From Tema Okun's Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture (2021)
Antidotes for White Supremacy Culture
When people say "fight the power," this is what they mean.
According to Tema Okun's White Supremacy Culture (2021), the main characteristics of White Supremacy are:
Fear: Using fear to divide and conquer in order to profit and gain power at the expense of others. Ex: Fear of not belonging, fear of not being enough
Antidote: Name fear when it happens. We must each develop the skills we need to "meet our fear, sit with our fear, name our fear, and work to avoid letting fear drive our beliefs, actions, and decisions."
Perfectionism: The belief that we can be perfect based on the rules of White Supremacy. Striving for perfection takes away our energy to question those rules. Ex: Making a mistake is confused for "being a mistake."
Antidote: Separate the person from the mistake. Create a culture of support. Develop a learning community "where the stated expectation is that everyone will make mistakes and those mistakes offer opportunities for learning"
"One Right Way:" "The belief that there is one right way to do things and once people are introduced to the right way, they will see the light and adopt it."
Antidote: "work on developing the ability to notice when you become defensive and/or insistent about doing something your way and do everything you can to take a breath; allow yourself room to consider how a different path or paths might improve your approach and/or offer you something you really need"
Paternalism: Those who hold power control decisions and assume they are qualified to define standards and make decisions for those without power.
Antidote: "support people at all levels of power to understand how power operates, their level of power, what holding power responsibly looks like, and how to collectively resist and heal from internalized tendencies to hoard and defend power."
Either/Or Binary: Assumption that we should reduce the complexity of life and our relationships with each other into yes/no either/or right/wrong in ways that reinforce power inequality. Ex: male/female genders
Antidote: "Notice when you or others use ‘either/or’ language and make time to come up with more than two alternatives; Notice when you or others are simplifying complex issues, particularly when the stakes seem high or an urgent decision needs to be made;"
Progress = Bigger/More: Goal is always to do/be/get more and do/be/get bigger, measured "objectively". Progress is more valuable than the quality of our relationships to living things.
Antidote: "distinguish between growth, which is necessary and organic, and the conditioned desire for "more" - more stuff, more transactional power, more people, more ... for its own sake;"
Objectivity: The belief that there is a rational and objective/neutral viewpoint that ignores emotions. Logical thinking is often a cover for personal emotions based in fear of losing power or comfort. Ex: shaming those who are emotional in arguments, shaming people who think differently
Antidote: "support yourself and your group to sit with discomfort when people are sharing points of view or lived experiences that are not familiar to you"
Quantity Over Quality: Only things that can be measured have value like conflict resolution, mutual support, fair decision-making
Antidote: "honoring the ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) philosophy that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future; insure that any cost/benefit analysis includes all the costs, not just the financial ones, for example the cost in morale, the cost in credibility, the cost in relationship to living beings, the cost in the use of resources;"
Defensiveness/Denial: White Supremacy culture encourages silence about things that matter & discourages telling the truth in order to keep feelings from getting hurt. Ex: valid criticism is seen as threatening and rude
Antidote: "Work on your own defensiveness; ask yourself what you are defending against and why"
Right to Comfort/Fear of Conflict: Those in power have a right to comfort. The person or group causing discomfort is considered the problem rather than the actual issue at hand. Ex: white people demanding apologies for being called racist
Antidote: "don’t require those who raise hard issues to raise them in ‘acceptable’ ways, especially if you are using the ways in which issues are raised as an excuse not to address them; develop your emotional intelligence so you can tell when you are hiding your emotions with the excuse that you are being "rational;"
Urgency: False sense of urgency in everyday life that disconnects us from the need to pause, breathe, and reflect. This makes it difficult to take the time to be inclusive, encourage thoughtful decision-making. Ex: sacrificing interests of BIOC communities to win victories for white people
Antidote: "developing a personal and collective practice of noticing when urgency arises and taking a pause to deliberate with thoughtfulness and intention about the nature of the urgency and
the range of options available to you."
Individualism: Toxic denial of dependence on one another. Failure to acknowledge how our knowledge is informed by so many others. Ex: determining whether an individual is racist while ignoring cultural, institutional, and systemic racism.
