9.2 – Equity, Equality and Lizard People (TRANSCRIPT)

BIBLIOGRAPHY Hello fellow kids, and welcome back to What is Politics! Today I want to do a little old school OG what is politics and talk about how political worbs – words with no proper consensus definitions, make us all... Continue Reading →

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hello fellow kids, and welcome back to What is Politics!

Today I want to do a little old school OG what is politics and talk about how political worbs – words with no proper consensus definitions, make us all stupid and easy to manipulate.  

And a recent example of this is the worb “equity” which has almost entirely replaced the word “equality” in academia, and NGOs and activist organizations, as well as in corporate HR departments.  

And in this episode, I’m going to argue that replacing the word “equality” with the much more vague concept of “equity” is largely a way of taking ideas that promote economic inequality and disguising them in the language and style of social justice – and that it’s also a way of keeping people of all races, genders and ethnicities divided in conflict and competition with one another, so that we can’t pose an effective challenge to the people in power.   

In other words it is right wing politics disguised as left wing politics. 

And what I want to do here is for people watching this, if you see yourself as being on the right, I want you to see that you probably have a lot of beliefs and ideas that are actually on the left.  And if you’re on the left, I want to give you some tools to be able to recognize when right wing politics are masquerading as left wing politics, in the present, but also in the past, and in the future.  

THE LEFT

Now, since the before the political left had a name, it had always been pre-occupied with notions of equality.  In fact that’s literally the defining characteristic of the left.  From the emergence of the terms left and right in the wake of the French Revolution, up until the Cold War, the term “left” in politics represented those who strove for more equality, and the term “right” referred to those who believed in maintaining or expanding hierarchy.     

And when we’re talking about politics, when we’re talking about left and right, we’re talking about hierarchy and equality of decision making power.  In other words democracy on the left – where people in a group have an equal say in the decisions that affect the group – whether that group is the citizens of your state, or the workers in your workplace, vs autocracy on the right, where decision making power is determined by rank.  King over nobility over serfs, General over captain over private, Boss over worker,.  

The left in the french revolution of 1789 supported democracy, and the abolition of special ranks and the right supported the monarchy, and the preservation of special privileges for the nobility and the clergy. 

And the slogan of the left in the french revolution was Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood – a slogan which was inspired in part by the writings of the French philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau. 

Today, people often think that liberty and equality are antithetical – that they’re tradeoffs.  The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.  But that’s a legacy of the cold war.   Before that, those concepts were seen as a package that can only come together. 

A few decades before the French revolution, Rousseau had pointed out that you can’t have liberty without equality.  Liberty means being free to act without someone dominating you, and political equality means there are no ranks – everyone makes the decisions alone when those decisions affect you alone, and we make decisions together where those decisions affect us as a group, and we each have an equal voice in those group decisions. 

Political hierarchy on the other hand is ranked decision making, where one person decides for the others without their consent.  One person bosses another around, and you have to obey, or else you face dire consequences. Master over slaves. Captain over privates.  Owner over employees. That is the opposite of liberty.  You can only have liberty if you have political equality – equality of decisionmaking.  

And Rousseau also noted that some degree of relative economic equality was necessary in order for liberty to exist.  In Rousseau’s words, if we care about liberty, the we should “make the wealth-spread [meaning economic inequality] as small as you can; don’t allow rich men or beggars … no citizen should be so rich as to buy another, and none so poor that he is constrained to sell himself” 

Because if people are buying and selling eachother, or in our day and age renting eachother’s labour, then you will have one person bossing another person around all day – and that is the exact opposite of liberty and equality – and that’s true whether it’s slavery or serfdom or employment.  And that’s why the early socialist movement was in part pre-occupied with abolishing the employer employee relationship.  It was seen as a relationship of domination and exploitation – on the same spectrum as slavery and serfdom, but adapted to the era of contracts and capitalism.  

So until the rise of the soviet union, and the supposedly “communist” states, freedom and political equality and economic equality were ideas that were inseparable on the left.   And they still are today if the words right and left are to have any coherent meaning – except that for the most part, they don’t – because no one knows what they mean anymore.

After the russian revolution turned into an authoritarian political structure, the soviet union , needed to keep on claiming to represent the global left, in order to maintain its legitimacy – even though it had in reality abandoned both political equality and liberty.  

And so, in order to justify its existence and to hold on to some pretence of socialism – which was very much a left wing ideology – the communist party in power had to shift the focus away from ideas of equality of power – and towards ideas of economic equality and equality between nations.  And it justified the lack of political equality and liberty domestically by pointing to the fact that they were offering a degree of economic equality and security to their citizens, as well as national independence from the rich western countries.  And 20th century communism was basically an anti colonial movement before anything else. 

And because of this shift, the idea of what the left and right meant became confused.  And the elites in the capitalist west who were afraid of the appeal of socialism were very happy to participate in this confusion.  

In particular, they loved the idea of liberty being completely divorced from equality.   And in the new formulation, equality was depicted as the antithesis of liberty. 

So the elites of the US and the USSR both sort of colluded to present us with this fake choice, and this re-defined fake political spectrum, where you could have supposedly “left wing” economic security imposed by an authoritarian state, at the price of liberty and democracy – or else you could have supposedly “right wing” freedom in a democratic society, but at the price of economic equality.  

And you can see that freedom and democracy, which were staples of left wing ideology since the beginning, somehow ended up in the right wing camp in this garbledegook!   And this is the false choice that we’re still presented with today – if anyone even bothers to pretend to talk about economic equality anymore.  

But even with these garbled definitions, for more than 200 years, the left was always associated with equality of one sort or another – at first with political and economic equality, and then later, after the rise of the communist states, with equality of wealth.

OUT WITH EQUALITY, IN WITH EQUITY

But now, over the last 10 years or so, we’ve seen important institutions, which are associated the with the left in the popular imagination – like non-profit NGOs and activist groups, and universities – these institutions have been phasing out the use of the term “equality” entirely and replacing it with the word “equity”.  

Meanwhile the corporate world – which has always been the enemy of the left and of any sort of equality – has also taken a very keen and sudden interest in “equity,” particularly in their aptly named Human Resources departments – as if people are piles of coal to be shoveled into a giant steam engine.  

Now because of all this equity talk, which is always invoked in terms of concern for social justice, you have this really weird political gobbledygook situation today where big mega corporations like disney and amazon – which are everything the traditional left has always hated – are somehow being associated with the “left”.   

And this is a real gift to the right – because a lot of ordinary people hate those institutions, and they are actually right wing institutions par excellence – top down union busting hierarchical institutions, in terms of power and pay structure – and that’s true whether we’re talking about bible quoting chick fil-et or rainbow flag waving starbucks.

This nonsense has led to a situation where the terms left and right are now just completely meaningless, which robs us of an extremely important tool that we need to be able to analyze who’s on the side of equality of power, and who’s on the side of hierarchy of power.  

Most media pundits and journalists today, use the terms left and right to just mean “woke” and “anti-woke” – and these are camps which pretend to be mortal enemies – when they’re actually two sides of the same coin.  They both take legitimate ideas and concerns shared by many people, and then they turn them into idiotic nonsense which divides people up against each other by various cultural categories, in order to perpetuate economic inequality, thereby strengthening the various powers that be.   

And I’ll explain what I mean by this in a second – but for now let’s get back to equity vs equality on the supposed left.

According to people who see themselves as concerned with social justice, equity is in and equality is out because equality is supposedly a failed and outdated ideal.

So where outdated, failed figures like Martin Luther King or Gandhi or the slavery abolitionists, or the Suffragettes talked about equality – all of the great political geniuses of today like Ronald McDonald, and Kamala Harris, and Ibram X Kendi, are talking about Equity.  

And the reason that equality is supposed to be so passé is because equity is supposed to be much more fair than equality.  And that’s literally what equity means.  Fairness.  Fairness and equity are synonyms. 

And the reason equity is supposed to be so much more fair than equality, is that equity supposedly focuses on the results of a policy, while equality focuses more on the process.  

