“POOR LIVES MATTER”
My favorite athlete, Charles Barkley, nailed it. Yes, black, brown, and red people get screwed, often far worse than white people, but poor people regardless of race get screwed the worst.
Thank god Sir Charles recognizes this and has the guts to say it. Identity politics — fueled by industrial strength white guilt among those who didn’t grow up poor — points down a blind alley, an alley that pits all of us against each other based on race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Charles Barkley got it exactly right: it’s the 99% vs. the 1%. “Solutions” that accept the status quo and artificial scarcity (e.g., “reparations” based on race, while fundamental economic inequities go unchallenged), pit working people of different races and genders against each other, to the benefit of the 1%.
Think about past identity-politics disasters: busing (rather than equalizing school funding), and “affirmative action,” which did next to nothing to redress inequities, but played into the artificial-scarcity myth and the hands of the 1% — setting peoples of different races against each other, for decades, clawing each other over crumbs.
All of the social welfare measures that are universally popular (social security and medicare) are universal — everyone benefits from them. Why on earth don’t you, and everyone else, see that? Why not insist on benefits that will equalize economic well-being for everyone? Medicare for all, free higher education for those who want it, universal basic income regardless of race? Why not, in the “richest country on earth”?
Insisting on race and gender based “solutions,” without challenging fundamental economic disparities, in a manner that will benefit all, guarantees that the 1%’s divide-and-conquer tactics will continue to block real change and will continue to screw us — all of us.
Please don’t play into their hands.
Sharp and Pointed 