Sociohistorical contexts of racial violence: sundown towns and the durability of racialized public space

Guy Lancaster Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883-1924: Politics, Land, Labor, and Criminality, New York: Lexington Books, 2014; 186 pp.: ISBN 0739195492, 24.95 [pounds sterling] Lancaster provides a historical and sociological account of racial cleansing in the state of Arkansas from the post-Reconstruction era until the post-World War I period. Its historical account examines the racial politics and violence of the period and employs the concept of racial cleansing, the use of which provides the sociological basis of the work. The term 'sundown town' refers to a town or community that employed tactics to remove African Americans, often by force, from the area or to keep them from inhabiting that area. These settlements were often found in the American South, but away from the agricultural regions where the labour of Blacks was needed to sustain the local economies. Lancaster feels the term 'sundown town', while capturing its historical significance, is inadequate in that it fails to explain the rationale behind the motivations that created these spaces; therefore, the term 'racial cleansing', a derivative of the more widely used term ethnic cleansing, is used. Although similar in many respects to lynching, lynching was normally used to punish a target offender and functioned as a visible reminder to others in the community of the horrendous consequences of challenging the White power structure. Other vigilante actions such as nightriding and whitecapping were attempts to terrorise, but not necessarily extirpate, whole communities. Therefore, though normally not as violent as lynching or vigilantism, racial cleansing had the effect of changing the demography of a region, with its long-term social, cultural, political and economic effects. The Democratic Party gained state political control of Arkansas politics due to a series of manoeuvres that ended up protecting the interests of the moneyed landowners. At the same time, German immigrants began entering the state, escaping both religious persecution and a tenuous economy, to work on Arkansas' newly completed railway system in the 1870s. Blacks outside the region also entered the state, often enticed by bogus claims of hospitality and abundant job opportunities in a fertile agricultural region. The political administration of counties with growing Black populations was initially maintained through a series of'fusion agreements', in which Blacks and Whites shared in local governance. These arrangements soon deteriorated due to White fears of Black domination, fears which were often fuelled by a few instances of racial conflict. Certain politicians took advantage of this conflict to cement racial segregation and maintain White hegemony. Not only were Blacks driven away or repulsed from the railroad industry, terroristic threats and attacks were made against African American workers in other occupations in the developing timber and mining industries and in the well-established field of agriculture. Many poor White farmers, fearing Blacks would take over their jobs, became involved in whitecapping and nightriding activities; however, some large landowners thwarted these terroristic activities through legal action. As the vigilantes were arrested, the cases proceeded through the legislative system, eventually making their way to the US Supreme Court. The highest court in the land ruled that decisions on these racial cleansing activities would be left to the states, basically clearing the way for various forms of racial oppression to continue in the state of Arkansas. …

Parks are important venues for physical activity (PA), but research indicates that they are underutilized by youth. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and preliminary evaluation of Park Hop, an innovative collaboration of seven parks and recreation agencies to create an incentivized passport-style program to increase awareness, visitation, and active use of parks among youth in Greenville County, South Carolina. Park Hop occurred in summer 2013. It was developed within a family recreation program planning framework as a free, summer-long scavenger hunt designed to encourage children and their families to visit 17 selected parks and recreation facilities and answer clues at each location. The four overarching goals of Park Hop were to 1) increase parks usage and discovery, 2) foster awareness and appreciation for the wealth of parks in Greenville County, 3) increase time spent in PA during park visits, and 4) establish an annual tradition for all to enjoy. The pilot evaluation used multiple methods to collect information about program accessibility, enjoyment, ease of participation, park awareness and visitation, perceived changes in park enjoyment, and park-based PA. A total of 231 youth submitted completed Passports (M=7.0 years). All but one youth (99.6%) indicated that they visited at least one park for the first time as part of the program, with an average of 7.0 new parks visited per youth. Survey results indicated that youth averaged 87.1 minutes of PA on their last park visit, and the majority of parents said their child enjoyed participating (98%) and that they would participate again next year (95.1%). Park Hop successfully influenced park awareness and visitation (especially to new parks) among youth and effectively translated park awareness research into a sustainable initiative that positively influenced youth park-based PA. Further, Park Hop exemplifies a successful collaboration of multiple recreation agencies across Greenville County. Such partnerships may be critical during times of budgetary constraints while cross-promotion of all area parks offers a wider variety of opportunities to citizens. Implications of this program include the utility of collaboration between multiple parks and recreation departments, the pooling of resources for common goals, and partnering with local health agencies to strengthen the view of parks as community health resources. Overall, this summer-long program provided fun opportunities for families to explore local parks and engage with multiple parks and recreation agencies. With continuous expansion and improvement, such initiatives have the potential to improve use of parks and open spaces in an effort to reduce obesity amongst youth nationwide.

