Ranthropologist

Tag: inequality

  • Race and Privilege: Embracing Discomfort

    Race and Privilege: Embracing Discomfort

    I’ve written before about race. I focused on how race, as biology, is not real. But the events of the past few days [minutes, hours, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia…] make it painfully clear that race has tremendous relevance as a cultural, social, political, and economic construct. In that sense, in the sense of how we use it to treat each other differently, whether we think we do so or not, it is real in a way that is much more powerful than biology.

    I could go into a long history lesson here, but others have done it before me, and done it better. There are discussions about how racism and inequality are a result of centuries of White colonial powers justifying the theft of indigenous lands, the pillaging and raping of Native cultures, and the brutal enslavement of Native peoples. These crimes required defining indigenous peoples as inferior, savage, and less than fully human. Skin color became the proxy marker for subhuman status, and thus a justification for dominance, subjugation, and ultimately, the inequalities that we still wrestle with, centuries removed from the origins of colonial capitalism. These are truths that I now accept without a second thought. Still, I was talking with a friend today, trying to ease the physical weight I was feeling in my head and chest, and I realized that I am one of the lucky ones. I have been exposed to ideas, critical theory, discussion, literature, and debate on structural inequality, systemic racism, political economy, identity, intersectionality, hegemony, ideology, and more. Even if I am not a specialist in all these areas, I know more than most; maybe that’s why I bear the weight of my privilege so heavily. I know all these things, and yet my privilege is still something I take for granted until something happens to make me take it out, gaze at it, grapple with it, and try to find ways to use it for good.

    “We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to overempower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one’s race or sex.” – Peggy McIntosh

    I don’t want to make this post about me; my struggle with these ideas is nothing compared to the struggle of those who live without the privilege I so often take for granted. This post is about how, maybe, others can recognize their privilege. This is a very difficult thing for a lot of White people to do. We naturally become defensive. We want to believe that we aren’t complicit in the structures that allow us to move through life taking things for granted that others can’t. We don’t like the word privilege; it smacks of something unearned and undeserved, the indulgence given to a spoiled child. But in the context of White privilege, that’s not what the word means. It means something that we are lucky to have, and we are privileged because not everybody has it. If you want a full account of the idea of White privilege, read this classic paper by Peggy McIntosh. McIntosh discusses the concept, then lists several examples. If you are White, it’s illuminating to go through the list and feel recognition slowly dawning. If you are a person of color, I suspect you feel the same recognition, but from the other side of the coin. Not all of these examples will apply to everybody, but here are a few directly from McIntosh’s piece:

    1. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
    2. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
    3. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
    4. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
    5. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.
    6. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more less match my skin.

    And one of my own: I can get stopped for a traffic violation and not fear for my life.

    “[White people] move through a wholly racialized world with an unracialized identity (e.g. white people can represent all of humanity, people of color can only represent their racial selves). Challenges to this identity become highly stressful and even intolerable.” – Robin DiAngelo, Huffington Post

    Maybe you read these and think, yeah, ok; that’s true for me, but that doesn’t make me a racist. Maybe not; but racism doesn’t just mean individual discrimination and stereotyping. And that leads us to another subject just as tricky as privilege, if not more. White people don’t want to acknowledge the privilege of their race, and they definitely don’t want to acknowledge complicity in structural racism. And I agree! It’s incredibly uncomfortable to feel like you have to defend yourself just because you happen to belong to a particular race… but there, again, is another example of White privilege; generally, White people don’t have to defend themselves based on race. I’m talking about structural racism – the kind of racist ideology that is ingrained in us from birth. It’s the hegemony that we internalize as the natural order of things: some people are just better than others because they work harder, they try harder, they want it more. It’s the dismissal of the idea that maybe the system itself is structured so that we don’t all start from the same place, and as White people, we don’t want to have to acknowledge that. It takes away from the narrative that the hard worker is the one who wins; if people of other races really wanted to, they could work harder and get a better education and a better job and get off the welfare treadmill. We make it a defect of personality or upbringing or, yes, biology, because it allows us to keep on ignoring the reality that the playing field is not level. Again, these notions are deeply ingrained and not explicit in our thoughts, so we can go about our lives feeling secure that we aren’t perpetuating a racist system. But that is the very epitome of racist hegemony – it makes implicit co-conspirators of us all. You don’t have to be classically racist to be part of a racist system.

