I’ve seen a lot of very angry stuff on Twitter.
Someone named Jesse Kelly seems to be making demands of purging “racist
history” for example, by attacking ivy-league universities which in the past
had connections with slavery.
Plenty of high-minded white (male) college students
who have publicly signed on to full support of Black Lives Matter would then
have an existential crisis continuing to attend. Maybe their turn to learn to
be in the same boat? Maybe national service?
On the other hand, where does the obsession with
statues and names stop? Thomas Jefferson
and Monticello, George Washington (and the University named after him, from
which I graduated?) What about the Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin? The Lee House in the Arlington Cemetery,
Dorey Schelmer and Meghna Chakrabarti had an article
where Rana Foroohar and Michelle Singletary do a podcast for WBUR, “Economic
Roundtable: Pandemic, Protests and a Troubled Economy”.
“Systemic breakdowns are not personal failures.” Well, they are if you had been
inappropriately privileged and then are challenged from beyond the blue. Rana
really gets emotional at the end of the 47 minutes. She rails about people who make policy (that
might include opinion writers indirectly) and have no personal contact with the
disadvantaged people they make rules for.
The thrust of the discussion was to migrate from
accumulated wealth to labor for its own sake.
This does matter more to people of color (which might be many other
minorities) than most whites (and she does go through the accumulated affects
of redlining and the mortgage crisis in 2008, and then talks about how the pandemic
has affected POC disproportionately and their jobs.
My own use of the web for speech becomes an issue,
because I can do it with accumulated assets and not as a business that employs
people. In the short run, I have very
little to “sell” people or create jobs.
In a longer run, there may be some ideas but it has to be permissible
for me to carry them out, despite my “privilege.”
If you really want to address wealth inequality, you have
to consider a lot more than race. Activists
are distracted by the statues issue when they really could demand more from (“privileged”)
people to account for how they got what they have, and turn this into a personal
moral issue. Consider shared risk exposure and proximity (with service
expectations). Consider policies that
discourage passing on large inheritances, or even partially surrendering some
existing ones, where possible (state laws on trusts would need to change),
given the economic crisis. Particularly
if the economic impact continues as long as the speakers say in the podcast, you
want to think about “proportional equity” of outcome, where the reward is
appropriate for the risk and labor effort made by the person and takes into
consideration service.
No comments:
Post a Comment