That's a real question for me. What does it mean to unite? What does it mean to gather a diasporic community of people, who are related by skin tone, but has never been a part of a community? There's so much going on in our country. The Black Lives Matter Movement communicates the attempts we are making as a people within this society to address the hurt, pain, and disregard we experience with this country.
We hunger for peace, we hunger for a voice, but we also understand that we cannot do this without the help of those standing with us around us. We are all fighting this battle, at least all of the Black people, whether they acknowledge it or not.
Right now, we are starting a Black Campus Ministries (BCM) work at the University of Iowa. e did a BBQ with NAACP and we saw over 100 Black people come out to get BBQ! I've never seen that in my 16 years looking at the University of Iowa. We are planning some BLM forums with NAACP, and as a Christian organization, we cannot ignore the political implications that are affecting the Black community here.
But recently, there was an article that said Iowa City was the least stressed city in America. Come again? Now, WHO EXACTLY WAS INTERVIEWED FOR THAT? I question the research data that helped the author and researcher come to that conclusion.
The battle is here just as well. Black community members, students from the college, and faculty are all feeling the effects of marginalization. What I thought that statement meant when I heard we were least stressed was, "Well, all of our minorities are in checked, so you don't have to deal with anxiety issues in that way, PLUS everything accommodates you easily, NO STRESS!"
BCM needed in Iowa City because Jesus cares for the lives of Black people. Would Jesus say that Jewish lives matter? Of course? Would Jesus say that Women's lives matter? Of course. Would he say that Gentiles Lives Matter? Of course. Guess what, Black lives are Gentiles as well!
That's all I got to say for the moment...
So, I researched the study that you referred to, because I wanted to see the methodology. The site that did the study - SmartAssets.com - used 9 factors, broken into two rough categories. The stressor items were average workweek length, average daily commute, unemployment rate, personal bankruptcy rate, divorce rate and ratio of housing costs to income. The stress-relievers were average hours of nightly sleep, number of entertainment establishments per 1,000 business places, and percentage of population meeting recommended weekly exercise.
ReplyDeleteThe data was pulled from public data sets, like the Census Bureau. No qualitative interviews were done. Once the data was collected, they ranked each city on each metric and then averaged the rankings. The city with the best average ranking scored a 100 and the worst average ranking scored 0.
I can see a few issues with this type of analysis.
(That was probably a hypothetical question, huh? I answered it anyway. :) )