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This paper examines vulnerability in the context of affluence and privilege. It focuses on the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm in California, USA to examine long-term lived experiences of the disaster. Vulnerability is typically understood as a condition besetting poor and marginalized communities. Frequently ignored in these discussions are the experiences of those who live in more affluent areas. This paper seeks to more closely explain vulnerability at its interface with affluence. The aim is to challenge uncritical explanations of vulnerability. We also offer alternative ways of conceptualizing vulnerability as a material condition and social construct that acknowledges broader cultural, ecological, and economic conditions, which may offset, maintain or deepen true risk exposure. Drawing on in-depth interviews with residents and emergency service managers, the paper presents a suite of vulnerability categories that intersect to create two concomitant and competing conditions. First, vulnerability is variegated between households within communities, including those in more affluent areas. Second, household vulnerability is collectively altered, and oftentimes reduced, by the broader affluent community within which individual households reside. By paying closer attention to the Affluence–Vulnerability Interface the paper reveals a recursive process, which is significant in the context of building more disaster resilient communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial on culture and public health during the COVID-19 pandemic is presented. The author discusses the question of privilege in how people can cope with the pandemic, the impact on personal culture in social interactions, and the possibilities of the future for public health.

In this article, David G. Garcia, Tara J. Yosso, and Frank P Barajas examine the early twentieth-century origins of a dual schooling system that facilitated the reproduction of a cheap labor force and the marginalization of Mexicans in Oxnard, California. In their analysis of the 1930s Oxnard Elementary School District board minutes, alongside newspapers, maps, scholarly accounts, and oral history interviews, they argue that school segregation privileged Whites and discriminated against Mexicans as a form of mundane racism. The authors build on previous scholarship documenting the pervasiveness of racism in U. S. society to define mundane racism as the systematic subordination of Mexicans that occurred as a commonplace, ordinary way of conducting business within and beyond schools. Their findings complicate narratives that emphasize complete segregation in "Mexican schools, "while acknowledging the resistance of parents and the resilience of their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the author's observations regarding the cultural and intellectual diversity of the student protest movements and the public perception of the college student as privileged following the 2009 decision of the University of California (UC) Board of Regents to increase student tuition fees as well as the state of California's budget cuts. According to the author, the student protests have not provided a political language with which to challenge racial economic exploitation within and without minority students. The author discusses the reluctance of some minority students to save the public university as opposed to changing it. Rifts between student protest groups based on perceptions of race and culture are described and the concept of group representation is examined.

This study examines the historical relationships among privilege, race, and learning disability (LD) diagnosis. Whereas recent research links disability diagnosis primarily with racial and socioeconomic disadvantage (assuming a "low road" to disability), it is argued that in the case of LD, privileged children initially received the most diagnoses (suggesting a "high road" to disability). Using California data from 1976, 1986, and 1998, this study explores causes of LD diagnosis by examining the effects of students' individual race and district-level minority proportion. Initially, LD diagnosis appears at markedly higher rates in low-minority districts. Over time, this effect diminishes, while the effect of individual race increases, with black and Hispanic students becoming increasingly likely to receive an LD diagnosis as compared to white students. This article then discusses the critical implications of these findings for disability studies, and the relationship of social privilege to parents' role in determining the identification and accommodation of disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]