    In case you are having a defensive reaction reading this and thinking but I’m not a racist! (and I wouldn’t blame you), try to honestly answer these questions to see if just maybe you’ve internalized some structural racist hegemony (and bear in mind that your reaction might be deeply buried and not explicit, so think hard about your unconscious gut reactions and assumptions before assuming your answer to these questions is no):

    1. Have you ever crossed the street when a person of color is approaching from the other direction? If you didn’t cross the street, did you consider it? Were you nervous as you passed the person?
    2. Do you assume that Black mothers are raising their children alone and are on public assistance?
    3. Have you ever laughed over Black names, or said things like “It’s like they name their kids by grabbing a handful of Scrabble tiles!”?
    4. When you read about a random shooting or hear about it on the news, do you automatically picture a person of color?
    5. When someone talks about their doctor or their lawyer, do you automatically picture a White person?
    6. Have you ever seen a woman in a hijab or a man in a turban, and had the word “terrorist” pop into your head, even involuntarily?
    7. Do you get annoyed when a phone system asks you, “para Espanol, oprima numero dos”?
    8. Are you interested or concerned when you hear about the murder of a white person in  your community, but when you hear about the death of a person of color, you aren’t surprised? If you aren’t surprised, do you assume that the death involved gang violence or criminal activity by the dead person?
    9. Do you dismiss the ideas of Black people who use Black Vernacular English (what some people call Ebonics) and assume they speak that way because they aren’t educated?
    10. Do you feel relieved or justified when a Black person speaks out about trouble in their own community, because it makes you feel like you were right all along?

    Again, let me be clear: answering yes to any of the above does not make you a racist in the KKK fashion, or even in the fashion of your bigoted great uncle. And you may well have that initial reaction but then catch it and feel uneasy or bad about having it in the first place. And it’s not your fault. This is what hegemonic structural racism does to us – it implants these ideas and naturalizes them. Stopping those reactions is hard, and sometimes they come from a place so deep within that we barely register them. But recognizing and grappling with them is the only way to dismantle them.

    “…saying “all lives matter” as a direct response to “black lives matter” is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.” – Kevin Roose, Fusion

    I am writing this because I think it’s important for White people to do the difficult work of recognizing the system we are a part of, recognizing that we occupy a privileged position within it, and recognizing that we have implicit racial biases that make us complicit in the system. One more example of White privilege and structural racism: responding to #blacklivesmatter with #alllivesmatter. OF COURSE ALL LIVES MATTER. Black Lives Matter is not trying to say they don’t – they are saying Black lives matter ALSO. And until Black lives matter, it won’t be true that all lives matter. It’s the same as saying “But I’m not a racist!” Maybe so, but that doesn’t solve the problem of racism, does it? It’s a defensive reaction of privilege to push back at a community by saying “But what about MY life” when you don’t have to live in a world where your life seems to matter less.

    If you are White and this post makes you uncomfortable… I’m sorry for that, but I’m also glad. Since the horrific events of the past few days in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas, I’ve seen more pieces than I ever have before about how White people, if they really want to help, need to feel uncomfortable. As some of these articles point out, it is not the responsibility of people or communities of color to tell White people how to help or be allies. It’s up to us to do the hard work. I’m just as uncomfortable as anybody else, even with my years of exposure to ideas that are going to be new, foreign, and even frightening to others. That discomfort – it’s growing pains. It’s the necessary strain of working to be a better person who is helping to build a better world.

