Tag Archives: philosophy

What the pandemic has done to racial inequality in North Carolina [charlotteobserver.com]

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Carey Sipp Carey Sipp 12/30/207:20 AM

By Gene Nichol, The Charlotte Observer, December 28, 2020

It doesn’t happen as often as one might wish. But, on occasion, you can still be surprised by what someone says. For example, earlier this month, the Donald Trump-appointed Chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, explained to the Senate Banking Committee:

“Disparate economic outcomes on the basis of race, have been with us for a very long time, they are a long-standing aspect of our economy, and there is a great risk that the pandemic is making them worse. Because the people who are most affected by the job losses are people in relatively low-paying parts of the service industries that happen to skew more to minorities and women, there is a real concern that if we don’t act as quickly as possible to support these people then we’ll leave behind an even more unequal situation. We need to do as much as we can to avoid exacerbating inequality.”

Seriously, the guy Bloomberg News calls “Wall Street’s Head of State” lectured the country on the challenges of economic justice. Man.

The traditional patterns of racial economic subordination Powell referenced have long dominated every component of life in North Carolina. Today, for example, twice as many African-American Tar Heels live in poverty as whites. The numbers are even worse for Black kids – nearly three times as many are poor as whites.

Racial income disparity is huge. But racial wealth disparity astonishes. Black households, on average, claim less than a tenth of the economic assets of white Tar Heel families. Racial minorities are dramatically more likely, in North Carolina, to be unemployed, uninsured, food insecure, housing insecure, and trapped in low wage work. Such defining disparities have existed throughout the entirety of our state’s history. Radical, systemic, disproportional racial economic impact, as Chairman Powell put it, has “been with us for a very long time.”

To read the rest of this post, please click here.

https://www.charlotteobserver….rticle248124905.html

Carey Smith Sipp

carey.pacescommunites@gmail.com

How America Manufactures Poverty [newyorker.com]

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Carey Sipp Carey Sipp 3/15/231:00 PM

“We typically don’t talk about poverty as a condition that benefits some of us,” Desmond writes in his morally charged manifesto. “It seems we prefer more absolving theories of the problem.”Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker

By Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, March 13, 2023

“Books about poverty tend to be books about the poor,” the sociologist Matthew Desmond writes in “Poverty, by America” (Crown). That’s true whether the motivation is to blame the poor for their lot—chronicling the supposed pathologies creating a “culture of poverty”—or, more commonly nowadays, to generate empathy via detailed ethnographies of survival and agency amid deprivation. It was true of the first books that set out to systematically map and measure poverty, such as the Victorian reformer Charles Booth’s seventeen-volume “Life and Labour of the People in London,” and of Progressive Era attempts to rattle the consciences of the well-off, like Jacob Riis’s document of New York tenement life, “How the Other Half Lives.”

When Michael Harrington wrote his 1962 classic, “The Other America,” a work of morally charged narrative nonfiction often credited with helping to inspire the War on Poverty, his aim was to reveal the “socially invisible” poor to the rest of America. A cocoon of postwar prosperity and complacency, he wrote, blinkered “middle-class women coming in from Suburbia on a rare trip,” who might “catch the merest glimpse of the other America on the way to an evening at the theater”; it also blinkered “the business or professional man,” who might “drive along the fringes of slums in a car or bus” without regarding it as “an important experience.” The book’s dominant rhetorical modes, as Harrington’s biographer Maurice Isserman notes, were paradox and revelation. If the scales were pulled from the eyes of his well-meaning readers, they would see, in the shadows of American plenty, tens of millions of poor people, whom Harrington catalogued and described: rural poor, city-dwelling slum poor, alcoholic skid-row poor, and so on—all of them urgently needing the help of the government and liberal élites. Even a book like Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground,” an influential neocon attack on “welfare dependency,” from 1984, focussed on the poor themselves, if only so that Murray might make an argument about how they had immiserated themselves by adapting to anti-poverty policies.

[Please click here to read more.]

Carey Smith Sipp

carey.pacescommunites@gmail.com

Vincent J. Felitti, MD, Co-Principal Investigator of the Landmark ACEs Study, Receives Prestigious STAR NeuroLeadership Award

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Carey Sipp Carey Sipp 4/5/2612:00 PM

Felitti and Co-Principal Investigator Robert F. Anda, MD, to Be Celebrated at May 22 Virtual Global Summit Marking Nearly 30 Years of Adverse Childhood Experiences Science

Nearly three decades after publishing one of the most consequential public health studies in American history, Vincent J. Felitti, MD, FACP, has been recognized with the 2026 STAR NeuroLeadership Award, presented by the STAR Network Foundation — and will be honored at the same virtual gathering as his co-principal investigator, Robert F. Anda, MD, MS, who will receive the same award at the third annual Scars to STARs Day Summit: The ACEs Next 30 Years Global Leadership Gathering, taking place on May 22, 2026, during Mental Health Awareness Month.

Scars to STARs Day Summit — STARS for Survivors of Toxic and Abusive Relationships — is among the most significant annual gatherings in the global trauma recovery and prevention movement. Hosted by the STAR Network Foundation, the 2026 summit brings together scientists, clinicians, survivors, policymakers, practitioners, educators, and community leaders from across the United States and around the world — all participating virtually — to explore how science, lived experience, and systems innovation can break cycles of trauma and protect the next generation. Dr. Felitti will be featured in an opening film honoring the legacy of the ACEs Study and the science that has helped the world better understand the impact of childhood adversity.