And you have this famous meme that’s used everywhere to illustrate this for a mass audience – and in this meme you have three kids trying to watch a baseball game.  And the kids are outside of the stadium behind a fence, so there’s the implication that they couldn’t afford to buy the tickets.  

And the meme is two panels, and on the left panel it says “equality” and you see that each of the thee kids is standing on an equal sized crate to try to see the game over the fence.  But the kids are all different heights so the shortest kid can’t see anything, even when he’s standing on the crate.  

And then on the right, the caption says “equity” and the tall kid has no crate, the middle kid has one crate and the short kid has two crates, and now their heads are all at the same level so they can allv see the game … equally – with equality … which is funny because equality is supposed to be a bad thing according to this stuff – but equality is actually what the equity caption of the meme is showing – just a different kind of equality – but we’ll get back to that in a minute. 

So, promoters of this concept of “equity” good “equality” bad, will explain their position by pointing to the fact that black people in the united states got legal equality by the mid 1960’s, but today, 60 yars later, black americans are still on the average poorer, in jail a lot more, they’re underrepresented in fancy universities, they get arrested more, they get longer sentences when they’re convicted for the same crimes with the same record as a white person – in other words, you still have a lot of inequality, and in particular economic inequality.  Again equity seems to always be about equality – just a specific kind of equality.

And according to Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-racist, equity is when the results of a policy are equal in terms of racial proportions.  If 15% of the united states is black people, then you have equity when 15% of CEOs are black, and 15% of the kids that get into Harvard are black, and 15% of the people in prison are black, and 15% of homeless people are black.  

So that’s fairness according to Kendi and equity types, and that’s the liberal institutional view of equality vs. equity.   

Now on the conservative side of things, conservatives tend not to like the words equality or equity, and people like Jordan Peterson make the exact opposite argument than the liberal equity types do – Peterson and others tell us that we should only care about the process being fair, not the results.  What makes something fair is that the rules are fair, and that the best person comes out on top, and race and gender are irrelevant to this 

Like if you’re running in a race, it defeats the entire purpose of a race to have everyone finish at the same time, the whole point of a race is that the best person should win, and that’s what a race is for: to see who’s the best. 

And the real world analogy to that, is always ivy league college admissions or corporate hiring – where equity is now a giant buzzord. 

And the idea on what’s now called the “right” is that so long as the rules for things like college  admissions are fair, meaning that the same rules apply to everyone equally, then you’re getting the best, most talented, hardworking and qualified people to fill the leadership positions of tomorrow – and this benefits everyone.   

After all – the whole point of the competition for admissions and hiring is to end up with the best doctors and lawyers, not for everyone to get a trophy so that we end up with mediocre doctors and lawyers to screw up everyone’s lives and tie your guttyworks all in a knot on accident.

So in the conservative view, what makes something fair / i.e.equitable – is precisely the process and not the outcome. 

And conservatives like to talk about this in terms of equality – and it’s the only kind equality that they’re interested in – and it’s what they call “equality of opportunity”.  

And equality of opportunity is an extremely misleading way of putting it, because even if the process itself is perfectly fair, the reality is that working class and poor people and even many middle class people have so many obstacles to being able to even think of competing to get into these schools, that it’s more like equality of opportunity for rich people – and we’ll look at some of those details of that in a bit. 

It’s interesting to note though, that the conservatives who are against equity, are invoking  fairness – i.e. equity, when it comes to process and results, while the people who are supposedly against equality and for equity, the liberals – are invoking equality of results as their definition of what equity is… 

And this mishkebibble is a big red flag which tells us that these worbs are hiding what’s actually going on underneath the surface.  

ARGUMENT

And what’s actually going on, is that we have two different methods for perpetuating economic inequality, targeted at two different types of people – people with liberal dispositions and people with conservative dispositions.   

You have conservative messages which justify economic inequality by telling us that a fair process gives us fair results, while completely ignoring the fact that in a society like hours, the competition is rigged from the start in terms of who even gets a chance to compete at all.  

And on the other side, the liberal messages perpetuate inequality by pretending that what makes the world unfair is not economic inequality – but having the wrong percentages of particular racial or gender groups at the top and bottom of the inequality pyamid.  And what is fair is a world with the same economic inequality and homelessness, and skyrocketing rents, and disappearing middle class that we have now, but where the proportion of colours and genders and religions among the people in the ruling class and in the homeless population and all the ranks in between, are equal to their proportions in the population as a whole.  

It’s Rainbow lipstick on a capitalist pig so to speak. 

In other words, equity vs equality of opportunity isn’t a right vs left argument – it’s an argument between two types of right wingers – liberal right wingers vs conservative right wingers – who are arguing about how best to maintain the unfair and unequal hierarchies that we find in our society today.  

And both these arguments, but especially the liberal arguments, are what I like to call “lizard people arguments.”  And by that I don’t mean literal lizard people, but metaphorical lizard people. Persons of lizard. Like in those movies from the 80s V and They live.  Lizard people are people pretending to be advocating for equality of power – meaning left wing ideas, the little guy – but they’re actually advocating for dominance hierarchies – for the boss, for the state, the king the landlord, the rich.  They’re trying to get you to support things that you don’t want, by disguising them as something you do want.  

Like chocolate covered cyanide pills.  Or like an authoritarian one party state disguised as socialism, or like crusades and gold encrusted popes disguised as the teachings of Jesus.

CLASS FILTER

There’s an age old phenomenon that’s that I call “the Class Filter” or “Lizardification” – Whenever you have ideas that are a threat to established power – things like Socialism, Christianity, and the various movements for equality between various gender, ethnic and racial groups of the 20th and 21st centuries – if these movements and ideas avoid getting crushed by the powers that be, they’ll often end up getting absorbed and re-interpreted by the institutions of established power, and then they come out the other end [plop] as something completely different – something that the elite classes are much more comfortable with. 

Christianity starts out as the religion of communal poverty, turn the other cheek and throw the moneylenders out of the temple – but then, as it gets adopted by the Roman elite, and eventually the Roman Emperor Constantine and becomes the offical religion of the Empire, it turns into the religion of gold encrusted popes and military conquest, and crushing the serfs and of crusades.  

Mid-19th century socialism was all about abolishing the employee employer relationship, and giving workers control over government and industry, and of direct democracy – but then, as it passed through the parliaments of europe and then through the ruling bureaucratic elite of the soviet union and the other marxist leninist states – it quickly morphed into a bunch of shameful excuses for state control over workers. 

And more recently, we had civil rights and black equality movements, and women’s liberation and gay liberation, trans rights – and these movements have had enormous successes in breaking down social hierarchies and making our society a much more equitable and human place to live than it had been before.  

And in every case, the shift can be hard to notice at first, because the elite-friendly versions are still disguised in the language and symbols of the original movements that threatened power.

It’s like how the socialist slogan, “worker control of the means of production”, originally meant literal worker control over their workplaces and over government – but once it got through the halls of power, it ended up meaning “communist party control” over the means of production and of the workers.  

Or how your nonbinary intersectional feminist boyfriend is actually just a manipulative abuse artist, who uses intersectional language and ideas so he can better manipulate women.  

Now about the more recent movements for racial and gender equality – the ideas behind these movements very often came from ordinary people, from bottom-up social movements, and a lot of the queer and trans stuff in particular came from very poor, marginal people.

But once they went through the ivy league universities, which are full of rich kids and upper middle class professors – who have very different life experiences and concerns and interests than other people do – they’ve started to get transformed into a very different set of ideas – ideas that appeal to rich kids and upper middle class professors.  

So we see that focus on economic inequality and class has been pushed more and more in to the background and replaced with an emphasis on the types of pre-occupations that rich people have – micro-agressions and obstacles to becoming a corporate VPs or CEO (lean in).  The original optimistic emphasis on solidarity, and common humanity – which were central to all of these movements, turn into eternal divisions by race and gender and sexuality which can never and must never be bridged.  Ideas about giving more voice to people who aren’t often heard, get transformed into everyone has to always stay in their lane and know their place, and everyone has to follow rigid rules about what you can say or how you can dress or what music you can play – as determined by… rich college kids.  The idea of making spaces where everyone is comfortable, turns into spaces where no one is comfortable.  