Antidote: "seek to understand all the ways we are informed by our dominant identities and how our membership in dominant identity groups informs us both overtly and covertly"
Worship of the Written Word: Only honoring things that are written, even when what is written is full of misinformation and lies. This erases the wide range of ways that we communicate with each other. Ex: disregarding information shared through stories, embodied knowing or intuition
Antidote: "dedicate time to practicing and honoring other ways of knowing and expression: oral storytelling, embodied learning, visual and movement art, silence, meditation, singing, dancing"
Qualification: Expectation that those with formal qualifications are automatically correct. Assumes that white educated people are qualified to fix and save everyone else without acknowledging their role in it. This ignores the communities and cultures of people being "saved" while stealing their land and labor for profit. Ex: "The classics"
Antidote: "The antidotes to this characteristic include, first and foremost, knowing ourselves so that we become skilled at catching our internalized assumptions about our own qualified-ness. We must learn to question and get comfortable with the limits of our knowing. We must learn to prioritize relationships over being right (thank you Rev. Tami Forte Logan). We must learn to lean into the racial equity principles of collective action and accountability. We must learn to let go of the need to fix, save, and set straight in the acknowledgement that we are at our best when we are 'with' others (and ourselves)."
Power Hoarding: Power is a limited resource that should only be held by those "deserving of" power. Suggestions for change are considered personal attacks.
Antidote: "if you are a leader and/or hold power, avoid taking challenges personally and return to the principle of collective thinking and action; ask for help with your leadership, particularly when feeling highly defensive;"
The Drug War was started by a man who said “Doctors could not treat addicts if they wished to” and that judges should not be afraid to toss “killer-pushers into prison and throw away the key.” Beginning under president hoover, Harry Anslinger’s racism and xenophobia as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics shaped drug policy for over 30 years.
After talking with my community elders, I found out that “The War on Drugs” is not how the legacy of Anslinger’s work is understood in the Black collective imagination. My father, a retired gang member and baseball player, scrunched his face up in confusion at the mention of the War on Drugs. “Is it really a war on drugs?” he asked. He was right, “The War on Drugs” is a euphemism. “It’s really a war on us.”
Under the system of racial capitalism in the united states, power is expressed as control and exploitation of non-white bodies. I say “bodies” instead of “people” because u.s. White Supremacy culture dehumanizes people who aren’t white and only values us for the labor our bodies can do. With that in mind, Harry Anslinger was a perfectly american man. His success was directly tied to how much his policies legally restricted and punished people of color (specifically Black people, because racial capitalism came from the race-based enslavement of African peoples). The developing united states depended on the economic value of Black people and their forced labor to create wealth for white americans. The result: Black slaves and their labor equal the almighty american dollar. In the united states and those under u.s. influence, Black people are the currency of power.
Harry Anslinger hated jazz music. Under his direction, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (once the Department of Prohibition) kept a steady focus on cocaine and heroin. The bureau honed its sight on Billie Holiday, “Lady Day,” who was rumored to favor heroin and alcohol over the other drugs she used. She was coping. Lady Day grieved the dead of the Black Holocaust* using music and drugs.
Each performance was a protest. She sang in a beautiful and haunted voice:
“Southern trees bearing strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
“Pastoral scene of the gallant south
Them big bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia, clean and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh
“Here is fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the leaves to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop”
cw// lynching
Ms. Holiday had witnessed the painful aftermath of lynchings before. She was from Louisiana, after all. Each time she sang Strange Fruit, maybe she was brought back there, smelling the pepper that mamas put in their boys’ shoes to keep dogs away, smelling charred flesh left in the sun too long.
Before she could bring herself to sing about Southern White Supremacy to integrated Northern audiences, she had to steel herself. Because each time Ms. Holiday began to sing Strange Fruit, Harry Anslinger and his legal lynch mob rushed the stage from their front-row seats to arrest her before she could finish. Anslinger’s favorite agent, a sadist named George White, “whole-heartedly” harassed (even planted evidence on) Ms. Holiday unto her death at age 44 because she was a rich Black woman who didn't know her place. White was a “red-blooded American” man known to spike women’s drinks at bars with LSD just for fun. Backed by the Bureau, he lied, killed, cheated, stole, raped, and pillaged “with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest” [1].
