Tribalism Disunites USA “Union”

ALL ABOARD! NO “Mena” Party Race Creed Color-coded USA Census Express

The MENA mania is nonsense fueling increased fragmenting of the United States. 

While I have no prejudice against any nation or group, I do not want to see the United States turned into the sectarian, factional conflict-riddled culture and character of the peoples of the  Middle East and Africa (with foreigners constantly exploiting that culture and character).

I

f people are concerned with the health of American citizens or inhabitants more generally, what they should is

• (a) Push for an improved and thoroughly functional U.S. public health system (which has deplorably and deliberately declined over many years as public officials have revolved in and out of the public and private sectors and have become more and more deeply unconcerned, inept, corrupt and monetarily tied to and entangled with private and narrower and narrower individual interests); and

• (b) Gather health, disease, predisposition data from public health, medical and related institutions.

The solution to rabid, detrimental politicizing and privatizing, the gerrymandering of persons and processes, the undermining, neglect and sidelining of genuine, fundamental public interests and services — i.e., addressing matters of the common defense and general welfare of the United States  — is not more of the same.

I would rather public officials and the body politic

• (a) End the pandering; 
• (b) End the corruption among public officials and processes; and 
• (c) Delete entirely from U.S. Census forms such demographic formulations as sex/gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, et.al (which can and are exploited for sinister reasons and turned against individuals and the public good).

For the purposes of congressional representation or district-determining, the government needs only general totals in a given geographical area — bodies—not “kind” (pink, green or cream), labels from which sinister forces concoct sinister suppositions.

T

herefore, the argument set forth last year by Nadia N. Abuelezam and Sandro Galea (“No MENA Category” on U.S. Census “… a Mistake” (and repeated in a segment of last night’s Pacific News program aired on KPFA-Berkeley), I believe to be flawed, shortsighted, possibly partisan and narrowly self-serving.

Abuelezam and Galea wrote

• “Imagine we (? we) know that 25 percent of Whites and 50 percent of those identifying as ‘Other’ are at risk for depression (a health condition) while Arab Americans have an increased risk at 75 percent.
• If all those who are Arab American identify as White, we overestimate by 36 percent the relative risk of depression (a health condition) for Whites in the population.
• This misclassification will limit our (? our) ability to target interventions to the population most in need of appropriate mental health services.”

At the end of their article, the biographical notes name the writers as instructors at Boston College and Boston University School of Public Health: Nadia N. Abuelezam as an “assistant professor at the William F. Connell School of Nursing”; and, respectively, Sandro Galea as a “Robert A. Knox Professor and Dean.”

The U.S. Census Bureau announced in January of last year the exclusion of a “MENA category” on the 2020 Census.

The term MENA (or WANA) — “often used in academia, military planning, disaster relief and as a broadcast region for media planning and business writing” — is an “English-language acronym” for the region of the “Middle East and North Africa” (or for a group of countries in “West Asia and North Africa”) that carries, geopolitically and domestically, an actual and/or potentially discriminatory connotation and application.

Clearly the current U.S. administration (as of its predecessors) has a great deal to answer for in its misguided attitude and actions in the arenas of domestic and international affairs (the voters will or will not hold them to account). And while I have no idea what founds its position concerning demographic content or these particular marketing data on the U.S. Census, …

My argument is against further fragmentation, disuniting, of the United States of America, regardless to rationale.

F

urther, it is my belief that people rigidly aligned with or wedded to an area of ideological, political, partisan, personality spectra—devoted to their own singular point of view and believing theirs to be the only, the “right” view — are very likely to

• (a) Miss the whole view
• (b) Blind themselves to an essential broader perspective; and, in the final analysis,
• (c) Sabotage, hinder, and deny the greater good.

 

Sources

Public Health Post online magazine Viewpoint “No MENA Category is a Mistake” by Nadia N. Abuelezam and Sandro Galea June 4, 2018 https://www.publichealthpost.org/viewpoints/no-mena-category-is-a-u-s-census-bureau-mistake/

Wikipedia

MENA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MENA

A weekly program originating at Pacifica Radio station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California, is called “VoMENA (Voices of the Middle East and North Africa),” a program that “deals with the history, politics, culture and social issues of countries in the MENA region.”

Insight Beyond Today’s News, CLB - © All Rights Reserved