And when poor or working class people are discussed, they’re presented in the way that do-gooder rich people see them – as props to enhance the power of do gooder rich kids.  They’re helpless innocent victims, who need do gooder rich people as allies and representatives, to protect the total victim who is too feeble to be asked to do any of the emotional labour of articulating their own ideas or opinions.  And these great allies and representatives would shit their pants if they had to have any social interaction with any of the people they’re supposed to represent, outside of a patron client relationship. 

And the aim is no longer a solidaristic world of equal people working and cooperationg together – it’s a world forever divided by impenetrable barriers that can never be bridged, they that can only be policed and managed – by the ivy league manager class.  

And the replacement of the word Equality by the word Equity is part of this process of transformation from movements that threaten to change the system, into movements that entrench the existing system.  

ETYMOLOGY

So let’s look at the words equity and equality.  Just by looking at them, you can see that they have the same root word.  They both come from the ancient Latin word aequus [eykwus], meaning “even, plain, or just.”  So even in ancient rome 2000 years ago, the concept of justice and fairness were linked with the concept of being even – i.e. equality – level playing field.  And the concept of equality and fairness are deeply linked in our psyches probably since our origins as a species for reasons that we’ve explored a little bit in other episodes.

So equity inherently has within it this sort of implication of equality.  

But equality of what?  Because the thing is that equity and equality are both vague words, but equity is much more vague because at least equality makes you ask “equality of what?” which can give you a very precise answer that you can decide to agree or disagree with.    

So for the kids in the meme with the boxes and the baseball game – both captions in that meme demonstrate equality – but it’s just equality of different things.  On one caption you have equality of the size of the box – and on the other you have equality of ability to see the game.  

So if the authorities in charge of access to baseball games tell you that their goal is “equality of box size”, most people would say “well that’s stupid, what’s the point of that, isn’t the point that everyone should be able to see the game?”.  But if they say they’re aiming for “equal ability to see the game” then most people would say great, that’s fair, we support that.  So equality is good or bad, depending on equality of what. But the benefit of the word is that it makes you ask “equality of what”.

On the other hand, if the authorities instead tell us that their goal is “equity in terms ability to see the game” – then that just means “fairness” – and that’s a great lizard person word because any normal person hearing that will just assume that it means everyone gets to see the game, whereas the actual decision-making authority might have a very different idea of what constitutes fairness. 

Now think of the types of authorities that invoke equity and who actually control access to baseball games in real life:  big corporations.

It’s actually very likely that the Department of Equitable Baseball Game Watching thinks that true fairness – true equity – is when if you can’t afford to go see the baseball game, then you shouldn’t be able to see the baseball game at all, and nobody gets any crates, and they build a higher fence so that no one can see anything no matter how many crates you stack!   It’s fair so long as everyone has an equal opportunity to pay full price for a ticket without being discriminated against by race.   

And that’s the lizard person beauty of a completely vague and ambiguous word like “equity”.

And the more you identify with the authorities invoking equity – like if you’re a liberal cosmopolitan type and so are they, or if you’re a southern conservative type and so are they – or if you’re black and so are they – the more you’ll trust them and you’ll assume that they mean the same thing that you’re imagining, and the more they can screw you over.  

LEGAL STANDARDS

The more vague a word is, the more power that the person using is grabbing for themselves. 

And you can see examples of this principle wherever there is power.  

In law for example – I’m a practicing lawyer, and I specialize in defending tenants against landlords.  And in every legal system, you have some laws and particularly regulations that are very precise – and other laws that are a lot more ambiguous.  And the more ambiguous a law is, the more there’s room for judges to fill in the blanks according to their own values or prejudices and ideas and life experiences.  And since judges tend to overwhelmingly come from corporate or prosecutorial backgrounds, and where I live, they’re chosen by the governing political parties – they tend to think like people who work in corporations and as prosecutors and in governing political parties – i.e like the ruling class. 

So for example there are speeding laws that say that if you go faster than 60 miles per hour in a 60 miles per hour zone, then you have to pay a fine and get some demerit points.  So if you contest your ticket and there’s a trial –  there isn’t much room for the judge to impose her values on the situation – like even if she thinks the speed limit should be 200mph, and you went 61, she has to give you the fine if there’s clear evidence that you went 61.   And I’m saying “she” for the judge here not because I’m trying to be mr feminist wanna be, but because most of the judges where I work are women, so I tend to think of judges as women.  

Now where I practice, there’s a law that says that you can’t get evicted from your apartment until your rent is 21 days late.  That’s also very precise.  But, there’s an exception – you can still get evicted if your rent is less than 21 days late, if you pay your rent late frequently, but only if these frequent late payment cause your landlord “serious injury”: – un préjudice sérieux in french is how the law is worded.    

The lessor may obtain the resiliation of the lease if the lessee is over three weeks late in paying the rent or, if he suffers serious injury as a result, where the lessee is frequently late in paying it.

So the word “frequently” and “serious injury” are subject to interpretation by the housing tribunals.  

Now any normal person reads “serious injury” and thinks “that must mean something big, like the landlord needs the rent on time to pay his mortgage or other important expenses he’s getting in trouble with the bank or suffering some other serious inconveniences.   And that’s certainly what I thought it meant when I read that law for the first time as a student working at a legal clinic.  And I remember thinking “oh i see, this is an exception that protects small landlords who own like a duplex that they live in – but when it comes to a big landlord with lots of properties, you can basically pay up to 20 days late every month and you’re ok.  

But in law, you never ever assume anything is logical or works according to your intuition or common sense – so before giving the tenants advice on this, I researched the case history to make sure that judges interpret the law in the way that I interpreted it. 

 

And what I found really surprised me. 

When they first started to have specialized housing courts here in the1970s, the judges did apply the law in the common sense way that I had interpreted it.  Serious injury meant having trouble with mortgage payments or other important time-sensitive expenses.

This was there era when things like socialized healthcare, and consumer protection laws, and labour tribunals were introduced in Quebec and Canada, and when they were building subway systems and other public infrastructure projects.  It was a time when wealthy countries around the world were able to tax corporations and the wealthy at high enough rates so that they could afford to pay for all the nice things that make civilization worth living in. 

And in that era, government and the bureaucracy often saw themselves as the defenders and protectors of the public. 

But over the years as the era of big government got sucked down the toilet and replaced by the business friendly neoliberal era when the state is afraid to tax the rich, and public services and health care systems are falling apart the politicians let the wolves run loose to eat all of the sheep, the government is no longer sexy, and the judges and bureaucrats think of themselves less as protectors of the people, and more as regular white collar middle class people, investors, homeowners and landlords.  So when you read recent cases about the 21 day rule, it’s now considered “serious injury” if the building custodian goes and rings your door a couple of times during the month to ask for the money – even though he gets a salary this doesn’t cost the landlord any more money.   

And it’s funny to see the reasoning of the judges in advancing this completely ridiculous interpretation of the term “serious injury”.  

When you read the cases where the judges start turning towards more landlord friendly interpretations of this law, you read judgments saying things like: “well some judges say that serious injury means getting in trouble with the bank or not being able to pay expenses – but that can’t be what the legislators meant when they wrote this law, because that would mean that the law would only protect small landlords.  

But tenants who have big corporate landlords could just pay their rent on the 20th every month – so the legislators must have meant that serious injury is when the landlord is mildly annoyed because he had to email you three times to get the rent, or when the superintendent had to knock on your door one time – after all, you can’t have laws that apply differently to different groups of people – ben non ça se peut pas là!”

And that interpretation is absolutely ridiculous on so many levels – it’s just not true at all that laws affect everyone equally – laws against being allowed to sleep on a park bench don’t affect billionaires and homeless people equally – they’re entirely targeted at homeless people.  Or progressive income taxes treat poor people differently than rich people, that’s the whole point. 

And it’s totally plausible that the people who wrote that legislation did think that big landlords should be treated differently than small ones, because the mentality of government at the time was to see itself as a protector of tenants and consumers and workers against bosses and corporations and landlords.  

