On March 9, 1960, the All-University Student Leadership Group published “An Appeal for Human Rights” in local newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Journal, and the Daily World. Making it plain, the authors criticized the “snail-like speed” by which this country ameliorates the existing conditions of Jim Crow segregation. Denouncing the innumerable inequalities in education, employment, housing, voting, hospital, law enforcement, they called out those in authority for assistance in the complete and unequivocal abolition of these injustices.
On November 20, 2015, Concerned Students, in conjunction with minority groups, released “Demands of Black Voices,” a comprehensive list ranging from racial bias, to mental health, to representation, to wages, institutional inequalities, among others.
But despite the grandiloquent language of these tireless activists, both demands fall of deaf ears. To quote Sister Ashley Benn, “Demands have been made since the 1960s, and although we just give you a list of demands, and yes I know they are a lot, and yes I know that it just doesn’t take a day…I know it takes some amount of time, it doesn’t take 50 years.” Praise is long overdue to la mujer de color.
The current generation must learn from our forbearers’ struggles. We can be as clear as day, but still, nothing will happen.
There will be those that ask, but why won’t anything happen? Because in the spirit of Brother Gil Scott Heron, the movement will not be on the starting five of the Atlantic Coastal Conference. The movement will not be on the front page for winning the Nobel Prize. The movement will not have a 20 minute harangue at commencement. The movement will not illumine in brisk evenings some obscure marketing firm in the middle of the Bryan Center Plaza. The movement especially will not dissolve in its token 15 minutes of fame, within the white noise of complacency. The movement is not a Duke conversation, sino que it is a demand.
Never mind the paternalist condescension of President Brodhead, “In a university, you have to actually think through and work them out what can be done…” Never mind the premier talking head of this university performing a micro-aggression that ridiculed all our efforts before the fact. As if we absentmindedly outcry our pain. As if our screams are impulsive. As if we never lived under the koan of white supremacy, that “If a person of color falls, does it make a sound?” If dark bodies litter the streets, does this country give a damn? The answer: no not until the sewage of our flesh clot their pocketbooks.
Hence the Mizzou Activists naked assertion, “We’re gonna be loud as fuck.”
A month prior, on February 1960, the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR) co-spearheaded, along with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the desegregation of local restaurants and hotels in Atlanta, as the city hailed as supuestamente“too busy to hate.” The pragmatic mayor, William B. Hartsfield, thanked the students for “letting the white community know what others are thinking,” but took no immediate steps to address grievances.
On March 15, after a series of carefully orchestrated sit-ins at ten lunch counters and cafeterias throughout the city, students suspended the sit-ins for upcoming negotiations with representatives of the business community. The representatives showed little interest in compromise.
After a month of planning, students campaigned a new set of sit-ins targeting a number of businesses, including the Magnolia Room restaurant at Rich’s Department Store, the city’s largest retailer. After vociferous tensions, including counterdemonstrations by the Ku Klux Klan, COAHR expanded the boycott to “bankrupt the economy of segregation.” They added an additional tactic: demonstrators arrested would refuse bail, in order to crowd jails. The result: sales figures decline 13%, downtown businesses lost $10 million. And suddenly, to the stroke of the almighty dollar, white business leaders met privately for a settlement.
Students deviated from a politics of recognition, to that of siphoning, figuratively bleeding the power structure to death. The historical lesson is simple, “Hit them not in their hearts, but in their wallets.”
Ahora preguntarás, what about Duke? That same restless spirit is evident, upon historical excavation.
April 1968, in the week following Dr. King’s assassination, as the racial fabric of Amerikkka ripped itself apart, a series of events transpired on Duke’s campus known as the Silent Vigil. A cadre of students, after lengthy discussions amongst themselves and advice from some faculty and administrators, marched to Duke President Douglass M. Knight’s home. They presented a list of demands including: Knight’s endorsement of a newspaper ad stating “we are all implicated” in King’s assassination, his resignation from the segregated Hope Valley Country Club, increased pay for non-academic employees, a collective bargaining committee for workers, among other concerns.
But note Knight’s words of legacy. Given the power of the board of trustees, he proved incapable to make binding administrative decisions. He “often had no authority but no power.”Es decir, Brodhead can and will not assist in these demands, if not due to private apathy, but due to top-down puppetry. In the words of underground rapper, Immortal Technique, “my issue isn’t with the white man I see, but with the white man I don’t see.” Namely, that committed social actors, from Knight to Dean Ashby, must fight against reactionary opinions among senior administrators. “There was a great many members of the Duke constituency who didn’t care whether Martin Luther King lived or died; they felt he was disruptive.” Such is our position. We are addressing a talking wall that invests millions of dollars to see us, if not destroyed, subdued.
