Obviously you need to get everyone vaccinated, right? Or you need to get a large enough percentage vaccinated to where it doesn't matter. So what is keeping us from accomplishing this single (though not simple) step? Why are people being so hesitant to what is necessary? I hear a lot of anger from my friends that is directed towards those people. You know, the people who just can't get their act together to do the right thing: poor people.
No, I'm not making this up. You can see the numbers here. I posted that in May, and I was surprised at how little of a response I got. Okay, I wasn't surprised at all, because nobody wants to hear/talk about poor people. Except that if we do nothing about poor people, we are all going to die. It probably won't be the Delta variant, but I'm sure by the Omega variant, we'll be toast. Poor people aren't going to kill us through malice- at least not their malice.
This will be hard for many of you to accept, because you have likely bought into one of two narratives. The first is that individual freedom must be protected at all costs from the government. The second is that if people were just educated, we wouldn't have these problems (global warming, racism, etc.) Neither of these narratives address the problem of poverty, and they aren't meant to. The first narrative leads you to believe that all poverty is the result of personal laziness, and the second narrative suggests that poverty is a result of discrimination.
The poverty line as a metric has its problems, and there are many who will attest that it misrepresents just how bad the problem is. Still, 1 in 7 Americans lives below the poverty line, and you can only be okay with that, as long as have no idea how horrible our country is to people who live under that threshold. The idea that one in seven Americans is lazy enough to warrant cruel economic sanctions is ludicrous, but this narrative can only exist in a world where the counter-narrative (that discrimination explains poverty) thrives.
When you look at the numbers the problem can seem crystal clear. According to the Urban Institute, 18.1% of Black non-Hispanic people live below the poverty line versus 9.6% of white non-hispanic people (and hispanic people are worse off still at 21.9%). Those are stark contrasts indeed, but it's important to note that that life is horrible for that 9.6%, and you can't explain that horror by resorting to discrimination. The real reason so many white people live in poverty is the same reason every other group is in poverty: they were born into it.
There are no doubt many advantages to dividing up society by race when poring over statistics. One cannot escape the reality of discrimination, but having achieved that knowledge, I recommend that you continue to consider the statistics from other perspectives, because when you begin to look at the raw numbers, you start to see a very different story. Roughly 17.1 million (5.2%)Americans are white and poor versus 7.2 million Americans (2.2%) that are black and poor, and 12 million (3.7%) Americans who are Hispanic and poor. Then you add all the numbers up and you get about 45 million people in poverty.
If we could create poverty parity amongst all races, we would lift about one third of all people who now live in poverty out of poverty. That would be an amazing accomplishment, but if we could do that? Why not lift everyone out of poverty? Well, the big reason is that it would require a radical reformation of our economic system. One of the appeals of the discrimination theory of poverty is that you don't have to lose the winners and losers economic system. You just have to live with 1 person in 10 falling below the poverty line.
Now don't misunderstand me. I'm not arguing that we can stop worrying about race, because the issue at hand is a class problem. When I took an African American philosophy in graduate school I learned the painful truth that when society speaks theoretically in universal truths ("all men are created equal"), they are not universally true in practice. So I'm not arguing we replace our focus on race with a focus on class. I'm saying we need to add to our focus on race by looking at class. Otherwise we will end up with a stated goal of eliminating poverty that will value the elimination of white poverty over all other forms.
No comments:
Post a Comment