Monica Harris: the Illusion of Division
Monica Harris’ story is unique, intriguing and encouraging. A Black lesbian entertainment lawyer from southern California with Ivy League degrees decides to move to rural Montana. The kindness she discovers not only transforms how she sees 'flyover country', but how she understands the entire concept of political division in the United States.
Notes and references:
1. Monica Harris: The Illusion of Division: https:/www.amazon.com/Illusion-Division-Monica-Harris/dp/B0BDLQW9M2
2. TED talk - The labels that divide us: • The labels that divide us | Monica Harris ...
3. In the 2008 US presidential election, Barack Obama received the highest number of popular votes of any president in US history to that point; about 60% of his support came from white voters and 9% from Republicans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Un...
4. Roland Fryer of Harvard University: Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings. To answer this question, the authors construct a data set of all confirmed uses of lethal force by police officers in the United States in 2014 and 2015. They find that although minority suspects are disproportionately killed by police, white officers appear to be no more likely to use lethal force against minorities than nonwhite officers. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/up...
Do White Law Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects? Crunching the numbers, the researchers report "white police officers actually kill black and other minority suspects at lower rates than we would expect if killings were randomly distributed among officers of all races." In contrast, "we find that nonwhite officers kill both black and Latino suspects at significantly higher rates than white officers," they write. "This is likely due to the fact that minority police officers tend to be assigned to minority neighborhoods, and therefore have more contact with minority suspects." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/a...
5. Child and Teen Firearm Mortality in the U.S. and Peer Countries - The United States has by far the highest rate of child and teen firearm mortality among peer nations. In no other similarly large, wealthy country are firearms in the top four causes of death for children and teens, let alone the number one cause. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/a...
6. NYT coverage of this study: Childhood’s Greatest Danger: The Data on Kids and Gun Violence and Current Causes of Death in Children and Adolescents in the United States - The previous analysis, which examined data through 2016, showed that firearm-related injuries were second only to motor vehicle crashes (both traffic-related and nontraffic-related) as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents. Since 2016, that gap has narrowed, and in 2020, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death in that age group. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2... and https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056...
7. Mass Shootings by State [Updated June 2023] – Shows low numbers of mass shooting events in Montana and mountain states. https://worldpopulationreview.com/sta...