We could implement zoning changes that reduce the concentration of pollution and hazardous wastes in already-disadvantaged neighborhoods.
We could convert vacant land into community gardens and urban parks. We could provide more classes for parents on the critical importance of diet, exercise and immunizations for their children's well-being.
We could greatly reduce the spatial and social isolation of so many African Americans and Latinos through stricter monitoring of housing market practices, stronger enforcement of fair housing laws, expanded use of housing mobility programs, and more targeted homeownership assistance.
We could do these things and more. And we must.
None of this is to suggest that the struggle for better health care is over. As Atul Gawande notes in The New Yorker ("Now What?", April 5), even with passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act a number of hurdles must be overcome before its limited-but-important promise is realized.
These challenges include the anti-reform lawsuits planned by at least a dozen state Attorneys General, public ambivalence, and an energized opposition. Moreover, the slow phase-in of key provisions of the law will make it vulnerable to attack well beyond the immediate legal and political battles. And even then, Gawande observes, will the communities charged with making the provisions of the law work actually muster the creativity and thoughtfulness to do so? There are no chickens to be counted here.
The point is that even if all these challenges are met, we have much more and even more critical work to do.
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Andrew Grant-Thomas is Deputy Director of the Kirwan Institute. He directs the Institute's internal operations and oversees much of its US-based programming. His substantive interests include structural racism and implicit bias, alliance-building between immigrants and African Americans, African American males and gender dynamics within the African American community, and the promotion of systems thinking through videogames. Andrew serves as Associate Editor of the Institute's journal, Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts. He also edited Twenty-first Century Color Lines: Multiracial Change in Contemporary America, published in 2008 by Temple University Press. He is sits on the boards of several nonprofit organizations and various social justice initiatives. Andrew came to the Kirwan Institute in February of 2006 from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University where he directed the Color Lines Conference and managed a range of policy-oriented racial justice projects. He received his B.A. in Literature from Yale University, his M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago.
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