Institutional Racism

Much of the activity in the 1960s revolving about civil rights reflected the belief that racism was a personal flaw which could be corrected by the proper adjustment of federal laws to give substance to the promises of citizenship. George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and Bull Connor all personified racism with their determined efforts to prevent blacks from achieving full citizenship rights and their excesses spurred them to action when it was believed that with the power of the federal government curbing the activities of a few die-hard racists discrimination would finally be conquered. The emphasis on personal attitudes obscured the deeply ingrained institutional views of race which had systematically discriminated against minority groups for decades. Correcting individual patterns of behavior, people believed, would also cure institutional practices since it was apparent to everyone that institutions were ultimately composed of people

Nested Partially-Latent Class Models for Dependent Binary Data; Estimating Disease Etiology

The Pneumonia Etiology Research for Child Health (PERCH) study seeks to use modern measurement technology to infer the causes of pneumonia for which gold-standard evidence is unavailable. The paper describes a latent variable model designed to infer from case-control data the etiology distribution for the population of cases, and for an individual case given his or her measurements. We assume each observation is drawn from a mixture model for which each component represents one cause or disease class. The model addresses a major limitation of the traditional latent class approach by taking account of residual dependence among multivariate binary outcome given disease class, hence reduces estimation bias, retains efficiency and offers more valid inference. Such "local dependence" on a single subject is induced in the model by nesting latent subclasses within each disease class. Measurement precision and covariation can be estimated using the control sample for whom the class is known. In a Bayesian framework, we use stick-breaking priors on the subclass indicators for model-averaged inference across different numbers of subclasses. Assessment of model fit and individual diagnosis are done using posterior samples drawn by Gibbs sampling. We demonstrate the utility of the method on simulated and on the motivating PERCH data.Comment: 30 pages with 5 figures and 1 table; 1 appendix with 4 figures and 1 tabl

Our Brother\u27s Keeper: The Indian in White America

Our Brother\u27s Keeper purports to be the story of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It is not. It is the story of the Bureau as the Citizen\u27s Advocate Center wishes you to see it. It is a series of unrelated incidents and events that make a gruesome tale when strung together on a theory-of-colonialistoppression clothesline. Yet the deliberate structuring of these incidents-so as to support an abstract interpretation of a government agency and its role in the lives of its constituent service group-pre-empts the contemporary Indian dilemma as surely as if every Indian were struck dumb and unable to speak at all. The upshot of the report is that whit3w are very, very bad and Indians are very, very helpless and that Something should be done; but the authors would not presume to offer any suggestions. It is just as well that Cahn and company do not, since if their solution were as bizarre as their presentation, it would truly be the most tragic thing ever to happen to Indian people

Partially-Latent Class Models (pLCM) for Case-Control Studies of Childhood Pneumonia Etiology

In population studies on the etiology of disease, one goal is the estimation of the fraction of cases attributable to each of several causes. For example, pneumonia is a clinical diagnosis of lung infection that may be caused by viral, bacterial, fungal, or other pathogens. The study of pneumonia etiology is challenging because directly sampling from the lung to identify the etiologic pathogen is not standard clinical practice in most settings. Instead, measurements from multiple peripheral specimens are made. This paper introduces the statistical methodology designed for estimating the population etiology distribution and the individual etiology probabilities in the Pneumonia Etiology Research for Child Health (PERCH) study of 9; 500 children for 7 sites around the world. We formulate the scientific problem in statistical terms as estimating the mixing weights and latent class indicators under a partially-latent class model (pLCM) that combines heterogeneous measurements with different error rates obtained from a case-control study. We introduce the pLCM as an extension of the latent class model. We also introduce graphical displays of the population data and inferred latent-class frequencies. The methods are tested with simulated data, and then applied to PERCH data. The paper closes with a brief description of extensions of the pLCM to the regression setting and to the case where conditional independence among the measures is relaxed.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, 1 supplementary materia

Racial and Ethnic Studies, Political Science and Mid-Wifery

One of the major fallacies of Western civilization, according to Alfred North Whitehead,\u27 was the propensity of Western thinkers to assume that ideas generated within their intellectual landscape were indicative of reality itself. Although some phases of Western science, notably physics and philosophy, have transcended their parochial origins, aspects of the old medieval synthesis still remain in the Western worldview. The gradual fragmentation of the old categories of natural history and theology into the isolated sciences and disciplines of today has produced a myriad of separate bodies of knowledge complete with their professional priesthoods and has allowed considerable slippage in the ability of the Western scientific paradigm to generate adequate explanations for the multitude of problems we face as a society

Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations

Federal Indian law... is a loosely related collection of past and present acts of Congress, treaties and agreements, executive orders, administrative rulings, and judicial opinions, connected only by the fact that law in some form has been applied haphazardly to American Indians over the course of several centuries.... Indians in their tribal relation and Indian tribes in their relation to the federal government hang suspended in a legal wonderland. In this book, two prominent scholars of American Indian law and politics undertake a full historical examination of the relationship between Indians and the United States Constitution that explains the present state of confusion and inconsistent application in U.S. Indian law. The authors examine all sections of the Constitution that explicitly and implicitly apply to Indians and discuss how they have been interpreted and applied from the early republic up to the present. They convincingly argue that the Constitution does not provide any legal rights for American Indians and that the treaty-making process should govern relations between Indian nations and the federal government.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1331/thumbnail.jp