Conversation is damage control at best, and slow death, forestalling the movement until leaders graduate or tire themselves. President Brodhead, as Duke’s talking head, anticipates the sweeping tides calling for his resignation. Mizzou then is not so much a school, but an epicenter, a historical conjecture of the Ferguson protests–and more broadly, the BlackLivesMatter movement—catalyzed ostensibly because the Football team indefinitely boycotted playing time. For the overseers of this ivory plantation, their beloved cash crop almost disappeared.
And until we threaten this school with the same penalty for exploiting our bodies, nothing will change but the day. The businessmen will trade their suits for lab coats, the doctors hear their cue. Progress is a white lie that will be administered at inauguration ceremonies, toasted at fundraiser dinners– the melatonin of the Amerikkkan dream. Desperate and exhausted, the ethnic body will eventually the liberal prescription. Sedated, the churchgoers of the preaching choir can rest easy for a few hours.
But by nightfall that dream dies, after four hours of bleeding out on the street because ninguna pinche ambulancia ever came. It dies clinging to its detention center, on the false promise that Obama granted amnesty to all indocumentados. It dies selling loose cigarettes at Staten Island, from attending a swimming pool party in Texas, from driving with a busted tail-light, to praying in Charleston. The congregation holds steadfast to that dream, until it’s literally beaten out of them.
The diagnosis is cyclical and simple: racial insomnia. We’re woke, because we can’t sleep.
We’ve had conversations, we’ve talked about these issues. The problem is those in power choose not to act about it.
Don’t get it twisted. This whole question of diversity is a giant farce, nothing more than a power point slide for the Duke brand; where every fiscal year, I set aside my reservations and put on some cultural performance that makes you look good, while I get nothing in return. Whether Marriot workers, a one year Program in Education faculty (te extrañamos Dr. Jason Mendez), or an undergrad, to be a person of color is to always be reminded that your labor is deemed more valuable than the rights you deserve. Because we are expendable.
And to my quierida gente de color, my celebration of dark skin, I say: in this deathbed of culture, we are its fleeting heartbeats. Multiculturalism is nothing but the management of difference, one commodifed for brochures. Engaged in a futile politics of recognition, we’re hunched low, we fight for scraps. Divided amongst ourselves, we apologetically dismiss each other’s struggles. It’s not under my timetable, that resources are meager. Yes, precisely because the white pie chart allotted the very minimum to placate outbursts. Precisely because we exist only for their lamination.
To my beloved students of color, and all others silenced, as the movement ensues, I plead: in this borrowed limelight, do not confuse justice with concession. Amidst all this blinding opulence, do not forget that 50 years ago, five black American integrated this campus in large part due to economic pressure from esteemed endowments explicitly threatening to withdraw their donations unless the school admit them. Our politics does not exist in a vacuum, but within a complex matrix of supremacist hatred, liberal dismissal, and the shameless worship of capital [prestige].
Así que to Hell with respectability. A la verga con realizando mi miseria! Duke, me cansé de rogarle, nunca me quisiste. You tar and feather my culture, so quite frankly, I might Tar Heel my brown ass out of here. But no se te olvide, I ain’t no traitor, because you betrayed me before my chanclas ever stepped here. But before I leave, jamas pararé, until I knock you down a few pegs, so that you may see our unpaid labor, quietly draining our spirits. Pagados bajo la mesa.
So what now? Ahora te dejo con unas palabras: James Forman, Executive Secretary of SNCC, said, “We can present thousands and thousands of bodies in the streets if we want to. And we can have all of the soul force and the moral commitment around this world. But a lot of these problems will not be solved until that shagged-old place called the White House begins to shake and gets on the phone and says, ‘Listen George [Wallace], we’re goin’ put to in jail if you don’t stop that mess.’ It’s not just the sheriff of this country or the mayor of the police commissioner or George Wallace. This problem goes to the very bottom of the United States. And you know, I said it today, and I will say it again, ‘If we can’t sit at the table, let’s knock the fucking legs off!’”
Notice 99.99% of the time the question is “what is a woman”. Nobody is asking “what is a man”.
The reason for that is because staying close to the reality of who is biologically male and who is not is a life or death assessment. A miscalculation could literally kill you. Even other males knows this. Transwomen know this. A bus of 50 trans men and a bus of 50 “cis” males is not an equivalent bus in terms of risk and harm if you’re a member of a vulnerable population. Hence people’s willingness to muse endlessly and “deconstruct” woman as a concept or aesthetic yet they somehow sober up when it comes to discussing men and indulge much less in such fanciful musings.