BACK TO EQUITY

So laws originally written to protect tenants, get filtered through the class of judges, and by means of the ambiguous words in the law, the judges turn tenant protections into to laws that facilitate evictions and gentrification – because now the landlord can pretend that you paid late a few times and then he kicks you out so he can jack up the rent.  

Now vague language is often just necessary because you just can’t predict every situation that’s going to come up, so there’s always going to be room for the judge’s discretion – but making precise language more vague when there’s no reason for it, is basically just a power grab and a manipulation technique.  And that’s exactly what “equity” is.  

BE EXCELLENT TO EACHOTHER

Like imagine that you have a political candidate who runs on the platform of simplifying our complicated legal system – which is actually a great idea – and his proposal is – instead of having our confusing system with 5 zillion laws and regulations at multiple levels of government to cover every sort of situation imaginable, instead we’ll just get rid of all the laws, and have one perfect law that everyone can understand – a constitution that just says that says “Everyone must be excellent to eachother, and all things must be cool and good”.  Like the combined wisdom of Bill and Ted movies and Orang Man Memes.

And that is the perfect law – if you’re a total dictator – because it means that the person who gets to make decisions – whether it’s a judge or head of state or equity and inclusion officer, gets to decide whatever they want in any given situation without any constraints.

A man shoots a homeless guy because the homeless guy smiled at his wife – the judge gives him a pass because the judge thinks that homeless people are scary, and it’s their own fault for being homeless, and that’s not excellent, so the guy was just being excellent by defending his wife’s honour. 

The president decides that police can come search everyone’s houses and execute everyone who’s addicted to painkillers – because being an addict isn’t cool and making everyone safe from icky addicts is excellent!

Vague rules mean “whatever the person in charge says goes” and in our society, people in charge who make decisions in most circumstances tend to be rich people like business owners and investors – or else upper middle class people – like judges, politicians, managers and administrators – the skilled intellectual workers that rich people hire in order to make sure that their money keeps rolling in smoothly.   

EQUITY IRL

So back to equity and how it’s applied today:

We live in a time when the middle class is getting more and more hollowed out each year, while the rich get richer, and life is getting harder and harder for a lot of people.  So there’s a big market for lizard people politicians who can pretend to care about what people are going through, and who will pretend to want to deliver change, but who in the end just be delivering the same old bullshit as always, to keep the donors and powerful people happy. 

So you get your Barack Obama running on hope and change, which everyone thought meant hope for fundamental changes to the economy and politics, but he actually just meant change your underwear every day and keep hoping for a better life that’s never going to happen unless you win the lottery – or Donald Trump who promises that everyone will get health care and that he’ll protect american jobs, and he’ll stop the opioid crisis and he’ll shake up the whole system – and then he just delivers the same giant tax cuts for rich people that every president delivers with the only change being that he ratcheted up ethnic conflict and made it ok to say things that had been considered beyond the pale in national politics for decades.  

And note that when Trump is promising everyone gets health care – that’s left wing politics.  In democracies, right wing politicians basically only gain popularity by invoking tribal instincts, or else by promising left wing policies which they never deliver, or both. 

So you have lizard Obama, and Lizard Trump, both making left wing  promises, and delivering right wing results, and then you get all of these little lizard wanna be’s like peetie buttigieg and ron desantises who are trying to be imitaton Obamas and Trumps but who don’t have any of that same lizard person charisma of being able to hypnotize people while you suck out their blood for your donors.

So, today, one big way that you can look like you’re doing social change, but without threatening the power of rich people in any way, is instead of being a champion of the people as a whole – which makes elites super uncomfortable – think of bernie sander – you become a champion of some of the people – of historically disadvantaged people – but you don’t champion them in a way that actually helps them – you do it in a way in a way that looks like you’re helping them, but you’re mostly just helping rich people who donate to your university or your political campaign. 

And how do you do that?  What’s the bizarro rich people version of helping minorities?

It’s called “anti-racism” and “equity”.   You look at all the difficulties faced by members of identity groups who are disproportionately poor, and blame these difficulties entirely on discrimination, without looking at the context of economic exploitation and competition which cause most of these problems, including generating and activating discrimination in the first place.  And then you promise to promote “equity”- an ambiguous worb which secretly means economic inequality disguised a social justice.  

So – if you look at history and anthropology, and you look at negative outgroup discrimination – things like racism and sexism – like why do these things exist in human beings all over the world?  We’re going to do an episode specifically on this, but in short, we evolved the tendencies to discriminate against people outside of our group, in order to facilitate the economic exploitation of outside groups, and to facilitatie the exclusion of those groups from the competition for access to resources.   One tribe makes a bunch of excuses to hate the other tribe so we can take their resources or kill them or enslave them.  

Like the reason that anti black racism came to become this giant system of oppression in the United States, wasn’t just because white people have evil racism in their hearts – it was in order to morally justify the economic exploitation of slaves.  And diving slavery from freedom by skin colour was not just because of mysterious evil, but because it helped prevent broader opposition to slavery.  And then, in the reconstruction era, after slavery – racism was consciously and explicitly used as a tool by the rich plantation owners and other business owners, in order to stop the white and black workers from joining together to fight for better wages and working conditions – which is what was happening at that time as the populist movement started becoming multiracial and expanding it’s popularity and power. 

Or if you look at anthropology and you look at societies that are have extremely patriarchal where women are second class citizens who make all the food, but then only eat leftovers after the men and children have eaten – you see that the ideas and attitudes of sexism and patriarchy serve the same purpose.  It’s a set of justifications to keep women as domestic servants, to reserve the best food for men, and all of the important positions of political decision-making etc.  

Studies going back to the 1970s show that if you take a bunch of strangers in a room, and then you call half the people group A and the other half group B, members of each group immediately begin to discriminate against eachother and to infer bad motives into the behaviour of the outgroup and good motives into the behaviour of members of their own group – and the most likely reason that this tendency evolved in human beings, is to facilitate the exclusion and exploitation, or sometimes even the genocide of other people in the competition for resources – or else conversely, to defend ourselves from other groups who are trying to do those things to us. 

DYING OF WHITENESS

There’s a book called Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl.  Metzl is a liberal type who went and did research on this idea that lower class republicans vote against their own economic interests because of racism.  In particular he was interested in people with serious health problems, who were voting for state level republican candidates who were promising to reject expansions of the healthcare system that would save their lives.  And the idea was supposed to be that these people are so racist and stupid that they’d rather die than give something to black people.  Hence the title of the book.  

But if you look at the language of the people he’s talking to, the racism that the author focuses on is real – but it’s almost entirely pre-occupied with economic concerns.  The illegal immigrants are taking their jobs, the welfare cheats are taking their resources and bankrupting the country so that there’s nothing left for honest taxpayers.  It was so consistently about resource competition that in an interview with Coleman Hughes, Metzl defined racial resentment as “in a nutshell, the fear that people are going to come take your stuff – that people are going to come cut in line in the push for resources.”

So what at first glance looks like knowingly voting against your economic interests because of racism, is actually voting for what you think are your economic interests – you’re defending yourself from immigrants taking your jobs, or from welfare cheaters wasting your taxes – or else you’re sacrificing yourself for your group’s economic interests –  like you might lose out and even die from lack of healthcare, but you’re punishing cheaters, and line skippers, and that’s going to help your children and your tribe in the long term. 

So we just can not understand racism without the context of economic competition.  Forms of outgroup discrimination, like racism – are messy proxies for economic competition which make you see your economic interests along racial lines instead of class lines – and that’s why it’s such an effective tool to be used by elites – both conservative and liberal elites.   In tribal times, identity probably was an effective match with economic interests – but in complex civilizations, poor white people have more in common in terms of their economic interests with with poor black people, than they do with rich white people.  

