“We would much rather get rid of racism than get rid of poverty.”
Okay, this one really is via Will Shetterly:
Today, says David Brooks, “the rich don’t exploit the poor, they just out-compete them.” And if out-competing people means tying their ankles together and loading them down with extra weight while hiring yourself the most expensive coaches and the best practice facilities, he’s right. The entire U.S. school system, from pre-K up, is structured from the very start to enable the rich to out-compete the poor, which is to say, the race is fixed. And the kinds of solutions that might actually make a difference — financing every school district equally, abolishing private schools, making high-quality child care available to every family — are treated as if they were positively un-American.
A quote from an excerpt from Walter Benn Michaels’ The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned To Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. I’ve got the book waiting for me at the public library.
