Weekly Shares - August 5, 2023 - A Note To My Children
I wish I could provide a more comprehensive list of connections to historical events to help you understand the patterns that repeat themselves in our country’s history of racism. Unfortunately, I was taught little about this in school or discussions with my parents. I hope we can continue to talk about these events so that your experience will be different.
One of the things that came up recently was the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Biden Administration’s decision to provide up to $20,000 in loan forgiveness for Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for all others. It is another in a long history of those in control in our country, a group predominantly comprised of rich white men, choosing to withhold benefits that could help people that do not look like them.
This article from the ACLU, highlights the fact that the country saw the subsidy of higher education as a national priority until the population of students attending colleges and universities began to change:
“Yet by the end of the 20th century, just as Black and Brown students and women gained entry after decades-long legal battles and social struggles, reactionary policymakers shifted the significant costs of higher education from the public to individual families. What had been considered a public good when it was predominantly for white men, became a public burden to be shifted to families.”
So the cancellation of college debt is just the latest in a long line of examples of, as Heather McGhee notes in The Sum of Us, how “Racism gets in the way of all of us having nice things.” Affordable healthcare for all, equitable public school resources, living wages, you can go down the list of inequities in our country and find a connection to racism and how it negatively impacts all of us.
Again I will highlight the words of Heather McGhee from her book which she subtitled “What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together:”
“When the people with power in a society see a portion of the populace as inferior and undeserving, their definition of “the public” becomes conditional. It’s often unconscious, but their perception of the Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they’ll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.”
Jonathan Metzl also gets to the heart of where this narrow-minded thinking leads in this excerpt from Dying of Whiteness:
“When politics demands that people resist available health care, amass arsenals, cut funding for schools that their own kids attend, or make other decisions that might feel emotionally correct but are biologically perilous, these politics are literally asking people to die for their whiteness. Living in a state or a county or a nation dominated by a politics of racial resentment then becomes a diagnosable, quantifiable, and increasingly mortal preexisting condition.”
Do you see any of the connections here? What is confusing? What questions do you have? I want to be clear that I do not have all the answers, but I do know that we need to normalize having these conversations with one another.