Men have no worries about sharing their prisons, bathrooms, clubs, and gyms because everybody is terrified of being in closed spaces with them alone. There’s zero effort from men in practice or policy to make their spaces welcoming for trans and non-binary people. Nobody dares to even suggest it. Men’s outright rejection of and intolerance of trans people is accepted like a weather report yet they’ll shout, scream, cry, throw up and act like it’s the New Jim Crow if a woman says “hey that’s fine but self Id laws don’t provide enough protection for women can we come up with another solution”. Men’s social dominance is protecting them from being “deconstructed” the way women are.
So we have a social phenomenon where only women are disrupted, imposed on, challenged, and re-defined and men are for the most part completely undisturbed/untouched? And that’s supposed to be “breaking gender barriers”. The only barriers being broken is women’s boundaries and ability to assert their needs. Which is a reproduction of the oldest gender paradigm ever.
You’re “disrupting gender” but the main benefactors of gender hierarchies are totally untouched/unbothered/undisturbed? lol k.
People who complain about trans women being in womens sports confuse me because they act like all athletes don’t have physical advantages. I could never compete against someone who’s able bodied in a running competition, no matter how much I train, but you don’t see me asking for all able bodied people to be kicked out of sports. And professional athletes are the best of the best in terms of genetic luck. If anything, the fact that trans women need to do so much to be allowed into women’s sports puts them at a disadvantage
we’re not asking males to be kicked out of sports we’re asking males to play in male teams and leave female teams alone wtf. if mediocre able bodied people claimed to have disabilities and demand to be allowed in paralympics and take spaces from actual disabled athletes how would you feel lol
OP, this is why sports is separated by sex:
And if you think that all the physical advantages that males have over women can be reversed by taking some hormone pills, you are very misinformed.
TSC Sociologist, Valerie Chepp, recently published a new edited volume titled, “Readings in Social Justice: Power, Inequality, and Action.” A particularly poignant excerpt is from bell hooks’s “Engaged Pedagogy” https://titles.cognella.com/readings-in-social-justice-9781793527677
Yeah, it was absolutely true. Many colleges, Ivy League and not, had quotas for Jewish attendance. This mostly became an issue in the interwar period.* While Jews had been emigrating to the US for several hundred years, since the first settlement of what is now New York, a massive wave of Eastern European Jewish emigration began in 1881 and continued in full force until (and to an extent through) World War I. In the 1920s, this ended due to racist, eugenicist influences on Congress- draconian immigration laws were enacted in 1924 to drastically limit immigration particularly of poor and “less white” people, like Jews, Italians, and Greeks, by basing the permitted immigration on numbers from 1890, when relatively few had emigrated. However, by the 1920s, colleges felt like they were facing a different problem- second-generation advancement. Jews who had arrived since 1881 had come with little to no English and relatively little education in general, but especially given the emphasis on assimilation and the “melting pot” which their children received in schools and settlement houses, the children of immigrants were far more Americanized, and their parents pushed them toward academic success. By 1915, for example, about 40% of students at Columbia were Jewish (either immigrants or first generation Americans)- ironically due to the fact that Columbia had made it easier for them to get in as public school students by basing admissions on standardized tests.
College administrators were not happy about this, so they decided to do something about it.
Examples:
In 1922, Harvard implemented a 10% quota for Jews in order to prevent a “Jewish problem,” in the words of its president, A. Lawrence Lowell. He rationalized this by saying that he wanted to decrease potential antisemitism on campus.
Harvard also changed its admission system from an entrance exam (which favored studious Jews from the well-performing NYC public school system, who generally succeeded) to a system in which they accepted students from the top seventh of their class regardless of their score on the exam. This favored students in other parts of the country who had received lower quality education, and had the additional “benefit” of reducing the number of Jewish accepted students.
In the 1920s, Columbia basically invented the modern college application form. Why? So that they could weed out Jewish (and potentially other undesirable) applicants. Knowing that many Jews changed their names to hide their Jewishness, these forms required that past names be listed and also asked for country of origin, mother’s maiden name, and social organizations. And you know those questions about extracurriculars? Those were also invented for this purpose, as a measure of “character”- with character meaning “not Jewish.” Jews were known for being studious and “greasy,” not participating in all of the typically WASPy social concerns, and so by making “character” a requirement they were able to eliminate Jews from the pool. Nicholas Murray Butler, when discussing the more limited admission of Jews, stated that there had been no conscious effort to eliminate Jews- after evaluating the application forms, Jews were simply among “the lowest grade of applicant,” this despite the fact that so many had previously been accepted on the basis of grades.Harvard soon followed suit in using an application form, and many other colleges adopted it in the coming years.
