There's Room for Everyone Who Believes There's Room for Everyone
The story isn’t going to be about one type of people all the time, and that type won’t always be the ones telling it. The story needs to be about all of us.
Too often it's not.
More Americans work in museums than work in coal, but coalminers are treated as sacred beings owed huge subsidies and the sacrifice of the climate, and museum workers—well, no one is talking about their jobs as a totem of our national identity.
Previews of the three things that follow, in reverse order:
The ninth lesson of wizard training is learning to tell yourself a different story about who you think you are on the inside. People underestimate the power of telling a different inside story, but it's the only real power we have to create new lives for ourselves. Usually, all of us have some kind of bad story seeds that eventually sprout into a solid harvest. If you want a lush, bountiful harvest, you must replant yourself from the inside. You must uproot all those bad seeds planted by others and plant new ones that will grow different stories inside of you.We absolutely can implement bold policies on the local, state and federal levels that will dramatically change the trajectory of people’s lives, eliminate poverty and improve the nation’s productivity. But we can only achieve that kind of change if we disrupt and replace the current narrative on poverty based on racist, classist, sexist and xenophobic stereotypes. It’s a narrative that blames people for their struggles — labeling them as lazy, corrupt, unintelligent or worse — and deems them undeserving of our trust, our investment or even their own dignity.We are as a culture moving on to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future. White men, Protestants from the dominant culture are welcome, but as Chris Evans noted, the story isn’t going to be about them all the time, and they won’t always be the ones telling it. It’s about all of us. White Protestants are already a minority and non-white people will become a voting majority in a few decades. This country has room for everybody who believes that there’s room for everybody. For those who don’t—well, that’s partly a battle about who controls the narrative and who it’s about.
We're not all the same, yet our too common narrative measures everyone against a single, monolithic standard of what normal, good, acceptable--human--is and ought to be, as though everyone could be economically successful white protestants just by willing it, and anyone who fails to achieve that standard is a lesser being.
Here are some thoughts about that story.
On the Myth of a "Real" AmericaThe common denominator of so many of the strange and troubling cultural narratives coming our way is a set of assumptions about who matters, whose story it is, who deserves the pity and the treats and the presumptions of innocence, the kid gloves and the red carpet, and ultimately the kingdom, the power, and the glory. You already know who. It’s white people in general and white men in particular, and especially white Protestant men, some of whom are apparently dismayed to find out that there is going to be, as your mom might have put it, sharing. The history of this country has been written as their story, and the news sometimes still tells it this way—one of the battles of our time is about who the story is about, who matters and who decides. . . .PBS News Hour featured a quiz by Charles Murray in March that asked “Do You Live in a Bubble?” . . .The quiz is essentially about whether you are in touch with working-class small-town white Christian America, as though everyone who’s not Joe the Plumber is Maurice the Elitist. We should know them, the logic goes; they do not need to know us. Less than 20 percent of Americans are white evangelicals, only slightly more than are Latino. Most Americans are urban. The quiz delivers, yet again, the message that the 80 percent of us who live in urban areas are not America, treats non-Protestant (including the quarter of this country that is Catholic) and non-white people as not America, treats many kinds of underpaid working people (salespeople, service workers, farmworkers) who are not male industrial workers as not America. More Americans work in museums than work in coal, but coalminers are treated as sacred beings owed huge subsidies and the sacrifice of the climate, and museum workers—well, no one is talking about their jobs as a totem of our national identity. . . .White Christian suburban, small-town, and rural America includes too many people who want to live in a bubble and think they’re entitled to, and that all of us who are not like them are menaces and intrusions who needs to be cleared out of the way. . . .In a story about a Pennsylvania coal town named Hazelton, Fox’s Tucker Carlson recently declared that immigration brings “more change than human beings are designed to digest,” the human beings in this scenario being the white Hazeltonians who are not immigrants, with perhaps an intimation that immigrants are not human beings, let alone human beings who have already had to digest a lot of change. Once again a small-town white American narrative is being treated as though it’s about all of us or all of us who count, as though the gentrification of immigrant neighborhoods is not also a story that matters, as though Los Angeles and New York City, both of which have larger populations than many American states, are not America. In New York City, the immigrant population alone exceeds the total population of Kansas (or Nebraska or Idaho or West Virginia, where all those coal miners are). . . .We are as a culture moving on to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future. White men, Protestants from the dominant culture are welcome, but as Chris Evans noted, the story isn’t going to be about them all the time, and they won’t always be the ones telling it. It’s about all of us. White Protestants are already a minority and non-white people will become a voting majority in a few decades. This country has room for everybody who believes that there’s room for everybody. For those who don’t—well, that’s partly a battle about who controls the narrative and who it’s about.
