We are fucked.

I like the detail of your statistics and that they show that even after years when things were suppose to change - the difference is opportunity is enormous.

Great post! Thanks for sharing!

class warfare. That's trickle-down Reaganomics nonsense.

I absolutely agree with you that social and economic justice are intrinsically tied together, and I don't think it is valuable to place economics over social justice. That said, thinking that we can fix social justice without tackling the mechanisms that make social injustice so lucrative, is a losing battle. (note though: everything in your post is exactly some of the ways in which each message lends itself to the other..the way we should be talking to people in these voter communities...wow, a Forbes article?)

This is a puzzle of human psychology and we can't ignore how humans think...not if we're going to change how they think.

People are too easily led by fear. Loss avoidance and insecurity in the face of scarcity(real or perceived) do not make people more rational and capable of being humane, or of abandoning the foundations that their realities have been built around. That's just too damn scary. Under these circumstances, in those rare cases where they do suffer cognitive dissonance about how they think they and the world ARE, versus what actually presents itself, their own efforts to resolve that dissonance only further drives them to accept stereotypes or other justifications for continuing inequality. The limbic system is in charge, and the Cerebral Cortex entirely its bitch.

So making the mistake of not giving these people something to actually focus their fear and anger at, while simultaneously telling them that people of color are not getting a fair shake, is all kinds of triggering, because what they hear is that we are coming for "THEIR" stuff, and its already getting harder and harder for them in this Kleptocracy we call America, and while this has absolutely nothing to do with immigrants or minorities, they've been told the opposite their entire lives. And now they're feeling the crunch too, and our economy is a fucking bubble. People make less than they did 20 years ago and they're in about 20 thousand more dollars of debt than they were back then. Our economy is living on credit.

In fact, the only good number I've seen is that poverty rates for black Americans has decreased, while on the flip side poverty rates for white Americans has increased...but even that's an incredibly deceptive number because people of color do not have more actual wealth than they used to, and in this unequal society, as you and the article pointed out, minorities always get shit on the hardest. The ways in which these communities are being taken advantage of by financial institutions is certainly a crime against humanity.

But that all brings us full circle to forces of economic injustice and the fact that predatory Capitalism fuels social injustice out of greed. In turns, scapegoating or making communities invisible and vulnerable is all about the bottom line..it's all about the big con. Are some of the fuckers racist as hell? Yes...but there's one color they believe in above and beyond all else. Everything else is a means to that end.

We can erode racism. We can do it big. But we have to do it by being clear about what we're going to get for everyone(otherwise the rich will continue to use welfare and immigration as wedge issues). We need to do it by being clear and loud about how we're going to give people what they are ENTITLED TO, and that we're going to do it by taking it from the people who have hoarded the world's wealth from all of us. And because that is part of our narrative, talking about racism and inequality is no longer perceived as a threat...it's no longer about raising taxes on the middle class to give to the poor...its about making their lives better by taking our worth back, and its about making the rich institutions that are bleeding all of us, the actual racists...because they're the ones using tactics and propaganda to make us kick down and not look up.

People generally think of themselves as good. They want to be good. Their own self-worth is tied to that, which is why they work so hard to make others sub-human when they intend to exploit them, or feel like they are threatened by them. It's part of the human narrative structure. That's why us channeling that opposition away from scapegoated communities and towards the rich who have gotten away with branding themselves as geniuses and job-creators and philanthropists for far too long, is so damn key.We do that and we can change people's paradigms. We brand a system that is screwing everyone as racist and people can start distancing themselves from anything with that characterization, because we didn't already put them under that umbrella to take umbrage at even while they grip its handle tightly.

Am I being too Pollyanna here? Oh yeah. I don't actually know that this is a winnable fight. Money is power and the top 20% have 80% percent of it at their disposal, and they will certainly invest highly in maintaining the status quo. I'd love to see the fight waged though.

...my thread on social justice and economic justice. The former encompasses the latter; it forms the umbrella. From that thread: "Social justice is the fair and just relation between the individual and society. This is measured by the explicit and tacit terms for the distribution of wealth, opportunities for personal activity and social privileges."

Anyway, some relevant quotes (emphasis mine) from articles Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about a year ago:

...that a class-first, color blind approach is not sufficient.

Simple as that.

I'm not sure what you think the argument is, but that's the crux of the point I'm making.

Last edited Fri Jan 6, 2017, 02:09 PM - Edit history (1)

class first and not address racism. In fact, in my post I said that both should be done together, and that what we need to do right off the bat, so that we can continue to talk about racism in society effectively and in a way that doesn't fall on deaf ears, redirect all the fear and anger at the source and away from immigrants and welfare and all the bullshit. Not first. Together.

As to reparations...

strategy does matter. I wish that weren't the case, but it does. This is about education. You want to start talking to people about gravity waves before they even understand the Earth revolves around the Sun. Do you actually think that that is an effective way to get progress? We can fix so much that it racist about our system without leading with that, for the very reasons I've been describing. We can alleviate so much of the pain and suffering actually delivered upon people of color in so many ways that are achievable right now, with the mindsets we're dealing with today, and we can address a racist system not after, but during the process. And the good news is that all moves us closer to making reparations an actual reality.If something is actually moving us in the right direction, not on some tenuous detour, but actually on the path to opening people to new paradigms, then why make the perfect the enemy of the good?

I have been saying that nothing is possible unless you advocate for it and make it a part of normal conversation, so I don't want to be hypocritical about my view on reparations, and I recognize that this is a contradiction. But the very call for reparations is something that triggers the limbic brains of way too many conservative white people. It feeds into the divide-and-conquer tactics already being waged upon us. It gives our enemies tools to use against us and shuts off ears to us before we can take that power away, and that's because without a whole lot of explanation(which people will not hear), it suggests again, that we are going to come for your stuff white people.

Could it be done? could we say from the get-go that we need reparations, but that we're going to take it just from the rich, who bear such a great responsibility in seeding and nurturing racism for their own financial gain? I feel like that's an advanced course on revolution, rather than the 101 class that we can get so many behind today,but I don't know, maybe.