The Gateways Festival Orchestra: The Color of Concert Music
Protected: Grace and the Great Turkey Giveaway
The Wokeness Problem – Part 1
There’s just too many f-bombs, b’s, and mf’s and such in comedy these days that it’s hard to use much of it in so-called polite company. Still, I wish I could. Bill Burr, Jo Koy, Dave Chappelle, and Richard Pryor, of course. I’d play a routine here and there to illustrate a point in a sermon or workshop I’m doing, especially on race, or equity, or any number of social change topics. You can, though, usually count on one comedian: the brilliant Trevor Noah, one of the funniest and most trenchant commentators on race today. Click on the link just above the picture below and you’ll be taken to YouTube to view one of his Daily Show “Between the Scenes” segments, this one on being “too woke.”
Wokeness and sjw’s (social justice warriors) have come in for harsh criticism these days, and it seems mostly justified. As Trevor Noah illustrates below, you can be “too woke,” “too much a sjw,” and undercut your good intentions. I think it’s important to acknowledge those good intentions, though beneath them you can’t help but feel an old, familiar dynamic. Here come the whites again, the saviors, the privileged ones with the I’ll-fix-it attitude. They take over because of an instinctive feeling that they just know the right way. They’ve read a book or two, done a discussion group, attended a workshop and suddenly they know racism better than people of color. Women know the dynamic well. I wish there were a phrase that captures it the way an acquaintance of mine, Tania Modleski, did when she wrote her book Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a Post-Feminist Age. Maybe “Anti-racism Without Blacks”?
A five-part podcast called Nice White Parents details well how whites come in to an “underserved” school with seemingly good intentions and, as they take over, wind up leaving the school’s original students and the school’s community behind. The caption that sat under the picture to the left summarizes it well: “In this series, Chana Joffe-Walt asks whether public schooling has been founded on a ‘false ideal of integration’—one that has been the subject of boycotts, protests and policymaking for half a century, but has historically served white families.” (My emphasis.) The best intro to the series—which you can get on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the New York Times (which also provides transcripts), and other services—is, I believe, on This American Life.
I will delve more deeply into the wokeness problem in Part Two of this article, but close for now with a passage I have often quoted. Robert Greenleaf wrote this in 1970 in The Servant as Leader, the booklet that started the entire field of servant leadership studies: “…the next 30 years will be marked as the period when the dark skinned and…the alienated of the world assert their claims…” and were not “led by a privileged elite…It may be that the best that some of today’s privileged can do is to stand aside and serve by helping when asked and as instructed.”
It’s a complex problem. On the one hand, you don’t want to dampen a woke person’s, a sjw’s, enthusiasm completely. There’s good intentions in there somewhere. But somehow we all need to think about dampening the superiority complex that comes with whiteness. If not, though some surface things might improve, the same system which generates inequality, inequities, and systemic racism will continue on as powerful as ever. For whites, I’d say if you’re not in the background, if you’re not clearly in a support role, stop a minute and think hard about your “place.” This advice, it’s important to note, isn’t given because we need to set up a new hierarchy where people of color rule. It’s a stepping backward to question hierarchy itself very deeply, question it so that true cooperation, true collaboration, true respect can infuse the actions we take together.
Go HERE to watch Trevor Noah on the problem of being “Too Woke”
♦ This article is part of a series based on ideas used in the Becoming the Beloved Community workshop. Go to the series’ LEAD POST, to the Diversity Training and Teaching main page, and to Part Two of this essay.
The Wealth Gap Widens
According to a summary Business Insider report, the top 10% of Americans now own a record-high 89% of corporate equities and mutual fund shares. The top 1% alone hold 54% of these stocks. Looking outside just Wall Street, the top 1% of Americans now own more overall wealth than the entire American middle class.
