Culture & Engagement

In this special issue, we define ableism as stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, and social oppression toward people with disabilities—the largest minority group in the United States.

The goal of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was to create a civil rights law protecting people with disabilities from discrimination on the basis of their disabilities.

The editorial begins with a discussion of the ADA’s history, highlighting the indispensable role of the broad disability rights coalition. The editorial then turns to an overview of the law and its main provisions, before discussing its domestic impact, both in integrating those with disabilities into society and reducing discrimination in health care settings—while acknowledging the law’s unfinished business.

From the article, "I am not a “person with a disability.” I do not “have a disability.”

From the TED-Ed Blog

This project aims to examine factors underlying disabled persons' perceptions of discrimination legitimacy and potential ways to make discrimination more unambiguously unacceptable.

From Huffington Post and argues that laptops are necessary in classes for disabled students.

The man who coined the term "ageism" argues that the United States has not made the much-needed research investment in aging.

What's a surefire way to make activism more effective? Make it intergenerational. What's the biggest obstacle? An ageist culture that pits old against young and bombards us with messages that wrinkles are tragic and old people useless. Aging is not a problem to be "fixed" or a disease to be "cured.” It's a natural lifelong process that unites us all, and a world that's better to grow old in is better for everyone.

Debunking myth after myth about late life, author and activist Ashton Applewhite passionately urges us to come together at all ages - and dismantle ageism in the process.

Ageism leads to poorer health, social isolation, earlier deaths and cost economies billions: report calls for swift action to implement effective anti-ageism strategies

This manuscript presents findings of a study of older Latinos living in Skid Row and the factors that contributed to these men and women becoming homeless. The findings may assist us in improve our understanding and development of health service, program and policy changes that address the needs of homeless older Latinos and the nurses and others who care for them and their families.

A primer on the impact of implicit biases in schools and how they can be expressed by students and faculty.

Discrimination is deeply rooted not only in American history and culture but also in our very human nature. There are many significant concepts that articulate these tendencies and biases, including but not limited to otherness and the “other-race effect,” in-groups and outgroups, and implicit and unconscious bias.

Key data highlights focusing on race and ethnicity and promising practices.

The purpose of this study was to determine the perceptions and level of awareness college students have of microaggressions along with the degree of offensiveness and impact on academic motivation. While academic motivation was not impacted negatively, our results revealed individuals commonly targeted in microaggressions had greater awareness of their relevant microaggressions than did their non-targeted peers.

The question of how higher education can prevent a return to normal and destabilize structural racism has been at the center of AAC&U’s Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) initiative. Launched in 2016 in partnership with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, TRHT seeks to heal our communities and jettison the belief in a hierarchy of human value.

School districts that predominantly serve students of color received $23 billion less in funding than mostly white school districts in the United States in 2016, despite serving the same number of students, a new report found.

The health justice framework envisions the leveraging of law and policy to advance racial and socioeconomic health equity. Health justice scholars have examined structures in need of legislative and policy reforms, both within healthcare and with regards to the social determinants of health. My article argues that access to justice is an under-examined and critical component of health justice.

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) pandemic has taken the greatest toll on racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. Blacks and Latinxs suffer greater disease incidence, prevalence, morbidity and mortality from HIV as compared with Whites. Similarly, the Covid-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has disproportionately affected Blacks, Latinxs, and Native Americans causing higher rates of infection, more severe disease, and higher rates of mortality as compared with Whites.

Pharmacists took an oath to protect the welfare of humanity and protect our patients. As such, to practice truly patient-centered care, pharmacists must recognize racism as a root cause of social determinants of health and use their privilege to educate themselves and their colleagues around dismantling structural racism.

The article presents the discussion on systemic racism being a cause of health disparities. Topics include health disparities involving the differences in health seeking behavior; National Housing Act of 1934 created for providing stability to the banking industry at a time of national crisis; and Social Security Act of 1935 created for providing benefits for the elderly and disabled.

Discrimination causes health inequities for stigmatized groups. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals, in particular, are at significantly increased risk for disparate health outcomes when they reside in states that fail to extend equal protections to them or that actively deprive equal rights to them. Several states and the federal government have proposed or enacted laws that permit residents to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals.