In 2019, when I was mayor of Stockton, California, I launched the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, the first major guaranteed income program in any American city. . . .The findings of our pilot were significant: Compared to the control group, the people receiving the benefit experienced significantly less income volatility, so they were able to plan, pay for unexpected expenses and pay down debt. They were also healthier, exhibited less depression and anxiety and reported enhanced well-being. Recipients spent the money on essentials like food, utilities and transportation. And full-time employment increased dramatically for residents who were part of the pilot program (from 28 percent to 40 percent) as folks were able to stop working multiple jobs and take some time to find a single, better job.Many of these findings fly in the face of stereotypes that this nation has maintained for generations about people who are struggling, and particularly about people of color. However, for me, someone who grew up in poverty, the findings were not all that surprising. I’ve long known talent and intellect are universal, but resources and opportunities are not. . . .We absolutely can implement bold policies on the local, state and federal levels that will dramatically change the trajectory of people’s lives, eliminate poverty and improve the nation’s productivity. But we can only achieve that kind of change if we disrupt and replace the current narrative on poverty based on racist, classist, sexist and xenophobic stereotypes. It’s a narrative that blames people for their struggles — labeling them as lazy, corrupt, unintelligent or worse — and deems them undeserving of our trust, our investment or even their own dignity.This framing allows politicians to ignore and maintain blatantly unjust systems that keep people trapped in poverty . . .But what would happen if we were to replace this false and destructive narrative with an authentic one that centers the experiences of people who actually live in poverty? . . .A little assistance can go a long way — and we’ve known that for a long time. So it is past time to end paternalistic and stigmatizing policy and instead pursue bold solutions that are morally just and economically smart.
Of and from the book Black Girl Unlimited by Echo BrownA powerful tale of a young woman succeeding despite everything working against her.The book opens when Echo--the protagonist shares a name with the author--is six. Smoke rolls into her apartment's windows from a nearby fire that is spreading her way. Her younger brothers are stuck in cribs and her mom is passed out on the bathroom floor from crack cocaine. It's a good introduction to Echo's world. The book closes with her beginning a new life at Dartmouth University. The story is how she manages to go from one place to the other, with plenty of pain and heartache along the way.Echo's story is suffused with a magic realism just vague enough that readers can choose to interpret as literal or metaphorical. On the first page she introduces herself as a wizard. Readers learn her wizardry allows her to see pain and darkness in a special way, with gifts to fight against it. She knows immediately her mom is a wizard and meets other women who share their gift during the course of her life. Each chapter is an episode of her life that imparts a particular lesson of wizard training.This is certainly on some level the author's true story--how true in all the details is unclear--and that makes it all the more inspiring and empowering. She never minimizes the obstacles she faces; in fact part of her magic is that she is able to name, understand, and describe them, including the deeply personal and fully systemic layers. The workings of the book's element of magic can be disorienting for readers, but that is an accurate representation of Echo's life and makes the book all the more effective.Not always a quick or easy read, but definitely worthwhile.The seventh lesson of wizard training is to kill the imposter, the person you became to survive, and embrace the original, the person you were before all the pain. The person you are at the core. The original, not the imposter, holds the true blueprint for what you are destined to become in this world. You will find no answers in imposters, but you will find everything at the source, in the soul of the original. The imposter cannot perform the highest level of miracles and rise in true power. Only a wizard, authentic and lifted, can be of the greatest service to the people around them.-----The ninth lesson of wizard training is learning to tell yourself a different story about who you think you are on the inside. People underestimate the power of telling a different inside story, but it's the only real power we have to create new lives for ourselves. Usually, all of us have some kind of bad story seeds that eventually sprout into a solid harvest. If you want a lush, bountiful harvest, you must replant yourself from the inside. You must uproot all those bad seeds planted by others and plant new ones that will grow different stories inside of you.-----Dre and Rone are still struggling to take a different path while also trying to survive as best they can in this toxic environment. I begin to understand why it's so hard for new seeds to grow, no matter how epic the miracle that planted them. The seed alone is not enough. New conditions are needed to support the growth of the seed, which is why a new apartment in a new neighborhood was so important. I wonder if this is why white people have worked so hard to live separately from us? To keep all their money and resources to themselves in their nice houses and neighborhoods, so our seeds can't grow? I am enraged thinking about it, but I force myself to refocus on my homework. I press my pencil on the paper and continue.
I'm reminded of something from an older post that I find helpful in considering "our national narrative."
