Helpful perspective that I'm passing along to ASPPH's "Expanding the reach, visibility, and impact of the field of academic public health" expert panel, which is working to support the Framing the Future: Education for Public Health 2030 effort (https://www.aspph.org/teach-research/framing-the-future/). Thank you!
Always appreciate your thoughts, Sandro! I deeply agree that we must reach beyond political and sociodemographic divides in our work, both in public health and politics. I believe engagement and discourse are goods unto themselves.
That said there’s an implicit both-sidesism here that’s worth facing down. So much of our divide right now is about exclusion, I grant you, but what upon? The only way you can call Suffolk more “intolerant” than Talahatchee is if you believe that intolerance of beliefs is the same as intolerance of identities. Is intolerance of hateful beliefs—that Black people are less than, that Muslims are terrorists, that immigrants don’t belong—really the same as the intolerance at the core of the hateful beliefs I just named? Is the intolerance I have for for the belief that denies that I could ever be American because of my Arab heritage or that I am a child of immigrants really the same as the intolerance of me simply for being what I am? I can’t change these things about me, but those who believe these things can (and should) change their hatred of them.
So while I agree that we must resist the urge to bubble and we must engage to bring about change, when one group of people believes that another group and those who believe in their equality is implicitly inferior, it’s no longer a both-sides debate.
Helpful perspective that I'm passing along to ASPPH's "Expanding the reach, visibility, and impact of the field of academic public health" expert panel, which is working to support the Framing the Future: Education for Public Health 2030 effort (https://www.aspph.org/teach-research/framing-the-future/). Thank you!
Always appreciate your thoughts, Sandro! I deeply agree that we must reach beyond political and sociodemographic divides in our work, both in public health and politics. I believe engagement and discourse are goods unto themselves.
That said there’s an implicit both-sidesism here that’s worth facing down. So much of our divide right now is about exclusion, I grant you, but what upon? The only way you can call Suffolk more “intolerant” than Talahatchee is if you believe that intolerance of beliefs is the same as intolerance of identities. Is intolerance of hateful beliefs—that Black people are less than, that Muslims are terrorists, that immigrants don’t belong—really the same as the intolerance at the core of the hateful beliefs I just named? Is the intolerance I have for for the belief that denies that I could ever be American because of my Arab heritage or that I am a child of immigrants really the same as the intolerance of me simply for being what I am? I can’t change these things about me, but those who believe these things can (and should) change their hatred of them.
So while I agree that we must resist the urge to bubble and we must engage to bring about change, when one group of people believes that another group and those who believe in their equality is implicitly inferior, it’s no longer a both-sides debate.