Church & State Fighting Obesity

by Christine A. Scheller | Aug 22, 2011 | Feature, Headline News | 1 comment

Do Churches Have a Role to Play in Fighting Obesity?

Long before First Lady Michelle Obama began advocating the Let’s Move anti-obesity campaign, Rev. Michael O. Minor, pastor of Oak Hill Baptist Church in the Mississippi Delta, was convincing his congregation and others in the seven million member National Baptist Convention that churches have a role to play in helping congregants develop healthful living habits. The convention aims to have a “health ambassador” in every one of its churches by September 2012, The New York Times reported yesterday.

Minor has been at this for about 11 years, and tells other pastors that “sick members can’t tithe.” At his church and others in the convention, fried foods are banned, greens are boiled with turkey necks instead of ham hocks, and bottled water has replaced sugary drinks, the article said. Oak Hill also organizing group walks on a track it built around the church.

Is Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move Campaign Appropriate or Insidious?

“Michelle Obama’s major initiative during her husband’s presidency has been the Let’s Move campaign, which aims to end childhood obesity within a generation by encouraging healthier eating and activity “during their earliest months and years. While well-intentioned to be sure, something about it strikes me as insidious,” wrote Caryn Rivadeneira earlier this month at Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics blog.

“Perhaps because even as Let’s Move seeks to ‘raise a generation of healthier kids,’ it’s a government program that targets kids: namely, fat ones. As the message of Let’s Move and other programs like it has trickled down through layers of government bureaucracy into U.S.schools and schoolyards, the dangerous sides of its do-gooder message seep into our homes. It creates problems where there were once none,” said Rivadeneira.

Unfair BackLash?

“Former First Ladies Barbara and Laura Bush worked to end illiteracy. Nancy Reagan famously took on teenage drug use. Lady Bird Johnson planted flowers. But none of them have been seared for something as seemingly benign as calling for kids to eat more vegetables, as Michelle Obama has,” the Los Angeles Times reported in February on the first anniversary of Let’s Move.

“Just about everyone will agree that the nation’s children are getting fatter and that obesity is a serious health problem. But the first lady’s push for healthier meals and more exercise … has provoked a backlash from the right, who complain that the only thing here that’s supersized is Big Brother,” the article said.

Persuasion, Not Legislation

“Mrs. Obama has no legislated power. She only has the power of leadership and persuasion. I’m glad she’s using it to promote action on childhood obesity, challenging as that is,” wrote Marion Nestle, professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, at The Atlantic in February. Nestle said the initiative “had brought childhood obesity to public attention, as never before,” that “fixing school food and getting supermarkets into inner city food deserts makes excellent sense,” and “encouraging the makers of packaged foods to reduce salt and sugar and to stop blatant marketing to kids brings attention to their worst practices.”

Do Church and State Have a Role to Play?

What do you think? Do pastors and presidents’ wives have a role to play in persuading people to adopt healthier habits or are these leaders treading where only health professionals should go?

Who’s Fault Is the Achievement Gap?

by Christine A. Scheller | Aug 19, 2011 | Feature, Headline News | 4 comments

On August 28, a monument to civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. will be unveiled in our nation’s capital, but two new polls suggest that White Americans still see the African American experience through a privileged lens.

Cross-Racial Consensus/Discord

With the African American unemployment rate twice what it is for Whites and the wealth gap wider than ever, Colorlines publisher, the Applied Research Center (ARC), conducted a nationwide poll of 2,400 adults to get a sense of whose fault people think this is. What ARC found is that “there’s cross-racial consensus that hard work generally leads to success in this country and that lack of success doesn’t mean an individual didn’t work hard,” but “very different explanations for the most glaring failure of our entire society—the persistent racial disparities in achievement and well-being.”

When asked if they agree or disagree with the statement: “In the United States, people who work hard generally succeed in life,” overwhelming majorities of Americans agreed.

When asked to respond to the statement: “In the United States, people who have not succeeded in life generally failed to work hard enough and/or failed to take advantage of opportunities to better themselves,” 34 percent to 43 percent of Americans agreed, depending on their race/ethnicity, but in no group did a majority agree.

When asked about three potential factors in the achievement gap: individual initiative, race and class, respondents’ opinions varied across racial groups. Twenty-four percent of Whites said individual initiative is the only factor, while no more than 13 percent of other groups agreed with this statement. Conservative political ideology was “the most reliable predictor” of who would attribute the achievement gap to individual initiative alone. Whites were also the only group for whom a majority disagreed that racism is a factor in the achievement gap. Only 37 percent of Whites said racism is a contributor.

“The data show that even controlling for other factors, clearly African Americans are more likely to see race as part of the explanation. That means that while White liberals were certainly more likely than White conservatives to believe racial disparities were caused by race-based discrimination or lack of resources, they were less likely to believe so when compared to Black liberals,” Colorlines reported.

Class was “the only one of the three factors suggested for driving disparities that garnered majorities of all four racial and ethnic groups—Whites, Latinos, Blacks and Asian Americans,” the article said.

Finally, among respondents aged 18-25, only about 65 percent are as likely as older Americans to see individual initiative as the sole reason for success. “Like Blacks and Latinos, they are also more likely to select more than just one type of explanation. Nuance is not our enemy, and with proactive efforts, it can be our collective future consensus,” Colorlines concluded.

Adding to the Consensus/Discord

Meanwhile, a nationwide USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of more than 1,300 people that was conducted in advance of the King monument dedication found that approximately nine out of 10 Americans say civil rights for African Americans have improved in their lifetimes, but when it comes to hiring, Whites see “a level playing field” while a majority of Blacks say discrimination persists.

My Take

These conflicting views remind me of something a White leader who worships and serves in a majority Black context said to me earlier this year. He said he is and probably always will be a recovering racist because, by virtue of being White, his is a privileged point of view.

In 12-step programs, the first step toward recovery is admitting we have a problem. These poll results indicate that we do. White Americans do not clearly see the suffering that discrimination inflicts upon people of color and appear to hold these neighbors to a higher standard than they do themselves.

I’m also reminded of the Apostle Paul who lamented his own inability to overcome sin. “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing,” Paul says in Romans 7:19. “Who will rescue me?” he asks. Jesus Christ, of course, is the answer. I pray that rather than discourage us, polls like these correct our vision and lead to repentance.