Now imagine what racism would look like without conflict over resources or economic competition.  Like if we lived in a Star Trek world where no one was poor and everyone had fulfilling jobs that paid decently, and was entitled to a nice stable place to live and there was no economic inequality because replicators make everything everyone needs.  In a world like that, racism would just mean that some people wouldn’t be invited to the fun house parties of certain shitty other people who discriminate against them.  And it would be extremely obnoxious, but it wouldn’t be a huge political issue – it would just be like the equivalent of some people being a jerks or a meanie weanies. And there are always jerks and meanie weenies in the world.  It’s when being a jerk or meanie weenie systematically makes it harder for you to get a job or proper health care or a decent place to live or a cab, or to participate in democracy, or it gets you harassed by police, and sentenced more harshly by judges, or it gets your health concerns dimissed by doctors – that’s when it becomes an economic issue – that’s when it becomes important.  

And today, in the real world, if you’re a wealthy member of a non-dominant group in a country with equal legal rights for everyone – the wealthier you get, the more the discrimination that you suffer from resembles people being meanie weanies and it’s less it resembles a series of giant structural obstacles to living a decent and dignified life.

For working class and poor people, not getting a good education is a problem because it means that your ability to make money will be hampered.  Discrimination by bosses and landlords means it’s harder to get a job and you’re that much closer to homelessness because poor people can’t wait 3 months to get a job like middle class people can.  And it means it’s that much harder to find a decent place to live even when you have the skills or can afford the rent.  And when you buy a home the banks target you with things like really shitty exploding mortgages, like they did in the lead up to the 2008 housing crash, which means you lose your home.  Economic problems.   

And if you’re a woman doing waitressing, you need to put up with sexual harassment all night because if you quit you’ll get evicted, lose your medical insurance, not be able to afford child care – and you have no safety cushion to keep you alive while you find a place to work where you get harassed less.  Economic problems.  

CHRIS ROCK VS CRACK ROCKS

Now if want a really clear illustration of the connection between economic inequality and racism, imagine a rich black person – like Chris Rock – he parks his nice car in front of his big house in his rich neighbourhood – and as he’s going from his car to his front door, a police officer stops him and asks him what he’s doing there.  

And Chris Rock is annoyed, and tells him that this is his house, but the officer keeps grilling him and giving him a hard time and he treats him with disrespect and hostility before he finally is convinced that Chris actually lives there and isn’t a drug dealer or a burglar.  

And then he apologizes because maybe he feels bad, or maybe because he realizes that if Chris complains to the chief of police or the mayor, he might get in trouble because Chris is rich and famous.  

Most of us would say that assuming that a black person is a drug dealer or a burglar is pretty racist.   And it is – but why do people make racist assumptions?

Imagine that a week later, in the same neighbourhood, a rich white person parks in front of his big rich house right next to Chris Rock’s big rich house – but this rich white guy is dressed like a crusty punk.  And the reason that he’s rich is because of he’s from a famous crusty punk band, Anus Pus.  And his name is Crack Rock.  

The same police officer who also stopped Chris Rock, stops Crack Rocks and asks him the same questions and gives him the same hard time until he realizes that like black Chris Rock, white Crack Rock is just going home to his legitimate big rich guy house.   It might take this officer even longer to back off of Crack Rock than it did with Chris Rock because Chris Rock is dressed like a GAP ad, and this guy is dressed like a heroin addicted crusty punk, and he kind of stinks – and it’s easier to imagine a rich black person than a rich crusty punk.  

The police guy assumes that the crusty punk guy is poor – because his clothes are a cultural shortcut for a poor person. 

Now not every person who dresses like a crusty punk is poor, but most are, and despite being rich, Crack Rocks, got discriminated against because his appearance is associated with poverty and danger – i.e. threat to property of the rich people in the rich neighbourhood.  In rich neighbourhoods, poor people are usually gardeners or nannies or servants of some kind, ore else they’re there to do burglary.  

And in a society where black people are disproportionately poor – black skin is also a shortcut for poverty and danger, especially to police who deal with violent crime mostly in poor neighbourhoods.  And the perception of danger, like competition, triggers the human innate tendency to discriminate, and to become tribal.  Police officer sees a lot of dangerous criminals with black faces, and then he starts to see black faces as dangerous as his outgroups discrimination instinct gets activated. 

It’s like in appalachian towns where there are very few minorities, you go to the trailer park, and the police will treat the poor white people there much like they treat the poor brown people in new york or atlanta.  You get the same contempt, and perception of threat – the same set of emotional responses and intuitions that are operating as when racism is at play – just different epithets – tweaker trailer trash instead of thug and n-word. One is called racism and one is called classism, but they’re both the same human outgroup discrimination response and they’re both based on the perception of poverty and danger and hatred of weakness. 

Chris Rock looks like a gap ad.  But the police stop him because black skin triggers a discrimination impulse that goes beyond economical inequality, but that is basically a spillover effect of economic inequality.  Chris Rock is paying the price for the fact that black people are disproportionately poor for historical reasons.   But it’s the poverty that is causing that response, and the association of black skin with poverty – not some mysterious inherent feature of black skin or of white people’s inner evil. 

And of course there’s a huge amount of racism that people grow up with as a legacy of the slavery and jim crow systems that’s part of the culture, and that has huge effects on how we treat each other.  But imagine that you could make all of that go away by giving everyone magic brown pills.  No more stereotypes, no more racism in peoples’ hearts and minds, no more discrimination in courts, or by police, or doctors or landlords or employers.  

All that racial discrimination would just come back in a generation. 

Because, unless you do something to stop poverty, black and brown people would still be disproportionately poor for historical reasons – slavery, jim crowe, deindustrialization.  And that means that over time, police and judges, and landlords and employers –  who already routinely discriminate against poor people for economic reasons – will start discriminating all over again as they start associating poverty and the crime and dysfunction that’s associated with it, with brown faces, which is a shortcut that we’re evolved to take.  

Racism is a weed that has its own life beyond poverty and economic inequality, but poverty, economic inequality, exploitation and resource competition are the soil from which racism and other forms of discrimination sprout.  There really isn’t much need for it otherwise. 

RICH PEOPLE LOVE POVERTY

Now most people understand that poverty is a bad thing that ideally should not exist.  Like a common sense idea that I bet most people have, is that in a society that is getting richer and richer on average, everyone should be benefitting from that, and poverty should be on its way out the door. 

But that’s not the world that we live in, and those aren’t the values of our ruling business and government elites.  People in ruling class bizarro land, might not like poverty in theory – but they actually need poverty in reality.  

Not all rich people – doctors and basketball players don’t need poverty to be rich – but people who get their wealth from businesses that depend on low wage employees for their profits, do.  

If you didn’t have poor people in the world, then no one would work at amazon warehouses for minimum wage where you get fired for having poo poos that take too long to come out, and no one would work at life threatening cobalt mines in Congo for pennies a day to make your iphones – these companies would have to pay serious wages to get people to do this work, and the wages would have reflect how onerous the work is, instead of just reflecting the bargaining power of the employee.  In other words, a world without poverty would evaporate almost all of the profits of the owners and shareholders of these companies.    

So if you’re someone whose wealth comes from a business that benefits from low wages, either as an owner, investor or high level executive – you want there to be enough people that have enough money to buy your products and services, but you also want a sizeable amount of poverty and inequality so you can get your labour for cheap, and also to scare your middle class and upper middle class skilled employees out of getting too uppity and asking for too much in terms of their wages and benefits.

So the entire corporate class and investor class, who are the same people who donate to politicians and universities – this is direction that their instincts lie in. 

BIZARRO SOCIAL JUSTICE

So – what’s a bizarro, wealth-friendly way of doing social justice for minorities that doesnt bother the donor class?

You make it your paid life’s work to ensure that poverty and wealth are racially proportionate to society as a whole, without changing the actual amount of poverty and wealth in society.

Again, Ibram X. Kendi, tells that something is racist if it doesn’t result in all the different levels of hierarchy in society having the exact same racial proportions as in the general public – and if something is not perfectly proportional, then you need to take concrete action to make it proportional.   And you can’t be passive – you’re either racist or anti-racist, working towards racial equality / proportionality. 