We examined implicit prejudice in a sample of 37 heterosexual college students who reported little or no sexual prejudice, using the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) and psychophysiological measures of affect.

The essay considers how the widespread international success of LGBTQI activists to garner social acceptance has made the terms homophobia and homophobic pejorative terms.

From the ACLU.

A breakdown of the states and the laws that protects people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing and public accommodations. Click on states to see law and information.

Pew Research Center conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis, and other empirical social science research.

Health disparities exist between lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals and heterosexuals and can be explained by differential access to healthcare, unique experiences with discrimination, and higher prevalence of HIV/AIDS.

A comprehensive new study from the Center for American Progress finds that many LGBTQ people continue to face discrimination in their personal lives, in the workplace and the public sphere, and in their access to critical health care.

It’s difficult to grapple with the idea that we may have gotten it wrong – that, despite our best intentions, we’ve done real harm. What I’ve learned along the way, however, is that this discomfort can be a good thing. All the best opportunities for growth and reflection involve some level of discomfort. This is how we align our values with our actions."

Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the primary goal of integrating the workforce and eliminating arbitrary bias against minorities and other groups who had been historically excluded.

From the Huffington Post, from the article: "it’s impossible to deny that being born with white skin in America affords people certain unearned privileges in life that people of other skin colors simply are not afforded. "

The author focuses on the notion of system racism, how it changed and what causes it. It offers statistics which demonstrates improvement as white Americans abandoned racism.

From the Huffington Post...For a while now, I’ve been thinking about how terms like “white privilege,” “inclusion” and “unconscious bias” all sound just... too nice. Don’t they seem a little on the pleasant side for words used to address a system of racist oppression?"

By the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
To create an equal society, we must commit to making unbiased choices and being antiracist in all aspects of our lives.

Recognizing white privilege begins with truly understanding the term itself.

Although redlining — a form of lending discrimination — has been outlawed for decades, its scars remain visible in many communities across the U.S., experts say. Read on to learn more about redlining and its impact.

History.com gives a brief overview the history of Anti-Semitism from Medieval Europe, Russia, the Holocaust, and in Europe and America.

In the following viewpoint, Bret Stephens challenges the mainstream narrative that rising antisemitism in the United States and around the world predominantly comes from white supremacists on the political right.

We live in an age of conspiracy theories. In the wake of the January 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, and with movements like QAnon on the rise, it's clear that millions across the United States subscribe to theories that a diabolical cabal of elites is secretly controlling society, and that they are willing to take violent action against these imagined enemies.

Specifically, this collection gathers scholarly conversations that come together at the intersection of transnational feminisms and digital Islamophobia in order to better understand how the confluences of race, gender, and religion become transmuted through digital platforms and racist, nationalist, and other violent and lethal Islamophobic ideologies.

Islamophobia is defined as the fear of or prejudice against Islam and Muslims, or those who follow Islam.

The system of higher education in the United States is highly stratified, with social class divides at nearly every touchpoint of students’ educational experiences.

Blog from Johns Hopkins Medical School students.

Language is everywhere. And it is one of the ways classism shows up readily in higher education and student affairs.

As a result of committed student and faculty activism, the topic of sexual harassment and sexual assault within colleges and universities has entered the national spotlight. Renewed attention to these problems has been met by a federal push to pressure institutions of higher education to comply with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

This convergent mixed methods study of 2462 survivors surveyed through the National Domestic Violence Hotline explores how MR laws impact survivors' help-seeking, the outcomes of their help-seeking, and whether their race, gender, and/or sexual orientation influenced their experiences.

This article analyzes women’s rights advocacy and its impact on the meanings of gender equality during the period from the achievement of suffrage in 1920 until the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This Article analyzes how race shapes experiences of harassment and how seemingly positive legal strides continue to fail women of color thirty years beyond Kimberlé Crenshaw’s initial framing of intersectionality theory. I discuss the weaknesses of the reform efforts and argue for more tailored strategies that take into account the ineffectiveness of our current Title VII framework and, more specifically, the continuing failure of the law to properly deal with intersectionality.