Facebook Publication Date: 7/31/2018 23:07

Lace on Race
Lace on Grace (Relational Ethics)

Race and ‘The Success Sequence’
When is a Stool a Stump?

In The Atlantic article by Brian Alexander, “What Is The Success Sequence And Why Do So Many Conservatives Like It?” (embedded in the comments) which questions the validity of the ‘success sequence’, there is a notable quote by Steven Ruggles of the University of Minnesota: “I mean that talk about personal responsibility—OK, but what about the responsibility of the institutions and the society where we used to make promises to people and now it’s a scarier world in terms of job security?”

This is a crucial question that we who care about issues of race and inequality must confront, as we insist upon equity and that we look with a historical lens at the issues that impact that quest for equity.

You will notice that I put this discussion under the header of relational ethics.

This is no accident. Economics are embedded into the relational, whether or not they are acknowledged, from the micro–when a CEO and a janitor go out for coffee, are the economic imbalances embedded and acknowledged and confronted into that exchange? (Silly Lace, you say–in the world we live in, that would never happen. Welp. Point made.)

And the relational is also embedded into the institutional and the structural, again, no matter how insistent the structures and institutions (and we, who at the end of the day collectively comprise the structures and institutions) do their best to divorce themselves from it.

Another quote, this time from Stephanie Coontz, from Evergreen State University in Washington State: “If I say, ‘All are created equal,’how can I countenance slavery, or hungry factory workers?” And if slaves are set free, and workers given new rights, “I say, ‘We have a country that no longer keeps you down, so you must be doing something wrong.’ We say, ‘Alright, the only way I can live with inequality is to see it as the fault of those who have failed to do as well as I.’”

The author of the article goes on to this conclusion: To do otherwise leads to a dangerous idea: that the system itself fosters inequality.

If you wonder why we at Lace on Race hammer so hard on the economic, this is one reason why. The trope of meritocracy is one that fosters and furthers white supremacy. While racism and white supremacy are not explicitly mentioned in the article, the fragrance of racial justice transmits throughout and must be inhaled.

For those of us, particularly for white people who twitch and clench when asked to consider that what they have and possess, and who insist that this dynamic has nothing to do with the racialized soup we are all in, and who downplay or outright deny where they started in the distribution of income/status/class when considering where they are now, this is a challenging idea indeed.

The social contract can be, and has been, and still is, gamed and amended, and undermined and distorted. The retraction of pieces of that contract, which just happen to affect the most marginalized first and worst, will, if we are very honest, not affect all of us, or all of us in the same way and to the same degree.

Another point hinted at in the article, but not fully articulated, was about the role of unions and the federal government in creating and securing a more or less stable middle class–but only for one cohort–white people. We must never forget that unions excluded people of color, or at the very least put up barriers that made full enjoyment of rights that unions secured all but impossible.

Likewise we must always remember that the creation of land wealth was also rationed to white people, in the early days of land grants, and later by suburban settlers via the GI Bill and redlining.

And the education of a cohort of would-have-been working class men, through the GI bill, which was also not a boon extended to all, made for the cumulative effect of education begetting education.

And– made post secondary education as much as a middle class finishing school as much as it was an academic pursuit. Those twin advantages, the ability to learn a middle class skill, along with the social skills and contacts that allowed one to leverage those skills, have reverberations today.

This must also be said–the decline of unions coincided with the inclusion of those who had formerly been excluded. Correlation does not make for causation, true, but the timing of the decline is concerning–and more than a little damning.

So, the three legged stool of success that conservatives feel that everyone should have been able to construct themselves, that of education/career, marriage, and children only works if one is bequeathed or allowed to find and gather enough wood in the first place, and then allowed to carve out all three legs–and when wide swaths of the population were never given either the resources, nor the blueprints nor the carving tools to do so successfully, the blame was put on them, and they were, and are being pummeled by the wormholed stumps.

So, questions: where we fall in all of this? For white people, does this make for more compassion, or more clench? Is it incentive to making dismantling such an imbalanced system a priority, or does it make you want to circle wagons?

For people of color, does this exposure of the institutional and the structural allow you breathing room, and enhanced pride of accomplishment, because you prevailed against overt, and also insidiously covert odds, or does it bring more weight; even despair?

And how do we reconcile all of this as we attempt to locate each other and find community in this space and in our offline lives?

Those who speak of diversity–of race, of class, of gender, of SES, of experience, cannot stop at the easy.

Is it part of our job, now that we know what we know and cannot unknow it, is it our responsibility to not just share the resources and the blueprints and the tools, but sometimes give the (somewhat ill-gotten) resources, blueprints and tools away?

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