While universities like Princeton had been interested in making a quota, it took Harvard and Columbia making the first move for them to implement one, along with colleges like Barnard, Yale, Duke, Rutgers, Adelphi, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Penn State, Ohio State, Washington and Lee, the Universities of Cincinnati, Illinois, Kansas, Texas, Minnesota, Virginia, and Washington, and the Bronx campus of NYU.
Colgate University kept six Jews enrolled specifically in order to counter charges of antisemitic admissions.
Syracuse University housed Jews separately from other students and had a KKK branch on campus.
Sarah Lawrence College had a question on its application about whether applicants had been raised with “strict Sunday observance.”
-Even as late as 1945, Dartmouth retained a quota for its Jews, citing its status as a Christian college for Christian men.
If a Jew WAS accepted to an elite university, he (they were generally not coeducational yet) could expect not to be accepted into university culture. The social clubs and fraternities which made these colleges one big boys’ club did not let Jews among their number. They were often considered to lack college spirit, be physically repulsive, not drink enough, be brown-nosers, and not participate in sports enough, as well as to raise the academic standard too high. They were also considered to be below the appropriate level of social class and standing.
-At Brown University, Jewish students were barred from fraternities, but also barred from creating their own fraternity, purportedly to prevent antisemitism.
At the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, the page with the number two ranking cadet, who happened to be Jewish, was perforated so that those who desired could remove it without defacing the volume.
Even at universities which accepted small numbers of Jews, almost no Jews would be accepted as college professors. Fewer than 100 Jews were hired as faculty throughout the country, and nearly all under protest or some kind of special circumstance, with the caveat that they didn’t usually hire Jews.
Graduate programs admitted few Jews, using as the pretext the fact that they would never be hired as university faculty.
Despite all this, Jews continued in their quests for education, becoming 9% of college students despite being 4% of the general population. They were also nearly half of the total number of college students in New York City. They generally matriculated at City College of New York (called by some the “cheder [religious school] on the hill”) or NYU’s downtown campus (nicknamed “New York Jew”). In 1920, CCNY and Hunter College (the women’s college) had 80-90% Jewish student bodies. CCNY had been the first college to create a Jewish fraternity, ZBT, which stood for Zion Bemishpat Tipadeh, or Zion Shall Be Redeemed With Judgement. Even there, there were few Jewish faculty members- for example, there were only four at CCNY. By the 1930s, there were still only 5, and CCNY was faced with charges of antisemitism in their hiring.
There were absolutely protests of this practice. There was an outcry, for example, when Columbia implemented its application form. However, for the most part, Jews preferred not to attend colleges where they would be social outcasts and often (especially those who already lived in NY) actively chose schools like CCNY/Hunter College and NYU (and initially Columbia) as they were close to home and would provide a more Jewish-friendly environment. In general, especially in the 1930s and 40s, the US was a pretty antisemitic place (I touch on this here). For example, in a poll in the 1940s, 45% of college students said they would not want to be roommates with a Jew. The end of the practice of Jewish quotas wasn’t so much due to outcry as due to an internal examination of antisemitism in the US and the decline of the phenomenon in the postwar years. (The Civil Rights Act didn’t exist til 1964, so the practice wasn’t illegal.)
*That’s not to say there was no discrimination against Jews in colleges before this- many prominent Jews of the early 20th century, such as Oscar Straus and Bernard Baruch, later noted the difficulties they faced as Jews in university.
Starving and homeless children in Russia in the 1990s, who often became victims of substance abuse, sexual abuse and were actively involved in crime. These scary photos are reminders that the West considers Russia in the 90s “democratic, free and detached from totalitarian communism.”
The capitalism implementation in Russia during the 90’ was probably the biggest capitalism failure of all times. Yeltsin implemented the economic policies applauded by the neoliberal institutions (FMI, World Bank, etc.) With mass privatisations, welfare destruction, destatalisation, destruction of social rights etc. The results were terrifying from all point of views:
As always happens in capitalism there were cartels, trusts etc. That formed a class of oligarchs that put themselves above the State leading the policies towards their interest against the interest of the people. Mostly represented by the Semibankirschina.
-Dramatically drop of life expectancy arriving at 7 years drop in less then a decade for men.
-Dramatic rise in mortality.
-Dramatic rise in self destructive behaviours like drugs and alcohol abuse.