That sounds radical and bad-ass, but what it actually means is that the problem with billionaires and CEOs and giant corporations isn’t that they make so much money that it allows them to completely dominate the government and rewrite all the laws to make themselves richer at the expense of everyone else – the problem is that not enough of the people who completely dominate our government and write the laws to make themselves richer at the expense of everyone else are female or black. 

And the problem with poverty isn’t that it exists – the problem is that black people make up about 25% of the poor people instead of 15%.   So the solution to that is we need more white poor people and more asian poor people and more jewish poor people to make it all correctly proportional… 

Now that’s utopia! (great job!)

Like imagine if in slavery times, the abolitionists, instead of making all of those powerful calls for human equality against the moral abomination of slavery which must be abolished – imagine if instead they were arguing that slavery is unfair because it’s racially unequal – we need white slaves, and chinese slaves, and jewish slaves, and we need black slave owners – and once 15% of slave owners are black, and 50% are female, and 60% of slaves are white – then slavery will be equitable and we can all go home.  

This is what all of these equity people are advocating for when it comes to poverty and extreme wealth in our society.  

And this ridiculous approach to social justice has multiple benefits for the donor class and the upper middle classes. 

First, even though you’re actually just reinforcing economic inequality, you feel like you’re doing something good for society.  

Second, it’s good PR for rich powerful corporations and institutions to show their customers and the frustrated masses that they’re doing something good for society.   So Nike is enlsaving poor workers in asia to make their stupid overpriced sneakers for poor people in the US to buy, but then they put put black lives matter flags and rainbow trans flags and they support Colin Kaepernick protesting against police racism, and now they’re the good guys. 

Third, focusing entirely on racial proportions and ignoring economic exploitation, triggers that tribal impulse in our brains, which keeps people divided by race and by every other zillion identity tribes – and this prevents us from forming the larger coalitions that we need in order to fight for things like universal healthcare or free education.  It makes us identify with the rich people in our own tribe instead of with the poor people in the other tribes.  

In the Jim Crow era, the division was extreme – there was a legal system in place that explicitly maintained an apartheid type system of two classes of citizens – and racism and racial animosity were promoted in order to keep that system stable and to justify it.  And all of that prevented working class whites and blacks from joining together to fight for better conditions for everyone.  

But you can get similar, though much less extreme effects, by giving some small advantages to historically oppressed people in a way that makes other struggling working class people feel like they’re being disadvantaged.  And then you let the right wing political parties and media fan the flames of resentment that their resources are being taken away and given to minorities, and then the you can call them racist, thereby furthering divisions and tribalism – and all the while, the elements of economic competition underlying all of this, and the commonalities of struggle that unite everyone get forgotten – and it’s not Jim Crow, but it is good for business and bad for unionizing.

And that’s actually one of the classic tactics of colonialism, in particular French colonialism – they would go into a country, find an oppressed minority group, and give them legal equality and full rights, give them education – and then give them all the positions of power and administration in the colonial government – often under the guise of righting past wrongs.  Like when we go into afghanistan it’s not to control oil pipelines, it’s to save the women, right?

And then the majority who was already racist against this minority, would become 10x more racist, which makes that minority completely dependent on France for safety so they’d never betray their masters, and boom divide and rule.    Again, colonialism is much more extreme than White Fragility and stupid memos about how being on time is white supremacy culture, but it is on the very mild side of the same spectrum of tactics for divide and rule.

Stephan Hammel pointed out on the This is Revolution podcast, that one of the ways that anti union consultants teach business owners to break strikes and labour organizing drives is by advising them to institute some anti-racist policy on the shop floor, or to give some privilege or advantage to some workers but not others.  And this breaks the solidarity of the workers as it triggers their tribal instincts and resentments, and they start fighting among themselves about whether these special advantages or policies are fair or not, and they redivide on racial lines instead of on class lines.  

And if you look at the sort of anti-racist trainings that are popular today – especially the Robin DiAngilo White Fragility stuff – you can see that while it presents itself as helping us become more sensitive to eachother – what it actually does is it just trains employees to be terrified of eachother.  Instead of focusing on empathy, consideration for others, cameradery, common goals and common humanity, it focuses on guilt and shame for the original sin of whiteness, and it has you narcissistically constantly focusing on yourself and your own endless incurable evil.  

And it should come as no surprise, that they’ve done studies that found that employees tend to become more racist after these stupid trainings.  

First of all, the more you remind people that they’re white – the more they start to think of “white” as their ingroup, and everyone else as the outgroup.  And as I talked about, people naturally discriminate against outgroups, however arbitrarily they’re defined.  And especially if your message is “your group is bad, your group is bad, your group is evil” – unless you have no self-respect, you’re going to end up rejecting the whole framework, and you’re probably going to start rallying to your white tribe to defend yourself from the other tribes attacking you.  That’s how our shitty instincts work.  And it’s not a coincidence that white nationalism has been on the rise in the US and europe at the same time as all this garbage has been popular in mainstream liberal culture. 

Now a lot of educated liberal types love punishment and guilt and self deprivation, so they like being told their bad, it’s like BDSM for them – but even then, these trainings are basically conditioning you so that if you’re white, and a brown person walks in the room your cortisol shoots up and you immediately feel stressed out and scared that you’re going to do something wrong.  So you’re conditioned to have negative reactions to brown people! And if you’re brown and you’re watching white people have a heart attack each time you go near them, that’s not exactly an environment where you’re going to feel at home.   

But while all of this is a disaster in terms of fighting racism, it’s not so bad from the point of view of big corporate employers, because if employees are uncomfortable around eachother, and they’re divided along racial or gender lines, then they’re a lot less likely to band together to demand better wages and working conditions.  

Divide and conquer is a natural instinct for people in power.  

It reminds me of a case I had where the landlord was trying to get all of her tenants out of the building so she could sell it at a higher price, and she kept meeting with the tenants individually to tell them lies and pressure them to sign contracts to leave – but then when I got the tenants to start talking to eachother and when she found out about it, she flipped out and started yelling at them “you’re not allowed to talk to your neighbours!” as if she owned them  and not just the building…

People who are trying to exploit you, always want to keep you divided, and they get nervous when you get too friendly with eachother, it’s a deep instinct.  

 

Another advantage of the rainbow of inequality strategy is that by focusing on the symptoms – discrimination – instead of the main cause – economic inequality and exploitation – you have a disease that has no cure – so that there’s always a need for your heroic efforts.  You can never stop “doing the work”.  You need to keep hiring Robin DiAngelo over and over again to berate you and make you feel guilty for being alive.  

Ibram Kendi proposes a United States government federal department of anti-racism – which would evaluate every single policy to see if it advances what he calls “anti-racism” which for him just means racial proportionality.  And you can imagine this army of upper middle class ivy league college graduates, making sure every single aspect of society has the exact numbers of every single race, religion, gender, disability – making sure your crusty punk show isn’t just white crusty punks, you have to go and kidnap some black kids and raise them in your crusty punk commune to make sure you have the right race metrics.  And this is awesome from the point of view of the harvard crowd, because that strategy will never ameliorate racism in any meaningful way and it will therefore keep them in jobs forever. 

And when you read liberal theorists who write about race – even thoughtful interesting writers who make valuable contributions, like Ta-Nahisi-Coates or people involved with the 1619 project – you can see that they think that racism is just a mysterious force that has no cause and no solution and that will never be resolved in any significant way – and that’s what you get when you don’t racism to the economic factors that generate it, and you have no theory of evolution of various human tendencies.   

A fifth reason why having a proportional rainbow ruling class is appealing to ivy universities and corporations is that it provides legitimacy to a ruling class that has been pulling the rug out from under the middle and working classes of all races and genders for decades now.

Again think of colonialism.  After Julius Caesar took over big chunks of western europe where Asterix lives and started taking tribute from those regions – he scandalized the traditional Roman elite by letting the elites of the Gauls and Kelts and various other western tribes into the senate, in order to gain their loyalty.  And the Tucker carslon’s of his day, like Cicero and Cato ranted and raged about it.  