The Federal Bureau of Narcotics justified ripping apart families and communities because Black americans were “10 percent of the total population, but 60 percent of the addicts” [1]. After Harry Anslinger heard about white actress Judy Garland’s dependence on heroin, he gave her some friendly advice and a letter of recommendation. For a white socialite in D.C., he refused to taint her reputation with an arrest and helped decrease her substance dependence. Harry Anslinger hunted and tortured (yes, actually!) Billie Holiday like an animal for daring to drugs while Black. Punishing Black people was and is a business. From slave-catching to the prison-industrial complex, money is Black bodies. Power can be measured by who controls Black bodies and their labor. With $o few u$er$ of heroin and cocaine, the Federal Bureau of Narcotic$ increa$ed their power by expanding drug law$ to target cannabi$ user$.
Anslinger’s office, backed by powerful politicians and the pharmaceutical industry, publicized pseudoscience from “experts” which associated cannabis and violence. He ramped up prison sentences and implemented harsh drug laws to keep america clean during the radically free Jazz Age. He campaigned to white Protestants to convince them of the dangers of drug use:
"Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men... There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
–Harry Anslinger
Like I said, Harry Anslinger hated jazz music. The free-form sounds and improvisation somehow proved that drugs made people crazy. The jazz community was tight-knit; sistas and brothas rarely snitched. More than that, he hated “jazz musicians” (which was code for Black men) and jazz concerts that “reeked of filth” [1]. Famous jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong promoted cannabis to Black folks as a relaxant that makes “you forget all the bad things that happen to a Negro” [2]. Armstrong was arrested in 1930 for possession.
“Black Holocaust” broadly refers to the 400-year enslavement and oppression of Black people in the u.s. “Black Genocide” refers to the murders of Black people by lynch mobs or police. In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress used this term to campaign for the government of the united states to be held accountable for genocide against Black Americans.
Sources
Hari, Johann. “The Hunting of Billie Holiday: How Lady Day was in the middle of a Federal Bureau of Narcotics Fight.” From https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/drug-war-the-hunting-of-billie-holiday-114298/
Smith, Laura. “How a racist hate-monger masterminded America’s War on Drugs.” Timeline. Feb 2018. https://timeline.com/harry-anslinger-racist-war-on-drugs-prison-industrial-complex-fb5cbc281189
"Please don't talk to me about your diet, diet culture is not good for me."
"If you continue to make comments about my body, I'm going to walk away."
"I know you're trying to be helpful, but hearing about your diet tips is not good for me. I am stating a boundary."
"I know you meant it as a compliment, but please don't focus on my body so much. It makes me feel self-conscious."
"Please don't make comments about what I eat. It makes me feel extremely self-conscious. If you continue to do this, I will not have meals with you in the future."
"You're not my therapist/doctor/nutritionist, so your advice is not relevant or helpful to me."
I might post more as they come to me. Feel free to use these freely and don't worry about offending others. Your health is your priority!
In many cultures, ethnic groups, and nations around the world, hair is considered a source of power and prestige. African people brought these traditions and beliefs to the Americas and passed them down through the generations.
In my mother’s family (Black Americans from rural South Carolina) the women don’t cut their hair off unless absolutely necessary (i.e damage or routine trimming). Long hair is considered a symbol of beauty and power; my mother often told me that our hair holds our strength and power. Though my mother’s family has been American born for several generations, it is fascinating to see the beliefs and traditions of our African ancestors passed down. We are emotionally and spiritually attached to our hair, cutting it only with the knowledge that we are starting completely clean and removing stagnant energy.
Couple this with the forced removal and covering of our hair from the times of slavery and onward, and you can see why so many Black women and men alike take such pride and care in their natural hair and love to adorn our heads with wigs, weaves, braids, twists, accessories, and sharp designs.