The event is a free, online summit. Early registration is encouraged and is available at this link.

Dr. Felitti received the  award in San Diego, California on February 9, 2026. Dr. Anda, former Senior Scientist at the CDC, will receive the STAR NeuroLeadership Award — [to be confirmed: at the May 22 summit or separately] — presented virtually by The Honorable Patrick J. Kennedy, Founder of The Kennedy Forum and recipient of the 2025 STAR NeuroLeadership Award.

A Study That Changed Everything — For Those Who Know About It

The 1998 ACEs Study — published jointly by Kaiser Permanente and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — revealed a striking and dose-dependent relationship between adverse childhood experiences, including abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction, and lifelong physical and mental health outcomes. The higher a person’s ACE score, the greater their risk of heart disease, cancer, addiction, mental illness, domestic violence, poverty, and premature death.

The study has since generated thousands of follow-on studies worldwide and fundamentally reshaped how scientists, clinicians, and an emerging community of practitioners understand the root causes of society’s most seemingly intractable challenges. And yet, despite being published by two of the nation’s most trusted health institutions, it remains largely unknown outside the fields of public health, medicine, and social services. The science that could help explain — and prevent — generation after generation of child abuse, neglect, addiction, poverty, mental illness, and violence has not yet reached the critical mass of leaders needed to act on it.

The  landmark 2019 study onPositive Childhood Experiences added a powerful and hopeful dimension to the science — finding that positive childhood and community experiences have a meaningful buffering effect against the impact of ACEs, and that seven specific positive childhood experiences are associated with a protective effect against adult mental illness. It was in recognition of this growing body of science that the network formerly known as ACEs Connection renamed itself PACEs Connection — with the “P” standing for positive — reflecting a commitment not only to understanding and healing adversity, but to actively cultivating the experiences that build resilience and prevent harm.

“The ACEs study is one of the most important pieces of public health research ever published,” said Carey Sipp, Editor-at-Large and Director of Upstream Strategies at PACEs Connection, the global network that has served for more than a decade as the connective tissue of the ACEs science movement to prevent and heal trauma, foster individual, family, and community resilience. “Dr. Felitti and Dr. Anda gave the world a roadmap. The work of all of us is to make sure a significant number of people use it — and that it is used to overhaul the very systems that perpetuate trauma.”

“PACEs Connection has been honored to serve as a gathering place, a library, and a connector for this movement,” said Dana Brown, Interim Executive Director of PACEs Connection. “Honoring Dr. Felitti and Dr. Anda at this summit is a recognition not just of their science, but of the millions of survivors whose lives that science has helped explain — and whose healing it continues to inform.”

“The STAR Network Foundation is proud to honor the scientists whose work gave the world a new lens through which to understand human suffering — and human resilience,” said Jamie Huysman, PsyD, LCSW, Founder and Executive Director of the STAR Network Foundation. “Bringing together this coalition of organizations to advance the next 30 years of ACEs science is exactly the kind of collective action this moment demands.”

About the STAR NeuroLeadership Award

The STAR SuperNova NeuroLeadership award is given for “neuroLeadership in trauma-informed care and recovery’.  Previous recipient: Patrick J. Kennedy (2025).

Scars to STARs  – A Landmark Gathering for the Next 30 Years

The May 22 virtual summit will feature a distinguished faculty of leaders working at the intersections of trauma science, recovery, prevention, and systems change, including:

  • Jamie Huysman, PsyD, LCSW, Founder and Executive Director, STAR Network Foundation
  • Diana H. Fishbein, PhD, Founder and Co-Director, National Prevention Science Coalition to Improve Lives
  • George Rapier III, MD, Chairman and CEO, WellMed Medical Management
  • Jesse Kohler, former Executive Director, Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice and Founder, The Change Campaign
  • Michael J. Menard, author of Greater Than Gravity: How Childhood Trauma Is Pulling Down Humanity and Founder, United Against Childhood Trauma
  • Glenn R. Schiraldi, PhD, Founder, Resilience Training International [confirm full title]
  • Thomas G. Bognanno, Principal, Alliance Practice LLC

At the close of the summit, leaders of PACEs Connection will announce its revitalization as a global community platform, supported by a coalition of partner organizations committed to advancing the next 30 years of ACEs science.

Organizations in early conversations include:

About PACEs Connection

PACEs Connection — PACEs stands for positive and adverse childhood experiences — is a 63,000+ member global network advancing the science of positive and adverse childhood experiences to prevent and heal trauma, build resilience, and support flourishing communities worldwide.

About the STAR Network Foundation

The STAR Network Foundation is a global organization dedicated to advancing trauma recovery, prevention, and survivor leadership. The annual Scars to STARs Day Summit is its flagship convening, bringing together survivors and leaders from across the world to accelerate trauma-informed systems change.

For more information contact: Carey Sipp Editor-at-Large & Director of Upstream Strategies, PACEs Connection carey.pacescommunities@gmail.com | or Dana Brown, Interim Executive Director of PACEs Connection at dana.pacescommunities@gmail.com dana.pacescommunities@gmail.com

Carey Smith Sipp

carey.pacescommunites@gmail.com