-Mass depression
-Low birth rates due to financial instability and uncertainty
-crime rates rise with entire pieces of the country controlled by organised crime
-Moral crisis well represented by the dramatic increase of prostitution ( Prostitution that was de facto absent during most of Soviet times especially under Stalin but that started again with Gorbachev)
Fascism is corporatism; public resources are used by private enterprise to advance some objective of that private enterprise. Neoliberalism and Conservatism are both fascist or corporatist economic systems. Neoliberalism is when the government proactively gives power to private enterprise and conservatism is when the government intentionally fails to regulate private enterprise
“Faced with the worst health crisis in modern times, Biden and other world leaders have chosen to support the interests of a few enormously rich companies. The same people who loudly disavowed Trump when he called COVID-19 the ‘Chinese virus’ have embraced their own variety of nativism, exerting reckless privilege while claiming to act in the interest of public health. All of this should be a scandal, but it isn’t. For the most part, people in rich countries have been relieved and content to have themselves and their families vaccinated after months of restrictions. Other countries remain an afterthought. Years of jingoistic policy under Trump and other nativist leaders worldwide have not inspired hope for global solidarity.”
Based on data compiled by Global Justice Now and released Saturday, “just 8 top Pfizer and Moderna shareholders” added a combined $10.31 billion to their fortunes last week after stock prices soared in response to the emergence of Omicron.
According to a statement by the group:
Moderna’s shares skyrocketed after the announcement and settled at $310.61/share on Wednesday 1 December, up 13.61% from $273.39/share since Wednesday 24 November, the day before the announcement. Pfizer’s shares rose by 7.41% from $50.91/share to $54.68/share.
Moderna’s CEO, Stephane Bancel, personally became more than $824m richer in the week after the announcement, with the value of his shares rising from $6,052,522,978 to $6,876,528,630. He sold off 10,000 shares for $319 each on 26 November, the day after the variant was announced, cashing out $3.19 million.
At close of business on Tuesday, Bancel’s shares had grown by $1.7 billion since the announcement, before falling after the company lost a legal dispute over patents.
Bancel has refused to share the recipe for Moderna’s vaccine with the World Health Organisation to help scale-up manufacturing of mRNA vaccines through its new hub in South Africa. WHO scientists are now trying to reverse-engineer the vaccine. His company is also waging a legal battle to erase the role of massive public funding and public scientists in developing the jab.
Do not focus on the leak. Focus on the contents of the leak. These justices are trying to take away reproductive rights, human rights.
This does not only effect women but anyone with a uterus! This is the first step they will take before they start taking more and more rights away.
The Justices have shown that they don’t care about what the US citizens think, we need to show them that they NEED to care what we think.
So here I am again, as a US citizen, begging that when you vote, you vote for people who will fight along side us. If Roe v Wade gets overturned then it will become a state by state decision, so you want the people who care about your reproductive rights to be in law-making positions.
Here’s what you can do:
Votefor people who are going to protect your reproductive rights.
Be apart of protests, if not physically then digitally.
Donateto places fighting for reproductive rights.
Educateyourself and those around you about the importance of reproductive rights.
Here are some resources that you can look into for more information:
Know that things are not hopeless. The majority of US citizens are pro-choice, especially us younger generations. We have the ability to handle this and we will, one way or another. Stay strong, do not lose hope.
Know that as of right now Abortion is still legal in many states!!!
For all the hype about Asian American success and Asian Americans as the model minority, the reality is much more complicated. Even though the stereotype is that Asians are “smarter” and more “academically-driven” than non-Hispanic whites (honestly, this distinction is really insensitive, and I just want to say that), in reality, Asians are actually morelikely to get a bachelor’s degree, but less likely to have a high school degree, indicating that Asian Americans who do “succeed” academically may do so to a greater degree than their “white” peers, but that those who do not achieve academic success are worse off than their white peers.
As a whole, they still seem “better off” than other minorities. There is a marked difference when we break down the statistics by country of origin, however.
Most of these differences are very clear when we consider history – returning to the(condensed and incomplete) timelines from my second post, that America signed immigration treaties with these different nations at different times under different circumstances. Yet in the simplification of the term “Asian American,” most people really only notice the most prominent countries:
Ignorance of the “lesser” populations, the smaller ones, hides a lot of startling differences in the narratives we see. Furthermore, a substantial percentage of immigration comes from those seeking refuge, and I have had friends whose families were torn apart in the hope that one or two might receive a better fate. A friend of mine from high school never saw her parents and two older sisters after a decision for her to come to America with an aunt, yet the hope is that a reunion may come someday. For those who come without fortune, connections, any understanding of the language, ready employment, for those who have lost their family, home, and often, all that they own, America can be a very different place.
