Thoughtforfood said:
I agree with the idea that there is systematic racism, but differ in my belief regarding the solution.....
Mine was not a call toward making a tool of "shame" to correct the wrongs of the past, nor was it that the oppressed should rely on that collective shame and their own "victomhood," as you call it, (even if, it must be said, the generational nature of their struggling social status
is directly connected to thier forebearers having been causualties of American history) to seek a means toward a better life. Rather it had to do with a simple concept, which is all too often downplayed when not outright inconsidered (because too inconvenient by many to do otherwise); namely
the management of wealth. A simple concept, that, in an enlightened society where reason dominates the priority scale and not the self-serving interests of the rich and powerful, allows for a rational approach to how public funds are spent where they are most wanting and toward helping those with the greatest needs.
That the capitalist machine is going along and can't be stopped, is merely an alibi to excuse one from having to take up more rigorous and noble social philosophy where the management of wealth and its more just distribution is dictated by such a rational approach.
Though I have no illusions that men will take it upon themselves to
actually live by such a rigorous social philosophy, however, the path toward greater social equality is to found in it. Yet this is a theme that was already addressed, that is reason leading to political and social policies, in the Classical Age in Plato's
Republic. 2300 years later we are still there...
Your case about self-realization amoung the Ethipian community of Atlanta, while poigniant, is merley instrumental and doesn't address the reality of the generational poverty among the American black ghetto populations connected to a history of white oppression. On the one hand, because we're talking about a recently arrived imigrant group without the historical burden to bear of blacks in the ghettos, for whom it is simply inconcievable (and I would also say intellectually dishonest) to assert that they can completely by themselves reverse their lowly predicament, without serious attention (and spending) comming from that collectivity with the patrimony that they so fiercely protect and hold onto for themselves. And secondly because the capitalist machine, as you call it, itself doesn't allow for a mass class of the economically feeble to have access to more wealth, because it tends to create (as it is in fact doing) a concentration of extreme wealth in ever fewer hands that leads to more intensive competition (not cooporation) among the middle and lower classes to grabbing the largest piece of the pie leftover by the super rich. The poor thus become ever more emarginaed and increasingly disenfranchised because they enter the competion already with a severe handicap. The capitalist machine doesn't permit cooporation, nor rational decision making, in terms of weath management; but, to the contrary, promotes a brutal competition among the social classes toward the aquisition of riches where individual liberty and private appetites (ie. greed) prevail over the collective's well-being and corporate sense.
In this picture, the American ghetto becomes a permanent and ever growing reality. To preach self-responsibilty toward "liberation," without changing the
modus operandi of the "machine" is at best naive, at worst intellectually dishonest and serving of a vapid ideology though the latter not in your case. The situation demands heavy investment in this weak class, and not just finacial but social and cultural as well, to break the cycle. Though this is something that no society, American or otherwise, in any historical moment has ever done with great vigor. To the contrary we have ample evidence to demonstrate what devestating social consequences result from
not investing in the various "ghetto populations" throughout history. I don't see your fear, consequently, in creating a State subsidence dependent class through investment, rather I find it much more allarming to leave them in their squalor while the rest of society looks on unconcerned.
Plato gave us the criteria of the more arduous political-social philosophy, because it goes against the base and egotistical instincts of individual materialism; however, well-off society has always prefered the most convenient approach. And has even invented a propagandistic myth of "individual responsibility" to be excused from having to consider the casualities that a hyper-competative, capitalist regime has inflicted upon the weakest social classes. And so not to have to be burdened with that inconvenient democratic and humanitarian principle of social justice, which only a more rationalist approach to wealth management and how the nation's finacial resources are spent can more fully transform into reality.
That "rich people have always kept their money" seems to me a banal fact that in no way should become an excuse to simply abide by the historical constant. Otherwise we passively accept to still exist in the Middle Ages. The XIX century socialist ideologies perhaps went the furthest in trying to put into effect a rigorous social philosphy, which began in Western thought with the philosophy of the State's managment as conceptualzed by Plato. To bad man is too much of an egoist and materialist to have come up with anything better than the "capitalist machine." Mine was simple an inquiry, in this sense, into where that course is headed...and its social consequences.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram