism in American political dialogue. And it established a pattern over the ensuing years in which almost any rationalization was sufficient to excuse the most severe abuses of African Americans. (Blackmon, p. 110-111)

I see this same betrayal today in our political discourse--oh, please, don't think I'm equating health care with the enslavement of millions of African-Americans. This is a comparison, not an equation. But just note the many politicians--not all of whom are from the South!-- who claim that we have the best healthcare system in the world. Who claim that every citizen has adequate health care. These are the voices of today's metaphorical South--it's not necessarily a region but a state of mind, a state of mind that condemns a vast portion of the nation's citizens to poor resources because of its slavish faithfulness to an ideology.

Other findings that represent this "separate but equal" myth? How about how uninsured and insured people are treated when seeking emergency care?

Uninsured patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as similarly injured patients with health insurance, according to a troubling new study.
The findings by Harvard University researchers surprised doctors and health experts who have believed emergency room care was equitable. ("Uninsured ER patients twice as likely to die", Associated Press, 16 Nov., 2009; posted on MSNBC.com)

Or how about this fun fact, that there are more hungry Americans today than there have been "since the government has been keeping track," as reported in The Washington Post :

The data show that dependable access to adequate food has especially deteriorated among families with children. In 2008, nearly 17 million children, or 22.5 percent, lived in households in which food at times was scarce -- 4 million children more than the year before. And the number of youngsters who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million. ("American's Economic Pains Bring Hunger Pains," Amy Goldstein, The Washington Post, 17 November 2009.

And earlier this week I read how,  in "its analysis of health care legislation,"  Goldman Sachs "concluded that, as far as the bottom line for insurance companies is concerned, the best thing to do is nothing." Do nothing, and stocks rise for stockholders in insurance companies: "The study's authors advise that if no reform is passed, earnings per share would grow an estimated ten percent from 2010 through 2019, and the value of the stock would rise an estimated 59 percent during that time period."  Hurray for rich bastard stockholders! Tough shit for all those millions of Americans who can't get adequate healthcare.

Something is seriously wrong in this country when over a million of Americans go hungry, many millions can't get adequate healthcare, many other millions can't change jobs because they are afraid of losing health care, and millions of workers do not receive pay commensurate with their skills and abilities.

Fun quiz: How many Southern politicians are supporting health care reform and sponsoring bills to decrease hunger and to provide workers with more rights? How do those numbers compare with politicians from other regions of the country?