Even within a single country of origin though, there are still many wide achievement gaps, depending on what generation “American” you are, as well as the time period of your immigration. I speak from the Chinese background, which I have seen the most of.
The first immigrants that gain a lot of public attention are the cheap migrant workers, such us those on the Continental Railroad. Much like the early Irish immigrants or our contemporary Mexican immigrants, they had poor education, but had come to seek a better living and to provide for their families.
The next wave of immigrants from mainland China were not until much later. Even with the Immigration Law, the People’s Republic of China placed strict restrictions on emigration until 1977, so much of the immigration in the 1960′s and 1970′s were from Taiwan. This early immigration accounts for why when Taiwanese are statistically “more prosperous” in demographic studies relative to individuals from mainland China (NOTE: if you do not know the complicated history and politics between Chinese and Taiwan, please Google it, as it is important, but not enough that I will entail it in this short blog entry.)
At the same time, the Cultural Revolution “destroyed” and “redistributed” wealth – at least in theory. There is much that could be said about the ideological shifts that happened and their impact on current history, but in the interest of time, I will simply conclude by saying that many of the immigrants which came next were generally not wealthy. Once the immigration barriers were first lifted, most of the next wave of individuals who arrived were scholars and businessmen. Many, like my parents, and the parents of a lot of my cohorts, became fairly well established by the time I was a teenager. However, there were also many undocumented immigrants, without offers at institutions of study, who forged their own way through manual labor, often in places like Chinatown. In many Chinese grocery marts, there are advertisements for English lessons, which are the rare opportunities for education and advancement that many of the “older” citizenry may have, if at all.
This contrasts heavily with the latest generation of immigrants, which contain a much larger percentage of students from wealthy backgrounds sent to America for study and stimulation. As Asia has prospered, education has become extremely competitive, with heavy fees for the best schools and extracurricular classes in every imaginable pursuit.
In short, there are very strange contrasts set-up in today’s Chinese American population, primarily in a publicly largely unrecognized class divide. There are, as I see them, three large categories which exist today:
Chinese Americans whose parents have “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” and made many sacrifices to ensure the access of their children to a good education
Chinese Americans whose parents were disadvantaged, and whose children are now given the opportunity of the parents of those in group 1
Chinese Americans currently immigrating from China from relatively successful families (this has also been aided somewhat by the one-child policy, which allows for a greater concentration of resources into single individuals*)
That is to say, there are two populations of Chinese Americans which are generally more affluent – but even that is a wide range, and the class differences that apply to other populations are just as evident in this population. Yet many of the stereotypes of Chinese American behavior, their stinginess and bargain-shopping comes from the past generation, where smart spending was a necessity of survival, a lifestyle that many families still have to live by within the Chinese American community but that for others is just a funny caricature of their parents. And to the influx of Chinese immigrants, some of these stereotypes don’t hold any cultural relevancy.
There is so much more that could be said dissecting the different cultures of these groups, where they intersect and where they don’t, but as this is already rather lengthy, I will simply conclude with this thought:
Race is NEVER a stand-in for class. The more we make generalizations by ethnic and national categories, the more we obscure the struggles of many within these populations, and hold them to expectations that are as impossible to them as someone who is a “true minority.” While national and cultural pride is something that should be honored and often becomes a key component of understanding one’s identity, while languages and traditions connect individuals of diverse backgrounds, it is also alienating for individuals whose realities are not understood or represented in the large understandings of racial demographic patterns. The statistics about Chinese American affluence do nothing to alleviate the struggles of those living in Chinatown, who are visited by the affluent, but who often live in squalor, whose stories are never told though their accents are laughed at and whose communities only come to light in reports about suspicious meats being served. American media has upheld the model minority standard while remaining suspicious of the impoverished within the community, never stopping to recognize a problem exists in their definition of the category of race.
I speak about the Chinese because they are not a minor, obscure minority that we have forgotten about. They are a large, over-generalized racial category that does not work.
*Granted, for said individuals, the financial burden is much greater on them to provide for two sets of parents by themselves, and would exponentially increase over time if everyone followed the laws properly, and life was mathematical, but given that this isn’t really relevant to the point at hand, please just store it away as a consideration for a rainy day.
Sociological Imagination is an approach to the world around us at the intersection of the world and person, history and biography, and creating an understanding such that renders one better equipped to navigate the structures around them. This is the first blog post in a series of three wherein I have elected to investigate the Asian-American identity from different perspectives. In my first blog post, I’ve approached the idea from an individual autobiographical standpoint, drawing from my personal experiences and struggles with identity. In my second blog post, I examine the idea from a historical perspective, while this, the third, draws some concluding thoughts from the intersection of history, biography, and social trends.