It’s just easier to control a society when people feel represented.   If poor brown people see rich brown faces in important positions of power and influence, they feel represented, even when those elites are screwing them over left and right.   Barack Obama set back black homeownership and wealth by a whole generation in the aftermath of the housing crash in 2008.  Even black upper middle class black people tend to not own homes because most people nowadays have to inherit their homes and downpayments from their parents, and black people’s grandparents were living in Jim Crow.  They never got to accumulate that capital in the first place,  And leading up to the crash, banks targeted black people for all of these crazy mortgages because they knew that black americans tend not to have experience buying homes, even when they made solid incomes – and then the housing crash came – and then Obama bailed out the banks instead of the people, setting back black wealth in america by yet another generation.  First slavery, then jim crow, then deindustrialization, then Obama lets the people lose all their homes.    

But Obama is still adored by and large by black americans because he’s a good communicator, he looks like one of them, and because they understood that republicans were fanning racist flames in opposition to him, which made them targets as well, so they rallied to his side.  

The Soviet Union also was very invested in trying to have lots of national and ethnic representation in important positions in the communist party.  If you’re not actually going to give the bulk of the population any real influence over anything you can still placate them by making them feel represented and emotionally identified with your enterprise.  China today has 9 political parties, but none of them have any real power besides the communist party – the idea is to get various constituencies invested in the system and to take their temperature in various ways, like the estates general in monarchical france.  

And right wing dictatorships do the same thing but without the multiculturalism, they get you emotionally invested in the ruling power, the idea of the nation.  The idea behind fascism was that hitler and mussolini were supposed to be the ultimate representation of the german or italian people in some magical symbolic way.   It’s the same strategy but relying on the support of the cultural majority support instead of multicultural coalition.  And corporations also have a lot of propaganda and activities for their employees to get you to feel identified with them in various ways.  

COLLEGE ADMISSIONS

OK, so let’s see some examples of how this actually plays out.  

One of the big areas where this concept of equity has become reality is in college admissons, where there are now entire Diversity Equity and Inclusion departments whose responsibilities include diversifying the student body to make admissions are more “equitable” meaning more fair. 

Well what does fairness in university admissions looking like to the people who administer them?

A normal person would think well, poor people have a lot of obstacles to getting in to top schools like this – so maybe they should get preferential admissions?

For example in the US poor neighbourhoods tend to have bad schools, because schools are funded by municipal taxes.  And it’s harder for parents who’ve never been to university to know how to prepare you for it.  And life tend to be a lot more chaotic in poverty and not conducive to learning in the first place. 

Robin J. Hayes, a black filmmaker and assistant professor at various universities, who grew up poor and graduated from Yale points out that 

“By the time I applied to Yale, I had been groomed as a scholarship student in majority-affluent feeder schools to succeed in conditions that guaranteed healthy GPAs. My attentive teachers in small classes delivered a curriculum that emphasized critical thinking skills, leadership capacity, and participation in mainstream institutions. 

Athletics and creative activities, studying in well-resourced libraries, and sessions with a seasoned well-connected college counselor were all required of me. Unsurprisingly, these nurturing environments allowed me to gain the credentials elite universities require. By society and the job market, I continue to be seen as a “high-achiever” in essence because I was never set up to fail.

No other kid from my block in East Flatbush was so lucky. At their truly public schools (not charters, not magnets, but common schools available to every family in the neighborhood), they routinely faced atrocious conditions including gun violence, overcrowding, and a curriculum that emphasized obedience over innovation. As outsiders to the college-prep “feeder system,” which includes a small number of competitive high schools … the students who persevere despite these formidable demands and manage to graduate, are rarely seen as “high-achieving” by schools like Yale. From the perspective of prep schoolers who have no grasp of the challenges presented by economic scarcity, the Collegiate Honor Roll Lacrosse captain easily surpasses the Benjamin Banneker High B+ student who lives in a shelter and works at Target after school to help out her single mother and younger siblings. The fantasy that all young people are running the same race blinds many university trustees, administrators, and admissions committees to the reality that they undervalue students who always have to run uphill”

So wealth brings and enormous advantage – and one of the main determinants of your wealth is whether or not you inherited it from your parents.  Like the wealthiest people in england today are still descendants of the original norman invaders who were the ruling class in 1066! a thousand fucking years ago.   

Once you have a certain amount of money, you have to be not only a complete idiot but also a complete maniac with a gambling addiction to lose it.   You hire people to invest it for you and it just keeps attracting more and more money like a black hole.  

All of this gets passed down from generation to generation, especially as homes like we just talked about. 

But some people’s ancestors didn’t have anything to pass down to them.  

Black americans for example, weren’t even allowed to own property until 1860 – and then they had a zillion legal obstacles in their way until the 1960s.  And then when they gained their full rights, and began climbing up the ladder into the middle class via unionized manufacturing jobs – zoosh, those jobs started getting shipped off to mexico and chiner only 10-15 years later because of policies agreed on by liberal and conservative parties alike.  

So the rug was pulled out from black americans just when they started being able to accumulate wealth. The expression Brother can’t catch a break is not a joke.  See Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped America.  

And of course this affected all working class americans – like look at the epidemic of opioid addiction and plummeting life expectancy for white men in the rust belt gummo apocalypse.

But Black people as a whole are worse off, because they were exluded as a whole, and because the obstacles to their accumulating wealth were lifted so recently.  The wealth of most middle class people is just their homes – and that’s what gets passed down from generation to generation.  So Black families headed by a person that graduated from college today have less wealth than white families headed by someone who dropped out of high school because they tend not to have inherited property. 

So first slavery, then jim crow, then corporate globalization which shipped all the jobs out of the country, then the housing crisis which wiped out black homeownership – these factors all stacked the odds against Black Americans building up the capital and skills that give people the advantages that they need to compete in today’s college rat race. 

And that’s not just because poor neighbourhoods have badly funded schools – but also because fancy schools today have completely insane admissions criteria that almost require you to be rich to get in.  Not only do you need stellar grades, but you also need to have started an NGO to save the Chinese whales when you were 3 years old, and you have to have invented a new source of clean nuclear energy for sub saharan african orphans when you were 9.   And half the time these are achievements that the parents of rich kids hire someone to set up for their kid, specifically so they can get into college 15 years later. 

And every person who’s poor, got to their poverty by a different route, but black people were excluded as a group, and as a result, they’re way behind – on average, even professionals are really behind on the accumulation game. 

So, to make competition for university admissions truly “equitable” and fair which liberals say they want – and to create true equality of opportunity that conservatives say their want, you’d need massive wealth redistribution, and massive investments in education, getting rid of or equalizing inheritances, and getting rid of school funding according to zip code.

Well these are things that are beyond the powers of universities to do.

So what can they do?  Well, you’d would think maybe they would  favour american descendents of slaves, especially from poor backgrounds.  Or maybe just poor people of all colours, who have almost all of the same obstacles as descendants of slaves do, but who just got to their poverty via a variety of different routes.  

Or maybe they can stop requiring that you have to have invented microsoft windows while you were wearing diapers to qualify.  

Or maybe they can get rid of legacy admissions – where they let in all of these unqualified booger eating Billy Madisons like George W. Bush, Hunter Biden, or Donald Trump, and Donald Trump Junior, because their dads were big donors or graduates.    

But of course they don’t do any of that.  Instead what they do is they give preference to rich and upper middle class Black students, who already have a lot of the advantages that rich and upper middle class white people have. Not only are the black kids admitted to Harvard overwhelmingly upper middle class and wealthy, just like all the other students at Harvard, but a huge chunk of them aren’t even descended from slaves at all.  

So by 2018 Harvard was proud to have finally achieved racial proportionality when it came to black students – 15% of Harvard freshmen are now black, just like general population. 

Except 41% of these black freshmen are african and carribean immigrants!  People from Nigeria and Ghana who are not descendents of slaves, or people from Jamaica and the carribean, whose ancestors were slaves, but who didn’t have the same subsequent 100 years of post-emancipation obstacles as in the united states.  And most of these immigrants who end up at Harvard were already wealthy or middle class when they got to the US in the first place, getting here on special visas for skilled workers.   