Hair is not just hair in African diaspora cultures, and this is why the appropriation and stigma surrounding our hair is so harmful.
An Afro-Futurist Future is a Harm-Reductionist Future
by Mallory Culbert
The end of the prison-industrial complex and the release of all prisoners are in humanity's best interest. Disabled people are more likely to be arrested & abused by authority figures/cops. Black people are arrested & jailed for drug-related charges at 2x the rate of whites, despite using drugs at the same rate. People who use drugs are punished for needing healthcare and/or minding our own damn business. We can do better.
The afro future cannot exist with harm reduction. We must address harm to the "afro" (Black) community in the form of reparations. For Black Americans reparations are due for slavery and for the racist drug war that incarcerates Black people disproportionately. After the civil war, 40 acres of land and a mule were promised to us. Without reparations, Black americans today have 1/10th of the wealth of white americans.
We are looking towards the future. We must be able to envision the future in order to build the future! In the Afrofuture, where we fully own our own bodies, drug use is a fact of life. Why? Because we can determine what best works for us!
We imagine an inclusive future that intentionally makes space for the perspectives & needs of historically excluded groups of people.
“The first Afrofuturists envisioned a society free from the bondages of oppression—both physical and social. Afrofuturism imagines a future [without] white supremacist thought and the structures that violently oppressed Black communities. Afrofuturism evaluates the past and future to create better conditions for the present generation of Black people through the use of technology, often presented through art, music, and literature” [1].
Afrofuturism is a direct contrast to Black Pessimism, a belief that considers Black people not as Humans, but as things to be watched and used by white and non-Black people. Black Pessimism examines the unique horrors of anti-Black violence, the endurance of anti-Blackness in the US after emancipation of enslaved folks and racial desegregation, and those aspects of Black suffering that cannot be fully explained by political economy or class conflict.
Black (capitalized, like every ethnic group) doesn't just include people descended from enslaved peoples in the americas, but is a term that describes the systematic devaluation of Black labor and bodies in a racial capitalist hierarchy. Whew, that was a mouthful!
This can look like Black laborers making a portion of what non-Black laborers make for the same work (devalued). It can look like Black neighborhoods being used as waste dumping sites by the local government (devalued bodies). It looks like racial segregation and whites moving away en mass to keep away from Black people. It is based in slavery with the idea that Black people are replaceable animals and not human. “Black” encompasses many culturally distinct groups of Indigenous peoples across the world, like the people of the Mer Islands of what is now called Australia or the Siddi people of Southeast Asia. Black folks span the spectrum and the globe; yet there is one universal experience between us--experiencing anti-Blackness, racial prejudice against Black people. This experience varies across cultures and depends on how race is socially understood and constructed in each one.
Afrofuturism escapes us to a different world, a world of our own creation. Black joy is not found in the absence of pain and suffering. It exists through it, even if injustice is inescapable. "So yes, I want the world to recognize our suffering. But I do not want pity from a single soul" [2].
Sources
Perry, Imani. “Racism is terrible. Blackness is not.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/racism-terrible-blackness-not/613039/
Capers, I. Bennett, Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, and Policing in the Year 2044 (February 8, 2019). New York University Law Review, Vol. 94, p. 101, 2019, Brooklyn Law School, Legal Studies Paper No. 586, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3331295
Meet the original Bluestockings, a group of women intellectuals. Their name would eventually become a misogynist epithet -- but it didn't start that way.
“The story of the first Bluestockings began in mid-1700’s Britain, when groups of women came together to discuss social and educational matters with men. They were mostly well-off and conservative, but their gatherings were fairly radical for the time and place, which belittled female intellect and made little allowance for education for girls and women.”
The Black Panthers created the Free Breakfast Program to feed school-aged children, one of sixty survival programs to meet the needs of the black community.
The Black Panthers fought against medical discrimination by bringing e acupuncture to their communities for addiction treatment [1].
Notorious gangs the Bloods and the Crips were formed to keep Black communities safe from the police.
The Free love movement of the 1960s resisted government involvement in sexual matters & embraced sexual self-determination for women.
