I
have had, participated in, or heard quite a few discussions this week about the
Confederate monument removal in New Orleans.
The subject of institutional racism and white privilege have come up in
many. This video does a good job of
outlining some of the disproportionate access to governmental programs over the
foundation of America to the present day based on race that mathematically
affects the starting point and cascading access to capital wealth enjoyed by
generations of American families on a macroeconomic basis.
What
does that have to do with statues? The
removal of Confederate statues as tax-funded symbols of what the Confederacy
fought for: the continued ownership (capital wealth) of black people by
upper-class white people was as a primary motivation economic. The governmental sponsored catalysts to
aggregate wealth to formulate the middle and upper-middle classes of America
primarily involving access to ownership of real property and employment have been
vastly disproportional in a cascading set of leg-ups emblemized in the term
white privilege. The empathy for America
to utilize the potential of our population has and still requires systematic
adjustments to access to capital, employment, education, housing, etc. that
recognizes what white privilege is not only from a moral sense but a
mathematical economic one.
So
these notions of post-racial America, of welfare-shame despite the statistics
of more participation of white people on food stamps than any other race, of
disproportional sentencing lengths and conviction rates for similar offenses in
the criminal justice systems, of what it means to be the son of a son of a son
who had a head start and one who did not, come down to empathy. Yes we as a nation can make some legal
measures to legislate discrimination based on race, but it is in individual
empathy and love that we will truly evolve and reach the maximal potential as a
global human society. That empathy
requires us to shed ignorance on how we got to the moment of now and transcend
the limitations of words like white Christian or black Muslim, not to
participate in the platitudes of Obama’s Democratic keynote convention speech
in 2004 that this video references, but to discuss white privilege and
systematic racism without the ‘My family never took a handout. We worked for
everything we have.’ default reactionary rebuttals that fail to recognize the
arch of American history that tints the very way one has been perceived in
general society and the likelihood that one’s progenitors were or not afforded
a similar advantage when seeking access to capital or capital producing
mechanisms.
It
is not about guilt or a personal you can have my seat at the table now; it is
about doing the math and obliterating ignorance so that we as a nation do not
rally to candidates or policies that rabble fear in the now based on racial or
religious lines that kindle the fires of the past that produced these economic
and social hindrances to our nation’s potential. We cannot build a wall from Mexico or ban
Muslim immigration or tint the view of inner city crime or ignore who is being
shot by police at greater rates and why; we must understand how we got to
now. We must understand institutional
racism, fascism, xenophobia, what Sam Cooke Sang about in ‘A Change is Gonna
Come’, what Bob Dylan sang about in Only A Pawn in Their Game,’ and we must
choose how we go about our daily life, how we vote, and how we recognize the
mathematics that affect our daily lives.
Rather than reaching for the low branch of rhetoric, we build systematic
changes in how capital is accessed and distributed in this country based on
empathy of what is best for the total population. This requires the obliteration of ignorance
of why keeping things like Confederate statues or flags up in a major American
city hinder that empathy. Maybe with
that empathy we can evolve our healthcare, educational, and criminal justice
systems to be more efficient and effective for all Americans.
Tim Wise Video
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