  • Daily Reads: Race, Riots, and Context

    Daily Reads: Race, Riots, and Context

    In light of the riots in Baltimore in response to the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore police, I offer this article by Conor Friedersdorf. Writing in The Atlantic, Friedersdorf condemns the violence while urging that the state-sanctioned violence perpetrated by police against Baltimore residents – particularly those of color – be addressed with the same urgency, indignation, and self-righteousness. Sadly, our attention is easily diverted from the underlying causes of the violence by context-free sound bites and video feeds, or by the actions of a single mother dragging her son away from the scene. Friedersdorf includes quotes from Martin Luther King that, to me, say it all, with this as the kicker: ” I’m absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt.” Friedersdorf reflects King by concluding “that riots are to be condemned; that they are inextricably bound up with injustices perpetrated by the state; and that it is a moral imperative for us to condemn both sorts of violence.”

    Two States of Emergency in Baltimore

  • Daily Reads: Statistical Inequality

    Daily Reads: Statistical Inequality

    Today’s read uses a specific example to highlight a broader problem that concerns me: the misleading use of statistics. Ezra Klein’s article from Vox discusses a recent statistic from Oxfam which states that the combined wealth of the richest 1% will be greater than the combined wealth of the remaining 99% within the next year. Taken by itself, this is indeed an alarming statistic, but as Klein illustrates, you have to drill down into Oxfam’s methodology to really see what this statistic is telling us. The article spells it out in detail, but the upshot is that the criteria used by Oxfam to calculate wealth takes into account debt as well as assets. What this means is that a poor rural resident of an underdeveloped part of the world who has no debt is considered “wealthier” than a resident of a developed nation whose debt exceeds her income. In other words, by Oxfam’s calculations, you could be making $150,000 a year – but if you owe $500,000 on a mortgage, you have a negative net wealth, which means you are “poor.”

    It’s well worth reading this article to see what calculations went into the statistic, and for Klein’s analysis of what we can learn from the overall Oxfam report. I have no doubt that inequality is an enormous global problem – but even when a statistic seems to support my position I want to make sure I am understanding that stat correctly. Sure, stats can make great soundbites, but I wish more people would make sure they knew what the stats they quote really mean.

    Be careful with that viral statistic about the top 1% owning half the world’s wealth

  • Shifting Perspective: The Economics of Privilege

    Shifting Perspective: The Economics of Privilege

    Just over a year ago, I decided to start indulging my creative side by crafting objects like lamps, clocks, and even furniture out of vintage, found, and second-hand objects. I even turned my little projects into a business of sorts, and started a website to showcase and write about my creations. As I learned how easy it is to make things that I thought would be difficult – like wiring lamp sockets, cutting, sanding, and finishing wood, and drilling through glass and metal – I started experimenting with other things I realized might be easier than they seem. This led to experiments with making food from scratch. As it turns out, ice cream, fruit jams and preserves, soda, and nut butters are easy to make and generally taste better than what you can buy at the store.

    At first, I felt smug about my new-found insights into the relative ease of the DIY lifestyle. It made me wonder how consumers got so easily fooled into believing that paying full price at the store was better than making their own bread and jam and peanut butter and ice cream and soda. But then, when I was sifting flour into my bread machine one evening, I suddenly thought about my Grandma G. Grandma G. made bread for her six kids and her husband every day. She did it by hand, and though by my father’s account Grandma’s cooking wasn’t great, it was serviceable. I pondered the innovation of the bread machine that allowed me to spend five minutes measuring ingredients into a pan so the machine could spend three hours mixing, kneading, and raising the dough which I would then transfer to the oven. I didn’t have three hours to spend mixing my own dough on a regular basis, which is why I had the bread machine. Bread making from scratch has become a luxury, and as such, it has also become a marker of status. In other words, it is a privilege. That is, if you are making your own bread, that probably means you have the luxury of time and resources – ironically, resources Grandma G., who was raising a large family on Grandpa G.’s meager salary, didn’t have. Her bread making was a necessity, not a luxury. She didn’t have a bread machine and access to hundreds of fancy bread recipes; she just had flour, yeast, salt, water, and her own efforts.

    This line of thinking shouldn’t have startled me, but it did. I had to admit that I am privileged to indulge in DIY cooking of the staples most people buy at the store. I have the resources to buy organic produce, free-range chicken, hormone-free milk from pasture-raised cows, and the myriad tools that make it easy to bake your own bread and make your own nut butters and jam. I own a fancy, high-powered food processor that whirs nuts into butter in just a few minutes. I have giant stock pots that I can use to boil fruit and sugar into jam, and tools for canning it. I have a fancy ice cream attachment for my expensive countertop mixer. I spent hundreds of dollars on bottles, caps, strainers, and funnels, and roots, herbs, and special yeast for making soda. Somehow in all that frenzy of DIY activity, I lost sight of the fact that what people used to have to do has become what most people can’t afford to do.