So black freshmen tend to be from the same economical class as all the other kids – and Harvard has had as many students come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution as the bottom 60 percent. More come from the top 10 percent by income than the bottom 90 percent

Walter Benn Michaels points out that, “When students and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids have.”

And Pascal Robert from the This is Revolution podcast, scoffs that a typical example of the ivy league mentality towards solving problems of racial inequality in the US is a discussion sponsored by the African-American Alumni Association of the Harvard Business School, which was non-ironically titled “Bridging the Racial Wealth Gap by Serving on Federal Reserve Boards.”

Now, at the same time as harvard’s admissions people are trying really hard to have more black faces on campus, they’re also putting in a lot of effort to have less Chinese and Indian and Pakistani faces!  

People from Asia make up 6% of the US population, and are 19% of the student body of harvard – but they’d be 43% if admissions were just based on grades and extracurricular activities alone, including inventing warp drives for animal shelters. 

So Harvard invented these vague “personality score” criteria for their admissions process so that they could make excuses to stop the asiatic hordes that no one can scrutinize, while letting in more rich nigerians and rich white kids – because Nigerians and white kids have really awesome personalities but chinese and indian kids – bo-ring, amirite?  And this “personality” score is more heavily weighted than any other criteria including academic perfromance –

It’s a lot like the anti-jewish quotas that these places had in place until into the 1960s – which incidentally rejected working class and poor jews and selected mostly wealthy and upper middle class jewish students who would “fit in” better with the ivy league elite culture.  

Now, to a normal person, whether you think that top universities should be producing the best scholars and doctors and lawyers for the benefit of society – or if you think that these schools have a responsibility to make society a more fair place insofar as they can – all of this is completely ridiculous.  

Instead of making society more fair, it just completely paints over the fact that you need all of these special advantages that come with social class to get into these schools.  It’s not fair according to conservative performance criteria, and it’s not fair in the sense of correcting unfair advantages – it’s just creating a proportional rainbow of rich kids.  

Naturally these admissions policies fuel ethnic conflict all along identity politics lines, American black students at harvard demand that immigrant blacks and asian and white women be excluded from privileged admissions criteria – asian students sue the schools for discriminating against them, and a supreme court case is pending on this – meanwhile rants aimed at downwardly mobile white people about how deserving white students are being denied the opportunity to climb the social ladder in favour of non-deserving black brown and beige students has been a staple of right wing demagogues for decades now.

Now on the the left – people concerned with equality of power – critics have argued that the way that you help disadvantaged people and the way that you end racial inequalities is to target economic inequalities, which will disproportionately help black people and other historically oppressed minorities, without inciting a race war. 

And the reaction of these elite schools to those critiques is quite telling:

In 2018, Richard Kahlenberg from the Progressive Policy Institute submitted a set proposals in for class-based admissions criteria that would increase the amount of black and disadvantaged minority students, but without having any racial criteria at all, nor any racist “personality” criteria.  It would scrap Billy Madison legacy admissions, and it would scrap the show pony achievements that only rich kids can accomplish when their parents pay Bill Gates to invent a cure for cat AIDS.   And instead, the proposed criteria would focus on grades and academic achievements, while favouring people from working class backgrounds.  And because the useless Billy Madison kids would be gone and quotas against asians would be gone, it would balance out the lower performance of the poorer kids, and the academic scores of the student body as a whole would only go down by 0.8%.

  

Of course Harvard rejected all of these proposals – on the grounds that 0.8 would dilute Harvard’s reputation for academic excellence!

But Harvard already lowers it’s averages more than that by preventing all those asian students from getting in, and by letting in Donald Trump Jrs. and Hunter Bidens and Billy Madisons.

 

Heather MacDonald writing for the right wing New Critereon tells us that in its defence against the lawsuit by Asian students, 

“Harvard invoked a parade of horribles that would ensue if racial preferences were ever held illegal. “If that day ever comes,” the university warned ominously … the court would “send the message—and create the reality—that America’s universities are no longer its cradles of opportunity and its beacons of social mobility.” 

So according to Harvard, social mobility is when Hunter Biden and George W. Bush and Billy Madison get in despite being cokeheads, because their dad’s are rich and powerful, but poor kids who work against huge obstacles don’t get in because they’re poor.  

And if you pay attention to what they do vs what they say – which is a great way to detect lizard people – the real goal is clearly not academic excellence or social justice or fairness or righting past wrongs – it’s just having a ruling class that’s a racially proportional rainbow of rich kids.

And the ivy leagues truly do produce the ruling class of the United States and the world.  

Not only does a place like Harvard often produce all of the judges on the supreme court, and most of the presidents, and a huge proportion of the CEOs and directors of big companies – but it also produces so many of the people at the head of everything everywhere – for example my friend works as a teacher and sometimes administrator in the NYC school system, and he tells me that whenever there are important administrative positions open, if someone like him, with 25 years of experience is ever competing for a job with a 23 year old harvard grad with no experience, they automatically give it to the harvard kid.  

So, to recap – you have two different strategies that use our innate tribal collective identity descrimination responses in order to divide us so that we never join up on common economic interests. 

You have one strategy which targets people who have conservative dispositions, which focuses on outside groups as threats to the resources of the inside group.  Immigrants taking jobs, welfare cheats draining out taxes, woke elites sending jobs to mexico and china, etc.

And this prevents people from identifying common struggles – like how deindustrialization in the U.S. wiped out working class black wealth and white wealth, and how this was the result of policies of liberal and conservative parties working together for the donor class.  Or how all corporations send jobs to china whether they fly american flags or rainbow flags. Or how immigrants flood into the country because the same free trade policies that deindustrialized the United States, also threw millions of people off of their farms in Mexico and latin america and Haiti – so they come to the US in droves to survive.  

And then you have a strategy which targets people with liberal dispositions, which turns all of the economic injustices of the world into racial and gender injustices divorced from the economic context which generates those injustices.  

So instead of saying that our economic system increasingly puts a million obstacles in the way of people of all races to get education and capital, and that black people on average are poorer on average because they’re behind in the accumulation game for historical reasons – we say that black people are poorer on average because of evil mysterious racism, which generates unequitable outcomes, and we blame all the obstacls on racism and ignore the fact that most of those same obstacles affect poor people of all ethnic groups.  And the solution to that problem is that you give more power to the powerful – you add on a whole bureaucracy of ivy league educated race managers in government and universities and corporations, whose impossible task it will be to make sure that the unfair outcomes that our economic system generates, will be redistributed according to racial and gender proportions, which will somehow make poverty and homelessness and death by lack of health insurance fair.

And when the liberals try to fix racism with guilt trip trainings, and cancel mobs and language policing and harebrained redistribution schemes and personality tests – this activates white identity as a threat response – and then the right wing media and politician ecosystem starts jizzing on overdrive and turns around and says “look at how these liberal elites, and minorites are threatening your resources, your jobs, your access to education!”  

And by pointing at minorities they can conveniently ignores all of the corporations and right wing legislators who are stealing all of their resources and sending their jobs to china and every other low wage country, and who have been allowing the cost of education to explode for decades now.    

And when the right wing gets more racist, and white nationalist, the liberals start joining in th jizz festival – because not they can point to all the racist and sexist messaging, which means they can ignore the economic concerns underlying the fears of a lot of the people who respond to those messages – and then they can dismiss anyone who responds to these messages as bigots and deplorables that you must never find any common economic interests with unless you too are a racist bigot.  And then they get to present themselves as protectors of the vulnerable minorities in an increasingly hostile environment that is very real. 

It’s the perfect two step boogaloo bounce ruling class shuffle jambaroo that keeps everyone obsessed with instinctively divisive cultural messaging and keeps their eyes off of our common economic problems and our shared goals and humanity.  

Great job liberal and conservative elites!

But we don’t have to fall for this b.s. anymore.  If we know how discrimination works and what it’s for, and what know what lizard people look like and we can identify these liberal and conservative methods to divide and conquer us, we can be immune to all of this stupid hysterical messaging and start to connect with eachother and find out common economic interests – and in doing so we will find our common humanity, and all of the discrimination and that’s how you fight discrimination in all of its forms.