Life is more than a box of crayons

I suppose I'm a bit jaded, but I can never say the word 'diversity' without feeling a bit of cynicism. What good is a rainbow of people-colors if everyone is stuck in the same impoverished boat? Am I just part of some whimsical menagerie packaged for consumption by a more privileged class?
As I have roamed around the country, and the world, I have come to appreciate a bit more about what I think really matters to me about diversity.
As a child of first generation immigrants, I was raised in a multi-ethnic world. Always part American, and part something else. One of the gifts of this sort of mixed background is a sort of flexibility to take in and absorb new life experiences, whether it be adopting a new cuisine or being immersed in the sounds of a language I cannot even hope to understand. Such experiences are more easily digested; such moments are more easily inhabited as part of the richness of everyday life.
Without this flexibility, I could only imagine how new experiences may be cast onto the island of the "foreign", to be sampled, but never trusted. Perhaps to be temporarily adopted, but never to gain entrance to the status quo.
I guess that is the fruit of diversity, a reason for diversity I can hang my hat on. It's not a haphazard windfall of grab-bag demographics, It's something that I think needs a lot of cultivation, and mutual respect. To relinquish the idea of the "default" cultural existence; it takes a healthy dose of self-awareness, and security in the uniqueness and "interestingness" of your own background, a willingness to let others who are not like you live their lives about in it, and the same willingness to live your life among those lives are not like yours. Not in separate and sometimes overlapping worlds, but precisely the same world now doubly or triply rich.

All the stuff that doesn't make it into the dissertation project will probably wind up here.

I've finally got my blog up and running!

I've got a dissertation project, of which this blog has sprung into being as I've been taking breaks from putting together grant proposals to fund this project, which means I've got some sense of purpose and a means by which to enter doctoral candidacy!

I'm hoping to share some of my head-in-the-public-health-clouds thoughts here as I make my way through the process of completing my dissertation work. More interesting things coming soon!

for now, let's remember the South Los Angeles fast food moratorium that happened in 2008 well. It turns out it didn't work.

should we have seen this coming? probably.

While the main argument here might be that only 1 year isn't enough time to see changes in the neighborhood food environment, let alone subsequent changes in diet and even further down the line, obesity, I think another problem is that the bill wasn't framed properly. To me, the bill isn't so much a way to dictate what people can and can't eat to make them lose weight, it was an attempt to produce a more equitable food environment. Not having produced effects on both these counts, I wonder how much of this has to do with confusion over the long term goals for this sort of policy or that there is just a dearth of evidence supporting the goal that eventually had the most traction, disproportionately high rates of obesity.

I'll be thinking about this for at least the next month, so I'll have more on this coming.