Why celebrate delusion? What's the point in making the case that there's no point in making a case? It might seem like I'm saying we might as well not even try to understand each other or get along since we're so illogical that it's an impossible endeavor. In fact, it's just the opposite. It's about helping each of us realize we don't have a monopoly on logic and truth and the "correct" way of thinking. It's about adding a fair amount of reasonable doubt about ourselves to counter our instinctive sense of assurance in the absoluteness of our own thoughts and feelings so that we're more reasonable when encountering the differing thoughts and feelings of others. If I know what I have to say is influenced and shaped by biases, irrational emotions, and logical fallacies, then I should more readily accede there is room for me to be complemented, supplemented, or even corrected by what others have to say. We need self-knowledge, in other words, to help us be more open to other-knowledge.This is the third in my series of posts on Colin Woodward's book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. It's based on the idea that we've never truly been united in our beliefs and values, that we have eleven different sets of ideals that go back to the continent's founding and beyond--sets that often contradict and compete with each other--and that our history has been one long process of negotiation, of fighting for influence and power that still carries on to this day. There isn't and never has been one America, he writes, but several Americas. And we don't have one set of "founding fathers" and ideals, but many that still inform our competing identities today. In Part 1 I introduced each of the eleven nations he describes and in Part 2 I summarized how they were founded and developed through to the Civil War. In Part 3 we'll look at how they have developed since and continue to define our political battles to this day.
There isn't and never has been one America, but several Americas.
A few other recent things that relate.
43% of Harvard’s white students are either recruited athletes, legacy students, on the dean’s interest list (meaning their parents have donated to the school) or children of faculty and staff (students admitted based on these criteria are referred to as ‘ALDCs’, which stands for ‘athletes’, ‘legacies’, ‘dean’s interest list’ and ‘children’ of Harvard employees). The kicker? Roughly three-quarters of these applicants would have been rejected if it weren’t for having rich or Harvard-connected parents or being an athlete. . . .With all this in mind, it’s impossible not to think about the longstanding racist pushback against affirmative action in the US. Racist white people (including the Trump administration) have long scorned the system that was designed to give historically underrepresented communities a better chance at entering institutions they have been systematically excluded from. According to its detractors, the use of affirmative action at universities amounts to reverse racism against white people and has helped Black people in particular enjoy benefits that white people are now supposedly left out of (notions like this, including the idea that Black people in America go to college for free, are entirely false).Judging by Harvard’s numbers though, it sounds to me like these people don’t actually think affirmative action is bad – they just think it should be reserved for white, rich people. And when it comes to Harvard’s revered status, these revelations about its admissions process poke gaping holes in the idea that anyone who is there has proven themselves “worthy” to be part of this elite institution.
The story says only the best, most deserving get into Harvard. The facts tell a different story.
Many different stories have been told about this pandemic and how best to react to it.
Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as those who live in areas that went for now-President Biden. That's according to a new analysis by NPR that examines how political polarization and misinformation are driving a significant share of the deaths in the pandemic. . . .The trend was robust, even when controlling for age, which is the primary demographic risk of COVID-19 mortality. The data also reveal a major contributing factor to the death rate difference: The higher the vote share for Trump, the lower the vaccination rate. . . .Being unvaccinated increases the risk of death from COVID-19 dramatically, according to the CDC. The vast majority of deaths since May, around 150,000, have occurred among the unvaccinated . . .Misinformation appears to be a major factor in the lagging vaccination rates. The Kaiser Family Foundation's polling shows Republicans are far more likely to believe false statements about COVID-19 and vaccines. A full 94% of Republicans think one or more false statements about COVID-19 and vaccines might be true, and 46% believe four or more statements might be true. By contrast, only 14% of Democrats believe four or more false statements about the disease.
Here's a local, specific version of that storytelling in action.
Mask mandates saved lives and prevented COVID-19 infections in Missouri’s biggest cities during the worst part of the delta variant wave, an analysis by the state Department of Health and Senior Services shows.But the analysis, conducted at the request of Gov. Mike Parson’s office in early November, was never made public and was only obtained by The Missouri Independent and the Documenting COVID-19 project after a Sunshine Law request to the department. . . .
A quote I've shared before:
At that moment Jack reached an insight, one he never forgot: a bee in a story could tickle worse than a real bee. He realized, too, that a story peach could be sweeter than a real peach, a story flower more fragrant than a real flower, a story song more melodious than a real song. What existed in a story could be more real than what existed in the world. And by reaching this insight, Jack understood the true power of his art.― Edward Myers, Storyteller
And a new one from Black Girl Unlimited:
For the entire bus ride back to my apartment after the field trip ends, I think about our conversation. Elena is nothing like the story I made up in my mind. How many other people are living lives outside of what I imagined for them? Probably all of them. I wonder how two people from such different parts of the world can have so much in common. And I wonder how two people from the same neighborhood can be so different.
posted by Degolar @ 2:26 PM
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