When I say "white people" I do not intend to mean *all* white people, sorry if I gave that impression.
It does not matter what ones motivation for behaving in a matter that discriminates against other races and advantages your own. The fact that you do so is enough to make the action "racist" at least by my definition of the term. I know …
When I say "white people" I do not intend to mean *all* white people, sorry if I gave that impression.
It does not matter what ones motivation for behaving in a matter that discriminates against other races and advantages your own. The fact that you do so is enough to make the action "racist" at least by my definition of the term. I know this definition is contentious. I don't think most white people are motivated by racial animus, not at all. But by their actions they are discriminatory and that's what matters.
This is interesting. I would have agreed in years past. In fact, part of the reason I left church was the (white) pastor's family worked the system so their kids wouldn't go to "that school"--our school, as it turns out.
More and more I've come to believe class is the motivator, which of course has significant overlap with race. People who desire upward mobility will by definition enter a class of people that because of historic reasons and demographic realities will be mostly white.
What I have come to loathe is that desire for more. I see big beautiful homes that remind me of some of my friends homes when I was a teen. But I also hate them because what they represent is a deep covetousness. In fact one of those high school friends and his family moved from a nice spacious middle class house to an even bigger and nicer house. When I asked why his parents decided to move, he replied, "greed."
If Black people wish to attain that same upward mobility agent wouldn't they? *we are all goddamned social primates with the exact same base impulses--then they should go for it. I certainly don't want to see Black and brown people confined to a wretched life of squalor.
I can't help but think that a major driving force behind slow upward mobility is something that is a personal problem for me: lack of ambition. For people mired in generations of poverty and truly, overtly systemic racism, I can understand why ambition wouldn't be on the list of top five life necessities.
How do we get people to believe it's possible to succeed? How do we impart the emotional energy required to overcome that first, most debilitating speed bump: that nobody who has come before you has succeeded?
There are more and more people of color for whom success seems like a possibility now. I'm not sure how much more castigating of the great white evil will move the needle .
Even if it was inadvertant, I love the phrasing of an "upward mobility agent" -- like a quiet crusader who steps in to materially help families clamber up to a level where they're living their lives rather than struggling to get by. Obviously these agents already exist in many forms and are in the trenches striving for real cooperative assistance on the ground, not just spouting jargon about centering their clients' lived experiences. Hopefully some in the jargon-spouting group can be recruited into doing more useful tasks going forward (rather than just disappearing when the novelty wears off and the new fad cause arrives).
When I say "white people" I do not intend to mean *all* white people, sorry if I gave that impression.
It does not matter what ones motivation for behaving in a matter that discriminates against other races and advantages your own. The fact that you do so is enough to make the action "racist" at least by my definition of the term. I know this definition is contentious. I don't think most white people are motivated by racial animus, not at all. But by their actions they are discriminatory and that's what matters.
This is interesting. I would have agreed in years past. In fact, part of the reason I left church was the (white) pastor's family worked the system so their kids wouldn't go to "that school"--our school, as it turns out.
More and more I've come to believe class is the motivator, which of course has significant overlap with race. People who desire upward mobility will by definition enter a class of people that because of historic reasons and demographic realities will be mostly white.
What I have come to loathe is that desire for more. I see big beautiful homes that remind me of some of my friends homes when I was a teen. But I also hate them because what they represent is a deep covetousness. In fact one of those high school friends and his family moved from a nice spacious middle class house to an even bigger and nicer house. When I asked why his parents decided to move, he replied, "greed."
If Black people wish to attain that same upward mobility agent wouldn't they? *we are all goddamned social primates with the exact same base impulses--then they should go for it. I certainly don't want to see Black and brown people confined to a wretched life of squalor.
I can't help but think that a major driving force behind slow upward mobility is something that is a personal problem for me: lack of ambition. For people mired in generations of poverty and truly, overtly systemic racism, I can understand why ambition wouldn't be on the list of top five life necessities.
How do we get people to believe it's possible to succeed? How do we impart the emotional energy required to overcome that first, most debilitating speed bump: that nobody who has come before you has succeeded?
There are more and more people of color for whom success seems like a possibility now. I'm not sure how much more castigating of the great white evil will move the needle .
That should say --and why wouldn't they? Damn keyboard.
Even if it was inadvertant, I love the phrasing of an "upward mobility agent" -- like a quiet crusader who steps in to materially help families clamber up to a level where they're living their lives rather than struggling to get by. Obviously these agents already exist in many forms and are in the trenches striving for real cooperative assistance on the ground, not just spouting jargon about centering their clients' lived experiences. Hopefully some in the jargon-spouting group can be recruited into doing more useful tasks going forward (rather than just disappearing when the novelty wears off and the new fad cause arrives).
Right?! Upward mobility agent might be a better industry than diversity and inclusion.
How to do it:
1) value ambition
2) have parents / community that believes in you
3) start with small goals and achieve them. Build.