Graphs and diagrams taken from “Asian Americans” from Pew Social Trends, 2010-2012 and “A Community of Contrasts” released by Asian American Center for Advancing Justice about the Asian American community in 2011.
Where is your nearest garbage dump? Where does the local factory go when it needs to get rid of some particularly toxic chemicals? If there was a disaster, would you have to move? Could you?
Sociologists use shorthand terms like “environmental racism” to draw attention to the fact that poor communities and communities of color are often more likely to be exposed to hazardous materials, and cases like the Flint water crisis drive this point home.
Of course, housing inequality also means that nobody has to dump anything to put poor communities in hazardous positions. One recent example of this is the flooding in Houston after Hurricane Harvey. Over at Socius, Yuqi Lu gathered data on the median household income in neighborhoods across the Houston area from the American Community Survey and matched it with land elevation data from Google Maps.
In general, poorer neighborhoods in Houston sit at lower elevations, and thus are more susceptible to flood risks. This relationship is strongest in less-densely-populated areas, such as rural and suburban neighborhoods, but additional analysis in Lu’s articleshows the relationship is robust.
Thelatest reports are in on human caused climate change. Regardless of whether we can act to turn it around in time, we’ll also have to recognize the fact that not everyone faces the same fallout from environmental hazards and natural disasters.
Evan Stewart is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota. You can follow him on Twitter.
The recent controversial arrests at a Philadelphia Starbucks, where a manager called the police on two Black men who had only been in the store a few minutes, are an important reminder that bias in the American criminal justice system creates both large scale, dramatic disparities and little, everyday inequalities. Research shows that common misdemeanors are a big part of this, because fines and fees can pile up on people who are more likely to be policed for small infractions.
A great example is the common traffic ticket. Some drivers who get pulled over get a ticket, while others get let off with a warning. Does that discretion shake out differently depending on the driver’s race? The Stanford Open Policing Project has collected data on over 60 million traffic stops, and a working paper from the project finds that Black and Hispanic drivers are more likely to be ticketed or searched at a stop than white drivers.
To see some of these patterns in a quick exercise, we pulled the project’s data on over four million stop records from Illinois and over eight million records from South Carolina. These charts are only a first look—we split the recorded outcomes of stops across the different codes for driver race available in the data and didn’t control for additional factors. However, they give a troubling basic picture about who gets a ticket and who drives away with a warning.
These charts show more dramatic disparities in South Carolina, but a larger proportion of white drivers who were stopped got off with warnings (and fewer got tickets) in Illinois as well. In fact, with millions of observations in each data set, differences of even a few percentage points can represent hundreds, even thousands of drivers. Think about how much revenue those tickets bring in, and who has to pay them. In the criminal justice system, the little things can add up quickly.
Elon Musk’s wealth has surpassed $200 billion. It would take the median U.S. worker over 4 million years to make that much.
Wealth inequality is eating this country alive. We’re now in America’s second Gilded Age, just like the late 19th century when a handful of robber barons monopolized the economy, kept wages down, and bribed lawmakers.
While today’s robber barons take joy rides into space, the distance between their gargantuan wealth and the financial struggles of working Americans has never been clearer. During the first 19 months of the pandemic, U.S. billionaires added $2.1 trillion dollars to their collective wealth and that number continues to rise.
Income is what you earn each week or month or year. Wealth refers to the sum total of your assets — your car, your stocks and bonds, your home, art — anything else you own that’s valuable.Valuable not only because there’s a market for it — a price other people are willing to pay to buy it — but because wealth itself grows.
As the population expands and the nation becomes more productive, the overall economy continues to expand. This expansion pushes up the values of stocks, bonds, rental property, homes, and most other assets. Of course recessions and occasional depressions can reduce the value of such assets. But over the long haul, the value of almost all wealth increases.
Lesson: Wealth compounds over time.
Next: personal wealth comes from two sources.The first source is the income you earn but don’t spend. That’s your savings. When you invest those savings in stocks, bonds, or real property or other assets, you create your personal wealth — which, as we’ve seen, grows over time.
The second source of personal wealth is whatever is handed down to you from your parents, grandparents, and maybe even generations before them — in other words, what you inherit.
Lesson: Personal wealth comes from your savings and/or your inheritance.
Much of their gains over the last 40 years have come from a dramatic increase in the value of shares of stock.