Background: Mask use is a cost-effective measure to decrease COVID-19 transmission. Mask mandates and guideline intend to increase mask compliance but are often ambiguous when it comes to public outdoor spaces, such as parks.Methods: We used an observational study to examine mask use in New York City neighborhood parks during COVID-19. 1453 park visitors were observed in 13 parks during July-August 2020 using a modified and validated park use audit tool (SOPARC) that included items on general and proper mask use (i.e., mask covering both nose and mouth). GEE regression was used to determine the association between proper mask use and demographic (sex and age) and behavioral (physical and social activity) variables, while adjusting for community-level covariates.Findings: Overall, 39·0% of park visitors used masks (24·4% properly, 14·6% improperly). Females (p = 0·023), adults (p = 0·025), and seniors (p = 0·006) showed higher rates of proper mask use compared to males and younger visitors. Physical and social activity were not significantly associated with proper mask use.Interpretation: Continuing mask use is important despite the rollout of vaccines. There is a need for improved messaging regarding the proper use of masks, particularly among males and younger people. Future research should focus on developing and evaluating targeted public health messages regarding proper mask use.Funding Information: Funded in part by the National Cancer Institute (R01CA206877), New York State Health Foundation (#16-04236), Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (E4A Program Grant #76473), Bryant Park Corporation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U48DP006396).Declaration of Interests: We declare no conflict of interests.Ethics Approval Statement: The PARCS study received approval from the Institutional Review Board of the City University of New York. However, SOPARC audits are based on field observations in public spaces and are thus not considered human subject research. As the SOPARC data used were collected by the city and shared with the authors of this paper for research, the current paper is considered secondary data analysis in nature.

Today's urban spaces require diverse functions according to segmented social changes. Urban public space needs to be a field of mutual exchange, respect of diversity, and communication. According to these needs, an identity which reaches the public should be developed and realized. Therefore, this study is to present indexes for evaluating public space as a means to improve urban identity along with developing an awareness of possible problems. For this purpose, this study found out and analysed factors of evaluation indexes for the most fundamental public spaces which form cities in order to develop directions for deciding on indexes for public space and activation of that public space. An empirical analysis was conducted with the use of a questionnaire with evaluation indexes, reliability, and validity of properties of the space to be analysed and the evaluation items were tested. Based on the results, the study compared and analysed the differences between groups with independent variables (evaluation indexes) and general characteristics through a t-test. As a result, it was discovered that easy and safe accessibility in the use of urban parks as public space was statistically significant. Such results show that accessibility is the most significant factor in the use of parks.

The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching, by Michael J. Pfeifer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011, x, 143 pp., $40.00 US (cloth). State of Supremacy. Racism, Governance, and the United States, edited by Moon-Kie Jung, Joao H. Costa Vargas, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, x, 340 pp., $75.00 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper). In the fall of 2011, I taught a seminar titled and Violence in for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. (I wanted to call the course White Supremacy and Collective Violence in Arkansas, but the department chair warned about having skinhead students thinking that it was a how-to course.) Probably the most significant obstacle I encountered during the semester was a worldview--not always explicitly expressed--on the part of my students which mirrored the sort ofAristotelian mindset ever present in medieval debates over the nature of the Eucharist. Just as the essence of the Eucharist was the actual, physical body and blood of Christ, while the properties were the bread and wine one could see, so was the United States of America held to be, in essence, a fundamentally beneficent force in the world, both for its own citizens and for those of other nations; the record of genocide, slavery, terrorism, racial cleansing, and violence constituted only the accidental properties of its history and should not be allowed to call into question the country's fundamental benevolence. By contrast, I was presenting a worldview which held such events as the Elaine Massacre of 1919--during which armed mobs and federal soldiers indiscriminately killed an estimated 200 African Americans (and perhaps many more) after several met to form a sharecroppers' union--or the Harrison Race Riots of 1905 and 1909-during which African Americans were expelled from a northern Arkansas railroad town, mirroring expulsions that occurred across the nation and created all-white municipalities known as sundown towns--as normative events for the course of American history, not exceptional in the slightest. (1) At the risk of sounding too Freudian, I told my students at the end of the course that violence--especially racial violence--is to American history what sex is to our daily lives. In the average Hollywood action film, sex between the main, male lead and the woman of his choice is rather disconnected from the rest of the storyline, occurring only because classical narrative conventions depend upon some kind of romantic subplot and the titillating flash of flesh. By contrast, sex in our daily lives is more often imbued with some context and precedent, from little flirtations at the office to getting the dishes done and the children put to bed early. Though studies have not been done on the subject, probably very few couples on the run from Mexican drug lords or cyborgs sent from the future on a mission of assassination feel up for an invigorating roll in the sheets after narrowly escaping their own deaths. Likewise, said I to my smirking students, do we need to see the instances of violence we had been studying not as events that happen out of the blue but rather events that occur within the particular political and cultural context of white supremacy. Unlike the varied manifestations of fascism, the global system of white supremacy, concomitant to the colonial projects of American and European nations, has not yet come under the easy condemnation of those scholars who study political extremism. For example, in one recent work, Origins of Political Extremism. Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, political scientist Manus I. Midlarsky interrogates numerous cases of extremism--including German National Socialism, Japanese imperialism, and radical Islam--but, aside from very brief mention of Latin American troubles, leaves the Americas untouched by his analysis, as immaculate as it is held to be by the most rigid adherents to the doctrine of American exceptionalism, despite a history of genocide, slavery, ethnic cleansing, and racial oppression (to speak only of ostensibly internal developments, rather than any history of military intervention in other nations). …

