Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

I went to San Francisco today on the Freedom Train to attend the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. The celebration left something to be desired — people were not singing in the aisles, or demanding that MLK’s work be completed. At one point, a rabbi reminded us that, though we may be “Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics”, we all worship one god. *sigh* silly monotheists. And I worry about these kinds of celebrations of individual people. It’s very easy to try to co-opt the holiday by saying, this is what Martin Luther King would have done, without considering whether he actually would. Perhaps that hasn’t happened to MLK, and I hope it never does, but it happened to Jesus, so we need to stay vigilant.

However, Martin Luther King was a great man and deserves to be remembered (as Sunshine said most eloquently). And, more importantly, his work is not completed, and urgently needs to be pursued. Unfortunately, the remaining work is harder than that already completed. Racism and other prejudices of any form are no longer publicly acceptable. There are no longer officially segregated restrooms, businesses, and schools. There is no more enemy, or rather, the enemy has melted into the general population. Blacks who kill whites are far more likely to receive the death penalty, yet it’s difficult to call any single case an instance of racism. And both blacks and latinos suffer a disproportional homicide rate, yet we don’t care enough to do much besides throwing people in prison after the fact.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

I don’t really care that some people are richer than others. I care that the rich use their money to get richer. And, even more importantly, the rich use their money to make sure their children are rich too. We talk a lot in this country about equality of opportunity, but the truth is, the poor just aren’t getting it. But the rich don’t have to know this. Increasingly, they can use their money to isolate themselves in walled gardens where they only have to interact with other rich people. As long as races remain segregated by their incomes, we rich whites can keep our prejudices about both other races and the poor by never meeting any counterexamples. And, we can continue to sabotage our society by defunding essential social programs, knowing that our money will keep us out of trouble. Until it is too late anyway. This is not just!

The rich have no right to be isolated from social problems they create. If they are unwilling to do it voluntarily, they must be forced to confront the real struggles of the working poor. It is time to desegregate the neighborhoods, not just the schools, by both race and class.

Comments, again, on the blog, so I see them and they survive more than 30 days on lj.

Yesterday, I found out that my parents are something-ist. I told them that some of you were thinking of taking in a refugee (wow, refugee is such a strange word to use in the U.S.), and their first reaction was (paraphrasing), tell them to be careful. A lot of the refugees aren’t good people. Well sure, any group of fifty thousand people is going to have a few untrustworthy ones. But why should they be any less honest, on average, than, say, the random person I shared a dorm room with for my first year at college? These people aren’t like random people in College Station. Well, that’s true. The people who couldn’t leave New Orleans were blacker and poorer than those in the town I grew up in. I don’t know which label fits, but I’m pretty sure one does.

I’m not immune to either racism or classism. I’m ashamed any time an instance gets pointed out to me, but the attitudes are still in there. So why am I disappointed in my parents for expressing them? What really matters is the scientific and statistical answer to the question: Are poor/black people more likely to steal from or otherwise hurt the people they live with than middle-class/white people? But there’s a whole lot of grey area between a scientific answer of yes and a scientific answer of no, and I think we’re currently in the middle of it. Our racism and classism is determined by how much we believe one way or another before getting a scientific answer. I see answering yes before all the data is in as a moral failing, and, apparently, am willing to call people out on it here.