    How did we come to this state of affairs? Why is it now a privilege to get back to the basics that my Grandma G. practiced in her daily life? These are not rhetorical questions, but as of yet I’m not ready to dig too deep into some of the possible answers. At their core, these are questions related to the stratification that is inherent in the structure of capitalism, but they also have a lot to do with our individual pursuits of a better, faster, easier way to get things done. Our pursuit of ease in the interests of freeing up time to do more things has ironically led to us having less time than we used to. Grandma G. made bread for her family every day because she had to, but she undoubtedly would have loved to buy loaves at the store instead. Now, the daily treadmill of making ends meet, especially for those in the lower economic strata, makes buying loaves at the store the necessity, and having the time to make bread from scratch becomes the privilege.

  • Affording to Care

    Affording to Care

    As readers of this blog know, I advocate looking at an issue from multiple perspectives and using facts, logic, and an arsenal of critical thinking skills to reach a conclusion about just about everything. For some issues, this is easy. For others, it is very, very difficult. I am facing that difficulty right now. I don’t usually like to post about current events because I want my posts to be generally applicable instead of linked to a specific issue, but this post will be an exception. I am having an incredibly difficult time keeping any sense of perspective over the fact that the federal government shut down at 12:00 am on October 1, 2013 because of what seems to essentially be a game of chicken – or more accurately, a hostage situation. I just don’t get it. I am trying to remind myself that as much as I believe in my point of view, the people on the other side believe in theirs and have a right to it… but I am also reminding myself that sometimes, it’s okay to come to the conclusion that the other side is just. plain. wrong. This feels like one of those times to me.

    Much of my current state of mind comes from emotion, and I admit that it can color my analysis, but in this case I also think the facts are on my side. The thing is, this showdown over the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is not just about facts; it’s about ideology. It’s about a fundamental disconnect between two ideological realms: one that believes the government has a duty to provide for all its citizens, and one that believes that individuals are solely responsible for taking care of their own needs. Of course, there are nuances to these two ideologies, and a broad spectrum of positions between their poles. But my training in anthropology has taught me about the structure of culture and society – from the simplest hunter-gatherer band to the most complex industrial civilization – and I am convinced that the hunter-gatherers have it right. These groups stress interdependence among their members, with an egalitarian structure that doesn’t allow for status hierarchies or any one person having more power or possessions than others in the group. In fact, hunter-gatherers must provide for each other, because the survival of individuals depends on the survival of the group. Group survival is paramount. In many industrial societies, this notion has been turned on its head. Status, materialism, and individual achievement are paramount. However, this does not mean the burden of the ruling class to provide for societal needs is negated; in fact, it becomes more important than ever, because a class-based, stratified social system is by its very definition a system that allocates more resources at the top, and fewer resources at the bottom. The bootstrap individualist will argue that any individual has the capacity, with hard work and gumption, to climb to the top of the ladder. This is loosely true, but it ignores the complexities of living within an entrenched class system. In a class-based system, the playing field is not level. When you are standing 100 yards behind the starting line when the gun goes off, you have to run harder and surmount more obstacles than the runners who start ahead of you… and those runners are apt to leave even more obstacles in their wake. And, of course, there are only so many spots on the winners’ podium, so even if you see it and keep running towards it, chances are the people already standing there will fight tooth and nail to retain their position.