For example, if someone invested $1,000 in 1978 in a broad index of stocks — say, the S&P 500 —theywould have $31,823 today, adjusted for inflation.
Who has benefited from this surge? The richest 1 percent, who now own half of the entire stock market. But the typical worker’s wages have barely grown.
Lesson: Most Americans don’t make enough to save money and build wealth.
So as income inequality has widened, the amount that the few high-earning households save — their wealth — has continued to grow. Their growing wealth has allowed them to pass on more and more wealth to their heirs.
These children will be able to live off of this wealth, and then leave the bulk of it — which will continue growing — to their own children … tax-free. After a few generations of this, almost all of America’s wealth could be in the hands of a few thousand families.
Lesson: Dynastic wealth continues to grow.
III. Why wealth concentration is a problem
Concentrated wealth is already endangering our democracy. Wealth doesn’t just beget more wealth — it begets more power.
Dynastic wealth concentrates power into the hands of fewer and fewer people, who can choose what nonprofits and charities to support and which politicians to bankroll. This gives an unelected elite enormous sway over both our economy and our democracy.
If this keeps up, we’ll come to resemble the kind of dynasties common to European aristocracies in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
The racial wealth gap is even starker. The typical Black household owns just 13 cents of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by the typical white household. The pandemic likely increased this gap, too.
In all these ways, dynastic wealth creates a self-perpetuating aristocracy that runs counter to the ideals we claim to live by.
Lesson: Dynastic wealth creates a self-perpetuating aristocracy.
IV. How America dealt with wealth inequality during the First Gilded Age
Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. Congress enacted two kinds of wealth taxes. The first, in 1916, was the estate tax — a tax on the wealth someone has accumulated during their lifetime, paid by the heirs who inherit that wealth.
The second tax on wealth, enacted in 1922, was a capital gains tax — a tax on the increased value of assets, paid when those assets are sold.
Lesson: The estate tax and the capital gains tax were created to curb wealth concentration.
But both of these wealth taxes have shrunk since then, or become so riddled with loopholes that they haven’t been able to prevent a new American aristocracy from emerging.
The Trump Republican tax cut enabled individuals to exclude $11.18 million from their estate taxes. That means one couple can pass on more than $22 million to their kids tax-free. Not to mention the very rich often find ways around this tax entirely. As Trump’s former White House National Economic Council director Gary Cohn put it, “only morons pay the estate tax.”
What about capital gains on the soaring values of wealthy people’s stocks, bonds, mansions, and works of art? Here, the biggest loophole is something called the “stepped-up basis.” If the wealthy hold on to these assets until they die, their heirs inherit them without paying any capital gains taxes whatsoever. All the increased value of those assets is simply erased, for tax purposes. This loophole saves heirs an estimated $40 billion a year.
This means that huge accumulations of wealth in the hands of a relatively few households can be passed from generation to generation untaxed — growing along the way — generating comfortable incomes for rich descendants who will never have to work a day of their lives. That’s the dynastic class we’re creating right now.
Lesson: The estate tax and the capital gains tax have been gutted.
Why have these two wealth taxes eroded? Because, as America’s wealth has concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the wealthy have more capacity to donate to political campaigns and public relations — and they’ve used that political power to reduce their taxes. It’s exactly what Teddy Roosevelt feared so many years ago.
V. How to reduce the wealth gap
So what do we do? Follow the wisdom of Teddy Roosevelt and tax great accumulations of wealth.
The ultra-rich have benefited from the American system — from laws that protect their wealth, and our economy that enabled them to build their fortunes in the first place. They should pay their fair share.
The majority of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, believe the ultra rich should pay higher taxes. There are many ways to make them do so: closing the stepped up basis loophole, raising the capital gains tax, and fully funding the Internal Revenue Service so it can properly audit the wealthiest taxpayers, for starters.
Beyond those fixes, we need a new wealth tax: a tax of just 2 percent a year on wealth in excess of $1 million. That’s hardly a drop in the bucket for centi-billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, but would generate plenty of revenue to invest in healthcare and education so that millions of Americans have a fair shot at making it.
One of the most important things you as an individual can do is take the time to understand the realities of wealth inequality in America and how the system has become rigged in favor of those at the top — and demand your political representatives take action to unrig it.
Wealth inequality is worse than it has been in a century – and it has contributed to a vicious political-economic cycle in which taxes are cut on the top, resulting in even more concentration of wealth there – while everyone else lives under the cruelest form of capitalism in the world.
We must stop this vicious cycle — and demand an economy that works for the many, not one that concentrates more and more wealth in the hands of a privileged few.
