The wave of mobilisation against racism and racial discrimination poses a crucial question: that of reparations for a past history involving slavery and colonisation. This is an issue which has still not been fully confronted. No matter how complex the question may be, it cannot be eluded for ever, either in the United States or in Europe....No amount of monetary compensation in present day individuals is sufficient for system racism and systemic sexism. Not that some individual compensation is not in order, but it alone cannot undue the long history of wrongs that has resulted in the unequal status of ethnicities and women.
This is a systemic problem involving culture, tradition, and institutions, law in particular. But even changing laws is insufficient if courts do not stand behind the intent of the law.
We should not fool ourselves by thinking that superficial "remedies" are sufficient when they are actually superficial. This is a huge and highly complex issue that may seen so intractable as to call for implementing symbolic "solutions" and calling it done, while the same conditions remain in place.
It is a "deep" problem because it is much more subjective than objective, although it manifests in the physical world as inequality, discrimination and the like that are quite visible in terms of social (status, access), political (power, influence) and economic (income, wealth) asymmetries.
This makes it a historical and generational problem that extends from attitudes of individuals to the prevailing cultural world view. The only way to justly compensate for this longstanding injustice is implement a plan to address it, realizing that the plan is only the beginning of action.
This is going to be expensive monetarily to the degree that only a currency issuer can handle it. It is also going to be costly in terms of real resources allocated. For example, universal health care requires building out the health care system, including training personnel, to accommodate the increased number of people in the system, with all having the level of treatment. Same with education that is designed to result in equal opportunity for all. That is, if the objective is a democracy as governance of, by and for the people rather than the few that are privileged by the system to varying degrees based on status, power, and wealth.
This is not only a national problem, it is an international one owing to the history of imperialism and colonialism that not yet over. The problems cannot be addressed adequately without addressing this, too.
Le Monde (FR) — Le Blog de Thomas Piketty
Confronting racism, repairing history
Thomas Piketty | Professor at EHESS and at the Paris School of EconomicsCo-director, World Inequality Lab/World Inequality Database
4 comments:
Except virtually every one has ancestors who were chattel slaves, if one looks back far enough, e.g. people of Slavic dissent.
Not to mention our current system of wage, debt and rent slavery...
The solution then is asset redistribution and reform of the money system to eliminate government privileges for usurers (e.g. private deposit guarantees) and the rich (e.g. non-negative yields and interest on the inherently risk-free debt of monetary sovereigns).
Piketty is another intellectual with his head in the clouds.
The word “racism” serves much the same purpose as “witchcraft” in the middle ages: no one has the faintest idea exactly what either word means or consists of, but they are both allegedly an unspeakably evil, and it’s very important to be seen inveighing against an unspeakable evil.
As for actually DEFINING either word, well you can forget that. Mention the word “definition” and the eyes of 99% of the population will immediately glaze over.
Reminds me of something William Hazlitt said, namely that he reckoned there were a hundred thousand people in England willing to fight to the death against Popery without having any idea whether the Pope was a man or a horse.
Bigotry, prejudice and bias are the new racism.
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