Some of this is pandemic related, but the U.S. wealth gap has been growing for decades. (This link takes you to an article I did in April 2013. The chart here is stunning.) A typical family used to be able to look forward to doubling its income about every 23 years, or once a generation. This held true from 1948 to 1973, but since 1973, according to Business Insider, “…it would take them 100 years to do so.” Not so with America’s wealthiest. During the pandemic alone, American billionaires added $2.1 TRILLION to their net worth, and the nation added “more than 100 new billionaires, going from 614 billionaires in March 2020 to 745 in October 2021.”
People always argue over stats, so I always find it instructive to look at the comments posted beneath many stat-filled reports. This one garnered over 300, falling roughly into 5 or 6 typical categories, of which I want to comment briefly on three.
The bootstrap category, insisting that the wealthy made this money on their own and therefore, Good for them. They should keep it. I’m not saying that many of the wealthiest didn’t work hard. In fact, many worked too hard, sacrificing health, friendships, even family. But such comments show a misunderstanding of systemic wealth: how most of the wealthy did not start from scratch, but with a tremendous head start. They more often than not had the advantage of wealth accumulated over generations, wealth influenced by factors such as race, ability to own homes in wealthier neighborhoods, better—often elite—educations, etc. Former President Trump spoke of his father giving him a small loan of $1 million. Small? Many typical Americans might stay up nights if they loaned someone even a few hundred dollars…or even much less.
The rich pay most of our taxes category. Yet their tax rates have fallen precipitously even as their income has skyrocketed. Today’s rate for rich Americans is nearly half of what it was in 1960: 26% vs. 51% then. And for many rich—not all—that rate is much lower, often ranging from 15% to 0%. This led America’s most legendary billionaire investor, Warren Buffett, to note that his effective tax rate was lower than his secretary’s, and thus the Buffett Rule was born: No household making over $1 million annually should pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than middle-class families pay. I want to acknowledge that tax law and its effects are very complicated, especially, I think, when it comes to corporate taxes. Still, from just a practical, everyday perspective I’ve often felt fake pity for a billion-dollar-a-year earner who had to pay 50% of his income and get along on just $500 million.
Finally, the poor are stupid category. Let me skip over the most egregious parts of these comments, which almost always show a blindness to the effects of race and gender, of lack of good education, of the generational effects of poverty, and the real, everyday hardships of having so little cash. Etc. I skip over these to say I agree that most people need to be more financially literate. Part of our illiteracy comes from not having that good, solid education. Part of it comes from Americans being fairly poor savers, let alone investors. Part of it comes because from a certain perspective saving or investing seems counter-intuitive. I was a college professor for decades, and some might know that the vast majority of us don’t make much money, far less than many public school teachers. One of my closest colleagues came into my office one day, plopped himself in a chair and said in a defeated voice, “This job is a fantasy for a man with a family, right?” For years I tried to get minority students to seriously consider becoming a college prof, to which one said, “Couldn’t you make as much money cashiering for Jewel?” “Yes,” I had to admit, “but after about 20 years you could make a decent living.” Laughter ensued. In my second year as a professor, my college’s comptroller called me to his office. “Listen,” he said, “you’ll never make much in this profession, and I know this is going to be hard to hear, but I want you to let me take 2% more out of each paycheck starting today so I can invest it for you in a retirement plan especially made for teachers like you.” I reeled at the prospect. “And I want you to commit to putting a larger percentage in every subsequent year.” It didn’t make emotional sense to me then, and I had a doctorate.
On this website I write a lot about The Neighbor Project (TNP). Part of this organization grew out of two family foundations started by Rick and Desiree Guzman in memory of my youngest son Bryan Emmanuel. TNP focuses wealth building not on stocks but home ownership, a parallel way to build wealth which has more immediate effects on stabilizing family and community. No matter what approach, home ownership or stocks—and hopefully both someday—it takes more financial literacy. This literacy won’t help the typical American get within hailing distance of the richest. They’re just too far ahead, and systems will favor them for many years to come. But the wealth gap will close some and extreme poverty will hopefully be on the ropes. Those will not be small victories.
♦ The racial wealth gap is even worse. See “The Racial Wealth Gap and Home Ownership.”