On this day, 1 November 1910, anarchist and syndicalist workplace militants met in Barcelona to found the National Confederation of Labour union, the CNT, with the aim to “speed up the economic emancipation of the working class through the revolutionary expropriation of the bourgeoisie”. The CNT would grow to become the leading force in Spanish working class politics, playing a leading role various general strikes, uprisings and the Spanish civil war and revolution. Four decades of Franco failed to break it and it is still active today.
We have a number of great books, as well as other items in our online store telling the history of and celebrating the CNT. Check them out here: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/all/cnthttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1251612165023931/?type=3
“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.”
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (via philosophybits)
“Stress is your body’s natural response to perceived danger. It’s actually meant to be helpful. When you experience stress, your brain’s hypothalamus prompts your adrenal glands to release hormones including adrenaline and cortisol, according to the Mayo Clinic. These hormones can impact a host of bodily functions, like increasing your blood pressure and quickening your heart rate. All of these physiological changes allow you to fight your potential stressor or flee from harm (hence the term “fight-or-flight response”).
To illustrate how this works, Dr. Crear-Perry uses an example far too many black people can relate to: a store employee following you for no reason besides the color of your skin. “Your heart starts racing, and you start breathing faster,” Dr. Crear-Perry says. “That’s a natural physiological response to the stress of being a black person in America.”
Stress responses that happen infrequently and last for a few minutes or so are perfectly normal, but chronic stress can be really detrimental to your health. (“Tell me something I don’t know,” you say.) Chronic stress can make you more prone to mental illnesses like depression, according to the American Psychological Association (APA). It can lead to migraines, tension headaches, and backaches. Chronic stress can also impact your blood vessels, arteries, and heart, which over time can raise your cholesterol levels and even increase the risk of a heart attack. Then there’s how you deal with this stress. If it’s by drinking more than a moderate level of alcohol, smoking cigarettes, or other unhealthy behaviors, that can only compound your risk of health issues.
Chronic stress is unhealthy for the average person, but these symptoms can be even more worrisome for pregnant people. If symptoms of stress like trouble falling asleep, loss of appetite, and headaches get severe enough during your pregnancy, they can impact you and your growing fetus, according to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). High blood pressure—which chronic stress can absolutely help induce—can directly increase the chances of having preterm labor as well as a baby with low birth weight, the NICHD explains. Those kinds of poor birth outcomes were the impetus for Geronimus’s weathering research.
Geronimus came up with the idea of weathering while examining why teen moms have overall higher rates of preterm birth, low birth weight, and infant death, with young black mothers having even higher rates than young white moms. She became interested in this area of study after working with several groups of black teen mothers as a young research assistant. Geronimus’s theory was that if she could take into account the different life experiences between black and white teens (like income levels), birth outcomes would improve the longer people waited to get pregnant, no matter their race. To find her answer, she dug into large pools of data like the CDC’s information on birth outcomes in 1983 among people aged 15 to 34 of various races.
“When I actually studied it, I began to see I was wrong,” Geronimus says.
What Geronimus found was that birth outcomes worsened among black moms as they aged. “If you were black and a teen mom, you had better birth outcomes even when compared to your 20s, and certainly by the mid or late 20s,” Geronimus says. The same wasn’t true for the white moms she studied.
In response to this finding, Geronimus developed the theory that weathering was a form of premature aging due to exposure to social inequity, she explains. The term is meant to capture the positive connotation of weathering (making it through a difficult experience) along with the negative implication (being damaged in the process).
Oppressed groups are essentially put between a rock and a hard place, Geronimus says. “They [are] expected to do things even though they were set up for failure, and if they [succeed] at them, it [exacts] a physical price.”
