Jacob Week 3

 I think the best way to deal with minorities in poverty is to just try and fix the clearly broken social mobility in America. Wealth has been consistently funneled upwards since the Reagan administration. While increases in technology and development will increase the total wealth in an economy or the world (I wouldn't give up my modern lifestyle to be the king of France living in a palace without the internet, air conditioning, or a refrigerator), "rich" vs "poor" will still be relative and in comparison to one another. The United States has gotten richer and richer, but the lower and middle class citizenry has seen a drop in quality of life despite the growth. The only way this makes sense to me is if that new wealth and a large part of the old wealth has been siphoned from the masses and collected in the hands of the mega-rich and the old. I'm not a revolutionary or politically extreme, I just think that the wealth has been funneled upwards so much lately that it would even be in the best interest of the wealthy to redistribute some of the wealth downwards in order to promote stability and protect the skewed system that enables their lifestyle.

On the other hand, redlining and "unideal" zoning is, in my eyes, effectively black-and-white. Looking at cases like Village of Euclid v. Ambler Reality Co. (1926) and seeing at the current state of us zoning laws, the problem is undeniable. There's a good map if you scroll down this link a little: https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/heres-how-las-suburban-style-zoning-contributes-to-racial-disparities-uc-berkeley-study . Urban sprawl is made horrible by massive single-family zones and high capacity apartments are packed next to landfills, power plants, undesirable facilities to immorally let the poor live next to filth. Generally I consider a notable amount of the social justice I see to be either impractical, seeking solutions that don't address the core issue (such as trying to appeal to the issue of minority poverty without firmly tackling the issue of upward mobility in modern America), or sometimes overblown. However, city zoning is one of the cases where it is absolutely designed to discriminate. While some practices are technically illegal, the amount of de facto enforcement of discriminatory policies and NIMBY's ("not in my backyard", a term for people who, regardless of what policies they outwardly support, reject any change in their actual neighborhoods and cities) blocking change is disheartening.

On the food specific problem, the purposely concentrated poverty in these areas already makes buying food more challenging, but due to the associated risk and lower profit it further disincentives supermarkets from opening up in these areas. Combine this with trends and policies in the United States turning supermarkets into conglomerate beasts and running small stores out of business, and the issue is magnified. I believe this is also all a symptom of the K-shaped economy (K-shaped since the middle splits with the top getting richer and poor getting poorer, like the shape of a K) mentioned at the beginning of this post, with developments like the FTC turning into little more than a rubber stamp of an agency making the situation worse. I don't think this problem is on the scale of "develop urban gardens to help combat this issue :)", but on a larger scale such that systematic change is required. Both because the situation is that bad, and because the issues effects a lot more than just urban food deserts. Obviously urban gardens are a good ideal, but I think it'd be like telling people to help fill water buckets during a wildfire. Technically helpful, but worth so little that advocating for it is almost self-detrimental.

I generally like to separate politics and social activism, although I know that they are deeply intertwined. If something is to be changed through government action, I think it should often be done through government change and advocated for in a political sense. This behavior can hinder me, as if everyone was like me methyl iodide would still be on strawberries. However, not everything can be legislated away. Some changes can only be made through social change. Issues that exist in the de facto, regardless of what the law says.
I personally believe a lot of activism only ends up discomforting the more conservative members of society, and ends up pushing them to oppose the activism without accomplishing anything meaningful. Think of people blocking traffic or throwing tomato soup on the Mona Lisa. This is why I'm so critical of activism and may seem pessimistic. However, issues like zoning laws and the culture around them, are something that I think does fall on us, as people in a society, to fix, as people in a society.