|
it's true that the preferred american mode of segregation is spatial, and i think that alot of the less...um...i want to say honest but that seems strong---less self-aware or situationally aware positions on questions of inequality of wealth and/or opportunity as it deploys along racial lines (which is also a class line) simply naturalize that spatial segregation---kinda in the way that you could easily do if you are standing on white island and look around and see only white people---if that's your context and you don't know any different, it could seem normal that where you stand literally, that point of departure for "common sense" approaches to social problems, is basically deceptive.
you have something parallel with respect to the relation of the present to the past:
in a general sense, what it seems like would be required is a sustained effort to basically transform the economic institutions that underpin american life in order to push them off what apparently remains the case---a kind of automaton repetition of the history of these institutions themselves as if that history was not implicated in racist practices in the past---and a dispelling of the illusion that history is separate from the present just because you can't see it.
and i think a politics geared around substantive equality is called for. in the recent past, we've been subjected to way too much political pseudo-philosophy from the populist right which has argued that substantive equality is communism and formal equality is what makes you free. this is of a piece with the attempts to naturalize economic hierarchy, to erase class as a variable and so forth. this slide seems a political correlate that enables folk to imagine it possible to have the most extreme economic inequalities of any industrialized country in reality on the one hand while investing in a myth of socio-economic mobility on the other. without the latter the horatio alger story would fall apart.
so there should be a shift toward arguments which say that substantive equality is the measure of freedom; equality of access to cultural opportunities, equality of access to credit equality of access to business--all of it. and you'd think this could come about as a result of an expansion of opportunities across the board. and you'd think the state would have a role to play in that. and that this might be a good time to do something based on the idea that redress of these problems is a worthwhile political objective...amongst other objectives--but as fundamental as any other objective.
specific policy thinkings i'm fighting my way through a head cold to think about.
interested in what others have to say.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|