Daily park use, physical activity, and psychological stress: A study using smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment amongst a multi-ethnic Asian cohort

Public spaces play an important role in urban life, as they are spaces that enable social relations, health and well-being. Those spaces aimed at leisure, such as urban parks, aim to offer the population, in addition to contact with nature, the development of physical activities and recreation for various age groups. The good quality of the spatial configuration encourages the permanence of users in the place and enables social interaction. However, the impoverishment of public space projects leads to their disuse. In this context, this article presents the result of a research that evaluated the spatial quality and use of an urban park. The case study was carried out in the Joaquim Amaral Amando de Barros Municipal Park, located in the city of Botucatu, SP. From an adaptation of the methodology developed by the Project for Public Spaces (2020), the elements associated with Access and Linkages, Comfort and Image, Uses and Activities, and Sociability were evaluated, using performance indicators and an index. The results show in general an excellent degree of adequacy of the physical aspects; however, the accessibility indicator was considered unsatisfactory. Accessibility problems impact the use of the park by people with motor disabilities or reduced mobility. Some weaknesses identified in the park can subsidize future design interventions and serve as a parameter for the development of projects in other parks.

We conducted secondary data analyses of pooled data from a clinical trial that prescribed park visits to children and their caregivers in a low-income, urban setting. Data were collected at the prescribing visit (baseline) and at one and three months of follow up from 78 families. Family characteristics were identified at baseline; regression models were used to explore changes during follow up in associations of park use with knowledge, attitudes and perceived access to parks. At baseline, park users differed from non-users in demographics, knowledge of park locations, attitudes about the value of park visits, but not affinity for nature. Park users were also more likely than non-users to feel that their neighborhood was safe for children to play in. Changes in knowledge of park locations, nature affinity, and perceived access to parks were each significantly associated with increased park use by families at one and three months after the park prescription. Adjusting for age, gender, race, poverty, and US birth, increases in knowing the location of parks were associated with an increase of 0.27 weekly park visits (95% CI 0.05, 0.49; p = 0.016); increases in feeling a caregiver had money to visit parks were associated with 0.48 more weekly park visits (95% CI 0.28, 0.69; p < 0.001); increases in perceived money for park outings were associated with 0.24 increased park visits per week (95% CI 0.05, 0.42; p = 0.01); each unit increase in nature affinity was associated with 0.34 more weekly park visits (95% CI 0.09, 0.59; p = 0.007). In other words, knowing where to go, valuing nature, and having time, and money contributed to increased likelihood of visiting a park. We discuss in terms of health behavior theory how demographics, knowledge, attitudes and perceived barriers to park use can inform park prescription interventions.

Critical factors influencing adolescents’ active and social park use: A qualitative study using walk-along interviews

Neighborhood parks are important venues to support moderate-to-vigorous (MVPA) activity. There has been a noticeable increase promoting physical activity among youth in neighborhood parks. This paper aims to assess the association between park use and MVPA among low-income youth in a large urban area. We recruited a cohort of 434 youth participants during the COVID pandemic years (2020-2022) from low-income households in Washington, D.C. We collected multiple data components: accelerometry, survey, and electronic health record data. We explored the bivariate relationship between the accelerometer-measured daily MVPA time outcome and survey-based park use measures. A mixed-effect model was fitted to adjust the effect estimate for participant-level and time-varying confounders. The overall average daily MVPA time is 16.0min (SD = 12.7). The unadjusted bivariate relation between daily MVPA time and frequency of park visit is 1.3min of daily MVPA time per one day with park visits (p < 0.0001). The model-adjusted estimate is 0.7 daily MVPA minutes for 1day with park visit (p = 0.04). The duration of a typical park visit is not a significant predictor to daily MVPA time with or without adjustments. The initial COVID outbreak in 2020 resulted in a significant decline in daily MVPA time (- 4.7min for 2020 versus 2022, p < 0.0001). Park visit frequency is a significant predictor to low-income youth's daily MVPA time with considerable absolute effect sizes compared with other barriers and facilitators. Promoting more frequent park use may be a useful means to improve low-income youth's MVPA outcome.

Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City's Public Spaces by Benjamin Shepard and Greg Smithsimon. State University of New York Press 2011. Pp. 246. $29.95 (Paperback). ISBN: 1438436203[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2012 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]I was supposed to review Ben Shepard and Greg Smithsimon' s Beach Beneath the Streets back in August. I can be thankful for delays as the events of Occupy Wall Street have caused me to completely rewrite this review. The timing for this book could not have been better as it provides a comprehensive history of the struggle for first amendment and economic rights in New York City over the past 50 years.This book is divided into two parts. The first, by Greg Smithsimon, describes the private takeover of public space through various zoning provisions negotiated between developers and the New York City government, often without the input of the local community. Smithsimon gives a general history of how government and private interests parceled out the use of public and private space. Shepard, in the second part, focuses on the practical uses ofthat space and the history of the advocate for public space who strove against a hostile government and private sector in the late 20* and early 21st century. This organization allows the reader to become grounded both in the technical aspects of space usage in Part I as well as the human narratives of advocacy in PartThe authors stress that accessible public space is vital for the basic function of society and imperative for a true democracy to function. The use of public space forms the basis for basic social discourse, from family picnics to political gatherings to the creation of safe havens such as community gardens. But the amount of open, truly public space has been shrinking dramatically as parcels of land are set aside for private uses, often over the objection of the community affected by such land grabs.Smithsimon focuses on the development of the private plazas which are public spaces in name but are maintained and controlled by private entities. While zoning agreements mandated that these private plazas be open to the public, these plazas were designed to limit access. He uses taxonomy to describe the careful planning in which corporations nominally must allow the public access, but which, through careful architectural planning, employ designs that attempt to keep the public out of these very spaces. He categories these spaces asSuburban - access is limited based on the exclusiveness of the areaFiltered -the space is designed only for certain activities such as a shopping mallPrivatized - from which, through architectural design, the public is kept at bayFor those who are homeless, public space allows those who are expelled from mainstream society (such queer youth) to band together, creating their own societal and familial bonds while living in the streets. Both authors stress how private infringement of public space has marginalized and criminalized those who have made the streets their homes. They also note how government-private cooperation in the form of park partnerships and the like have been used to quash the basic freedom of assembly as private entities forbid activities like protests in their space. Shepard points out the example of the ban on the use of Central Park for a large permitted protest during the Republican National Convention in 2004. In enacting this ban, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg put the interests of philanthropists who donated to the Central Park Conservancy over basic first amendment rights.Smithimon's and Shepard' s theories have been put to the test since September 17 when the Wall Street Occupiers, having been expelled from the public Bowling Green park by the NYPD, took the corporate notion of privately owned public space and turned it on its head by occupying Zucotti Park (formerly Liberty Plaza and re-named as such by Occupy Wall Street). …

Purpose: Racism is an essential factor to understand racial health disparities in infection and mortality due to COVID-19 and must be thoroughly integrated into any successful public health response. But highlighting the effect of racism generally does not go far enough toward understanding racial/ethnic health disparities or advocating for change; we must interrogate the various forms of racism in the United States, including behaviors and practices that are not recognized by many as racism.Methods: In this article, we explore the prevalence and demographic distribution of various forms of racism in the United States and how these diverse racial ideologies are potentially associated with racialized responses to the COVID-19 crisis.Results: We find that among white Americans, more than a quarter express traditional racist attitudes, whereas more than half endorse more contemporary and implicit forms of racist ideology. Each of these types of racism helps us explain profound disparities related to COVID-19.Conclusions: Despite a robust literature documenting persistent patterns of racial disparities in the United States, a focus on the role that various forms of racism play in perpetuating these disparities is absent. These distinctions are essential to realizing health equity and countering disparities in COVID-19 and other health outcomes among people of color in the United States.

We present a new national data set of historical sundown towns in the United States linked to contemporary spatial information – i.e., the Historical Sundown Towns Linked to US Census Geographies database. Sundown towns are places that once enacted legal or conventional practices meant to restrict the movement or residency of Black people and other people of color within their borders. Our data are based upon rich prior research by historians identifying where these racial restrictions on movement were practiced across the nation. We provide spatial information on these sundown towns, facilitating their linkage to contemporary and historical Census data from 1940 to 2020. These data present an important resource for scientists conducting quantitative studies of the durable legacies of historical racism, enabling granular analyses of the long-term consequences of an understudied form of historical racial control.

APOL1, Black Race, and Kidney Disease: Turning Attention to Structural Racism

The impact of socio-demographic, environmental, and individual factors on urban park visitation in Beijing, China