Staggering Statistics and Devastating Details

Dear Leading Ladies,

We decided to change it up this week. Instead of presenting an in-depth look at one issue, we are offering some staggering statistics and devastating details about a variety of social justice issues of concern to us. We hope you will find them as compelling as we do — and as clarion calls to action for all of us.

Did you know?

  • Not only are Americans “more likely to drop out of high school than in most other advanced countries” but “about one-fourth of those who graduate from high school cannot pass the American military’s qualifying exam,” according to Tightrope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

  • Although strict gun control laws have been enacted in some states, they do not stem the flow of guns. “More than two-thirds of guns connected to crimes in New York and New Jersey were brought in from other states, mostly from the South,” according to The New York Times.

  • The REAL College Survey, compiling responses from 330,000 students at more than 400 colleges and universities found that 39% of respondents were food insecure in the prior 30 days; 46% of respondents were housing insecure in the previous year; and 17% of respondents were homeless in the previous year.

  • “A member of the top 10 percent of income earners [in the US] makes about 39 times as much as the average earner in the bottom 90 percent; the average member of the richest 0.1 percent of the population earns about 196 times more than an average earner in the bottom 90 percent,” according to the 2021 Children’s Defense Fund report.

  • There is no national mandate about what states need to teach about American history. In a two-month investigation, CBS news found in 2020 “that seven states do not directly mention slavery in their state standards and eight states do not mention the civil rights movement. Only two states mention white supremacy, while 16 states list states' rights as a cause of the Civil War.”

  • Defunding (a misleading descriptor) the police has been inaccurately interpreted by critics as abolishing the police. Proponent and sociologist Rashawn Ray, writing for the Brookings Institution, explains that defunding, in fact, means “shifting funding to social services that can improve things such as mental health, addiction, and homelessness [and] is a better use of taxpayer money.”

  • “Nearly 1 in 7 children [in the US] were poor in 2019, according to the Children’s Defense Fund report for 2021. “71 percent were children of color and more than 2 in 3 lived in working families.”

What can we do with this information? Spread it around. Make sure others know the truth. When minds change, so do hearts. Then, when there is action proposed around these issues, people feel motivated to respond.

That is our hope.

Therese
Judy
Mary
Beth
Leading Ladies Executive Team
ladies@leadingladiesvote.org
leadingladiesvote.org

Staggering Statistic, Education, Equality, GovernmentBrenda Riddell