    In many ways I believe that the hegemonic lie perpetuated by this system – that is, the lie that there is space on the podium for everyone and all it takes is hard work to get there – is the root cause of our current crisis. The fight to defund the Affordable Care Act is championed by those who believe it is unfair for government to provide care to its poorest citizens. It is fought by those who believe that the poor just don’t work hard enough, or don’t try hard enough, or are lazy or entitled or accustomed to government handouts. Unfortunately, there are examples of people for whom this is true; but I don’t think it is true for the vast majority of those who are too poor, too sick, or too underemployed to afford health insurance. A successful culture is defined as one that secures the survival of the individuals that comprise it in a way that is fulfilling for most of them, most of the time. Clearly we are not meeting that definition in the United States. Other industrialized nations are having similar troubles, but at least most of them seem to have figured out that taking care of people’s physical (i.e. medical) needs is one thing that government should be responsible for. Our individualistic hegemony has obscured the path to a successful culture and society, so that opponents of the health care act criticize it as “unfair” because money they consider theirs – that is, the taxes they pay – is being spent to subsidize health care for those unable to pay for it. It’s “unfair” because those without health insurance now have a way to afford it because it spreads the risk amongst a much larger pool and allows for much cheaper premiums. It’s “unfair” because low-income people are being subsidized with taxes from individuals and businesses when they should just be working harder so they can get off the dole. It’s “unfair” because Congress is “exempt” (forgetting, conveniently, that the ACA is meant for people whose employers don’t provide health coverage, which Congress – also known as the federal government! – does provide for both elected officials and their staffs). It’s “unfair” because the burden of keeping the population healthy is being borne by those higher up the status hierarchy. To me, this is like those people on the winners’ podium – who know damn well that space on the podium is limited – flaunting their trophies and doing end-zone dances instead of shaking the hands of their fellow competitors and offering to help them over some of the barriers that they themselves may not have had to face. Instead of acknowledging that we are all in the same race, and working to make that race an equal chance for all, the winners instead blame the other competitors for having to race on an uneven track that they had no hand in devising and have very little ability to change.

    As I said at the start, I have a very hard time maintaining my objectivity about this subject. All I can see is that a group of individualist ideologues is willing to take down the entire system just so that our weakest, most vulnerable citizens have no chance at even seeing the podium, much less standing on it. I know this part of my argument is not logical, but right now, with this situation, I can’t help but give some heed to emotion.

  • Mini Rant: Overheated

    Mini Rant: Overheated

    Southern California is in the grip of the first real heatwave of the summer. It’s hot. It’s humid, by SoCal standards. There is a lot of thunderstorm activity in the mountains and deserts. I would be lying if I said the heat wasn’t a bit much, but I also happen to be one of those people who would prefer to be too hot over too cold so it’s not getting to me that much. However, I would also be lying if I said I wasn’t incredibly irritated by the constant exclamations and complaints over the heat. If I see one more ridiculously stupid “news” article referring to how San Diegans are escaping the heat (BREAKING NEWS: MALLS AND MOVIE THEATERS ARE AIR CONDITIONED!) I am going to snap and start sabotaging ACs. Yes, it’s hot, and we all know it (i.e., no social media pictures of car or patio thermometers needed). But boy does this bitching start to sound like a case of “My tiara is so heavy it’s giving me a headache.” We live in a country where most people have air conditioning or access to air conditioning. Heat is no longer life-threatening to the majority (although sadly, there are still heat-related deaths amongst impoverished people in the United States who have no AC and no easy access to cool places). Yes, heat sucks sometimes. It makes you sleepy. It makes getting outside and getting things done uncomfortable. But have some perspective, people! AC is a very new invention. Humans have adapted to and survived heat conditions worse than this for millennia. In most parts of the world, they still do.

    Heat in Indian

    Photo by Saurabh Das  /  AP

    This photograph shows people in India in 2009 attempting to escape the 120° heat by sheltering under a bus. In May 2013, India had a heatwave that resulted in 500 heatstroke deaths in three days in the state of Hyderabad. I guess my point is that those of us who can escape the heat should have a little perspective before indulging in the constant carping about the temperature. I’m not saying we can’t acknowledge our own discomfort; I just want people to practice remembering how fortunate we are.

    This post is a preface for a new series to come, in which I talk about what people want vs. what they need, and how the high level of confusion between the two has led the world to a pretty perilous state. Meanwhile, I’m going to make myself a frozen fruit smoothie and enjoy the 78° setting of my thermostat, and feel fortunate that I have access to such relief.