Concert of my Life

Idle No More ain’t Occupy. It’s all those voices rising up that many in the Occupy movement resisted when they/we called on Occupy to decolonize, learn anti-oppression, and understand the systemic differences of inequality amongst the ‘99%’. Idle No More is what Occupy perhaps aspired to be, but couldn’t fully be (in many, though not all places) because of it’s lack of grounding in the lived experiences of those communities most marginalized. Humble request to Occupy - join and support Idle No More - don’t co-opt or attempt to assimilate it. PS: Idle No More also isn’t just a movement; it’s more than that. It is about Indigenous nationhood, based on centuries of resistance to colonialism and an affirmation of inherent rights to self-determination.

There are a lot of readers who pride themselves on not paying attention to the identities of their favorite writers. Some of them think this means they’re not prejudiced. I don’t know anyone who isn’t, myself included. But let’s say for argument’s sake that those particular readers in fact are not prejudiced. How many books by writers of color do you think you’ll find on their bookshelves? I’d lay odds that if there are any at all, they will be far outnumbered by the books by white authors. Not necessarily because those readers are deliberately choosing mostly white/male authors. They don’t have to. The status quo does it for them. So those readers’ self-satisfied “I don’t know” is really an “I don’t care enough to look beyond my nose.”

And that’s cool. So many causes, so little time. But don’t pretend that indifference and an unwillingness to make positive change constitute enlightenment.

Myth Number 9: If we had class-based affirmative action, we wouldn’t need race-based affirmative action.

Racial and economic disadvantages in education are deeply intertwined, but that doesn’t mean the racial disadvantages can be reduced to class.

Because of residential segregation, even when a Black and a white family have the same household income, it’s very likely that the Black family’s children go to far worse schools. The “war on drugs” has led to an all-out assault on Black communities in particular. And in the current era—to quote sociologist Matt Desmond, commenting on his study of evictions in Milwaukee—“eviction is for Black women what incarceration is for Black men.” It should be obvious that these processes have a tremendous effect on children.

Moreover, the most important dimensions of class—wealth, not income—are the hardest to account for in college admissions, especially when it comes to ensuring racial justice.

One reason wealth is harder to measure is that many government programs are designed to make sure the poor—as opposed to the rich—don’t get benefits they don’t qualify for. One result is that it is generally easy to verify whether someone is officially living in poverty, but not always whether another family has been living paycheck to paycheck, while still another with the same income has valuable assets.

The children of highly-educated, high-income parents aren’t necessarily less racist than their peers. But they are more equipped to hide their worst thoughts from college admissions counselors and pesky journalists—meaning that they’re more likely to secure the employment and education opportunities that could help them change their tune.

Neoliberalism is a philosophy which construes profit making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of citizenship. It also provides a rationale for a handful of private interests to control as much as possible of social, economic, and political life in order to maximize their personal profit. Neoliberalism is marked by a shift from the manufacturing to the service sector, the rise of temporary and part-time work, growth of the financial sphere and speculative activity, the spread of mass consumerism, the commodification of practically everything. Neoliberalism combines free market ideology with the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of the social state and social protections, and the deregulation of economic activity. Core narratives of neoliberalism are: privatization, deregulation, commodification, and the selling off of state functions. Neoliberalism advocates lifting the government oversight of free enterprise/trade thereby not providing checks and balances to prevent or mitigate social damage that might occur as a result of the policy of “no governmental interference”; eliminating public funding of social services; deregulating governmental involvement in anything that could cut into the profits of private enterprise; privatizing such enterprises as schools, hospitals, community-based organizations, and other entities traditionally held in the public trust; and eradicating the concept of “the public good” or “community” in favor of “individual responsibility.

My generation was promised equality after assimilation. And for a while there I believed it: I read Blyton and Blume, and later Plath and Salinger. And I loved them as I should. I forgot Chinese word by word and let my tongue grow wooden. And I hardly noticed because I always had more to say to my friends than to my parents. I waited for strangers to stop asking where I came from, and they kept me waiting. I went to the place I didn’t remember that I’m supposed to have come from, I looked at my grandparents’ bookshelves and the gaps in their photo albums and I thought about culture, loss, change and time. When I was four an ocean crossed me. If it hadn’t, I still wouldn’t be in the same place I came from.