I think there are ways to have equity that don’t trigger as massive a sense of injustice as a privileged handout. If it was suddenly legal to have a policy that pays women and minorities more than white men, I’d be upset. Two wrongs don’t make a right. The current concept of equity as many folks talk about it comes off as punitive and the discourse framed in a way that seems almost intended to fail. For example, time and time again, messaging research clearly shows that way more people are willing to get behind measures that are designed to provide educational opportunities to the poor, but the second you make it about just providing educational opportunities to poor people of X race, support falls off a cliff. Take any issue that impacts a huge swath of humanity, offer a program that only helps a select few, and the research comes out the same. Yet progressives keep running with the messaging that guarantees failure.
While I absolutely believe that understanding how the social construct of race impacts US culture and treatment of POC (EDIT) is crucial to improving our society, I do fear that at some point (maybe in the distant future) this centrality of race in the progressive discourse is going to end up reifying and reinforcing the concept rather than consigning it to the dustbin of history, while simultaneously preventing any real change that benefits all laborers. I’m not saying we’re in a post-racial society—I’m just saying that the left has made a terrible mistake giving lip-service to intersectionality while focusing exclusively on race as the central sickness instead of widespread economic inequality that impacts all peoples.
I got shut down in a social justice exchange in a rural area once, because I had the audacity to stand firm in insisting that food deserts in the rural extremely white high poverty area was the product of economic inequality and rural underinvestment rather than race. Because everything is about race.
Yeah, if part of your city is burning, if you cordon it off, there’s less of a chance the fire will affect your not-burning neighborhood.
The point is, we can either hide the problem with a wall and police patrols, or use the same money to eradicate poverty and fix it.
The problem is that if you spend the money to lift people out of poverty, other people will feel left out.
I think there are ways to have equity that don’t trigger as massive a sense of injustice as a privileged handout. If it was suddenly legal to have a policy that pays women and minorities more than white men, I’d be upset. Two wrongs don’t make a right. The current concept of equity as many folks talk about it comes off as punitive and the discourse framed in a way that seems almost intended to fail. For example, time and time again, messaging research clearly shows that way more people are willing to get behind measures that are designed to provide educational opportunities to the poor, but the second you make it about just providing educational opportunities to poor people of X race, support falls off a cliff. Take any issue that impacts a huge swath of humanity, offer a program that only helps a select few, and the research comes out the same. Yet progressives keep running with the messaging that guarantees failure.
While I absolutely believe that understanding how the social construct of race impacts US culture and treatment of POC (EDIT) is crucial to improving our society, I do fear that at some point (maybe in the distant future) this centrality of race in the progressive discourse is going to end up reifying and reinforcing the concept rather than consigning it to the dustbin of history, while simultaneously preventing any real change that benefits all laborers. I’m not saying we’re in a post-racial society—I’m just saying that the left has made a terrible mistake giving lip-service to intersectionality while focusing exclusively on race as the central sickness instead of widespread economic inequality that impacts all peoples.
I got shut down in a social justice exchange in a rural area once, because I had the audacity to stand firm in insisting that food deserts in the rural extremely white high poverty area was the product of economic inequality and rural underinvestment rather than race. Because everything is about race.