Equality For Minorities Research Articles

ATTITUDES TO VACCINATION: SOCIOCULTURAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTEXT

In the article, theoretically-empirically analyzes of the correlation of indecision regarding vaccination and social-cultural factors are conducted. The analyses of recent researches point out at spread of indecision regarding immunization against different infectious decisions, including Covid-19. This attitude is created by diverse causes/aspects such as own persuasions, mistrust of government, development of conspiracy theories. In the article, reasons for the emergence of indecisiveness are analyzed, the existing methodologies concerning the issue are considered, and the perspective of the investigation is proposed. The study showed the following results: 30% (n = 80) of the respondents were vaccinated, and 66.3% (n = 177) were not. At the same time, 55.2% (n = 142) consider the threat from Covid-19 as serious. Also, most of the respondents (n = 167) have a positive attitude towards vaccination and are mainly supporters of progressive values ​​(equality of minorities, tolerance towards the LGBT community, etc.). In addition, respondents who see Covid-19 as a serious threat have a positive attitude towards vaccination (p = 0.370). Summing up, the main reason for the hesitation of vaccination is adherence to traditional values. This includes religiosity, family relationships, and parent-child relationships. The main category of these subjects are people aged 25+. Also, in general, the subjects do not trust the authorities and consider their steps regarding Covid-19 to be ineffective. Perhaps this is also one of the defining points in the formation of attitudes towards vaccination, because most of the sample has a positive attitude towards vaccination, but has not decided on this step yet.

Military Veterans and Neighborhood Racial Integration: VA Mortgage Lending Across Three Eras

The military has long been seen as an avenue for increasing racial equality for minorities, especially black Americans. In this article, we examine to what extent military veterans also experience residential integration by looking at neighborhood residential outcomes for black and white men utilizing the popular Veterans Affairs (VA) loan program to purchase a home. We draw on data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) to examine residential integration among white and black veteran homebuyers compared to homebuyers utilizing conventional loans over three major lending eras: 1990s, 2000–2007, and 2008–2015. By 2015, a quarter of all home purchase mortgages loans to black men were VA loans even though veterans made up only a tenth of the adult black male population. In our multivariate analyses, we uncover a sizeable combined swing toward neighborhood minority-white integration, 14.4% points, among black and white veterans who use VA loans. Compared to those with conventional loans, black veterans live in neighborhoods with 10% points fewer minorities and, white veterans, 4.4% points fewer whites. Our results illustrate how racial integration in the US military has the potential to foster lasting housing integration among veterans.

Why Is the European Union Being Deconstructed?

The European Union must be strengthened by better involvement of Civil Society . Societal coexistence between the various local cultures in the Union is anchored in three principles that are as simple as they are powerful. - Primacy of all human life (including equality of genders and equality of minorities); - Rule of law (including equality of all citizens in- and under the law); and - Democracy and secular governance (including autonomy of State and Church). These genetically and racially neutral values have given the Union the means and resilience to guarantee diversity and peace. The 2012 Nobel Peace Prize is a testimony to the success of the Union to ensuring peace between its Member States: “At a time of uncertainty, this reminds people across Europe and the world of the Union's fundamental purpose: to further the fraternity between European nations, now and in the future.” Now, the Union has to find its way in the 21st Century. Idealistic blindness and political naivety will deconstruct the Union and do as much damage as terrorist attacks. The Union has let external events take their course. It is forcing to be reactive rather than being able to shape its vision for the future. In view of the hyper-connected World and the digitalized global economy, the authors recommend: The EU needs to undertake a comprehensive reality check: agree on a realistic moral compass and develop an implementable “Grand Design”. Civil Society MUST be part of this process. In an attempt to wrestle the discourse away from the opportunists and populists on all sides of the spectrum, this paper analyses the situation and identifies fundamental principles and cornerstones of Europe and the European Union that need to be at the basis of political solutions. The EU MUST remain a union of shared values.

Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination

Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination

Revaluing Nature: Toward An Ecological Criticism

G L E N A. L O V E University of Oregon Revaluing Nature:TowardAn Ecological Criticism Describing the early rejection of the manuscript for his widely admired book, A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean recalls in his acknowledgments the cool dismissal from one New York publisher: “These stories have trees in them.” The renowned English historian Arnold Toynbee, in his narrative history of the world entitled Mankind and Mother Earth, published in 1976 at the end of his long career and also at the time of the first worldwide recognition of the possibility of environmental disaster, concluded somberly that our present biosphere is the only habitable space we have, or are ever likely to have, that mankind now has the power to “make the biosphere uninhabitable, and that it will, in fact, produce this suicidal result within a foreseeable period of time if the human population of the globe does not now take prompt and vigorous concerted action to check the pollution and the spoliation that are being inflicted upon the biosphere by short-sighted human greed” (9). In the intervening decade-plus since Toynbee’s state­ ment, we have seen little in the way of the prompt and vigorous concerted action which he calls for, and we must consider ourselves further along the road to an uninhabitable earth. The catalogue of actual and potential horrors is by now familiar to us all: the threats of nuclear holocaust, or of slower radiation poisoning, of chemical or germ warfare, the alarming growth of the world’s population (standing room only in a few centuries at the present rate of growth), mounting evidence of global warming, destruction of the planet’s protec­ tive ozone layer, the increasingly harmful effects of acid rain, overcutting of the world’s last remaining great forests, the critical loss of topsoil and groundwater, overfishing and toxic poisoning of the oceans, inundation in 202 Western American Literature our own garbage, an increasing rate of extinction of plant and animal species. The doomsday potentialities are so real and so profoundly impor­ tant that a ritual chanting of them ought to replace the various nationalistic and spiritual incantations with which we succor ourselves. But rather than confronting these ecological issues, we prefer to think on other things. The mechanism which David Ehrenfeld calls “the avoidance of unpleasant reality” remains firmly in place (243). For the most part, our society goes on with its bread and circuses, exemplified by the mindless diversion reflected in mass culture and the dizzying proliferation of activity among practitioners of literary research. In the face of profound threats to our bio­ logical survival, we continue, in the proud tradition of humanism, to, as Ehrenfeld says, “love ourselves best of all,” to celebrate the self-aggrandizing ego and to place self-interest above public interest, even, irrationally enough, in matters of common survival (238-39). One would hope and expect that our field of English would respond appropriately to the radical displacements accompanying ecological catas­ trophe. Consider, however, that our society as a whole and our profession in particular have, as Cheryll Burgess points out, been faced with three crises in the last thirty years: civil rights, women’s liberation, and environ­ mental degradation (2). All three of these problem areas have been the subject of widespread social concern. All have become, to a greater or lesser extent, world issues. The discipline of English has addressed the concerns of civil rights, equality for minorities, and women’s liberation through wide­ spread attention and no small amount of action in such crucial areas as hiring and promotion practices, literary theory and criticism, and canonformation . Race, class, and gender are the words which we see and hear everywhere at our professional meetings and in our current publications. But curiously enough, as Burgess points out, the English profession has failed to respond in any significant way to the issue of the environment, the acknowledgment of our place within the natural world and our need to live heedfully within it, at peril of our very survival. Curiosity must give way to incredulity at our unconcern when one reflects that in this area the problem-solving strategies of the past...

Social Indicators of Equality for Minorities and Women.

Social Indicators of Equality for Minorities and Women.