The Black Panthers' community health clinics educated and treated black health issues that were ignored by white medical research like sickle cell Anemia.
In 1970s Bronx, the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the Black Panthers protested to get the Lincoln Hospital to provide addiction services run by folks in recovery [2].
The "Black is Beautiful" cultural movement resisted the racist ideas that Black people's natural skin color & facial features were inherently ugly.
1960s counter-culture fought against us military expansion & against "the establishment."
Sources:
1. “How Racism Gave Rise to Acupuncture for Addiction Treatment.” The Atlantic. From https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/08/acupuncture-heroin-addiction/566393/
I don’t think hook-up culture is good or empowering for women and there’s data that backs up that women have more to lose under hook-up culture.
On average during casual hook-ups, only 7% of straight women have an orgasm while around 90% of men will have an orgasm during a hook-up. The stats are much higher (but still not high enough) that about 65% of women in relationships typically have orgasms when having sex with their partners. With men it always hovers around 890% during both hook-ups and relationship sex. sources: (x) (x)
The issue is that a lot of men do not care about women’s sexual gratification unless he has a romantic connection to her and sees her as a long term partner or potential long term partner. Most men who have hook-ups only care about their own gratification but not their partner’s gratification. Meanwhile, women are trained to always put others needs first and that their own needs don’t matter which is also why so many women will have hook-ups that only end in the man’s sexual gratification. This also ties in to how women on average are doing the lion’s share of domestic work like cooking, cleaning, and childcare, because women are trained to serve others at their own expense emotionally, domestically, and sexually.
Women also have a lot to lose as far as safety goes during hook-ups. A lot of women won’t speak up if the sex is bad or painful or unsatisfying because it’s a man they hardly know and they’re aware on some level that if you critique his sexual performance he could snap at you and hurt you and you don’t know him or trust him well enough to know he won’t if you speak up.
There’s also the issue that in an increasingly violently pornified world, men’s tastes have been warped to increasingly more violent tastes due to porn, which puts women’s safety at risk. 25% of women have felt afraid for their safety during sex because a man began to sexually strangle her or hit her without warning. This happens during relationships obviously, but for obvious reasons is more likely to happen during a hook-up where it’s a man you hardly know or trust and haven’t discussed this with.
I’d also like to add another safety issue with hook-up culture is the way hook-up culture encourages mixing heavy drinking with hooking-up with strangers and using minimal communication. Encouraging people to mix heavy drinking with hooking up is a safety issue in two ways, first of all mixing hooking-up with heavy drinking means people are less likely to practice safe sex. Normally people either forget about or don’t care about sexual safety when they’re drunk so drunk people are significantly more likely to have unprotected sex, and that puts you at higher risk of unwanted pregnancy and especially with someone you barely know you’re at high risk of contracting an STI. Also encouraging mixing heavy drinking with hooking-up while using minimal communication is just dangerous as far as the lack of consent that encourages which fuels rape culture.
As it is right now, women lose more during hook-ups. Statistically it’s mostly men getting sexual gratification during hook-ups, and hook-ups can put a woman’s safety at risk. The whole thing caters mostly just to men.
I think it’s better if women have sex with men they know and trust. If they do have casual sex, it’s much better they have it with someone they’ve known for a while and trust will care about her gratification and not try to harm her.
Maybe someday men won’t be so self centered when it comes to their gratification and won’t be so sexually violent and when that happens hook-ups won’t be so risky, but unfortunately right now men are too self centered and violent and it makes women lose under hook-up culture. Hook-up culture just gives men access to women’s bodies but gives little in return to women.
YOU. YOU GET IT
the issue of tying youth to desirability, whether sexually or culturally, doesn’t go away when you expand what youth is
youth worship isn’t just beauty standards, it’s saying that only the young have ideas or creations that have worth. that age means withering and decay. don’t expand what youth is, dismantle the idea that aging degrades your value as a human being
some of us should even be proud of the fact we managed to live this long despite all the shit that has been thrown at us.
To managed to live to an age where you almost didn´t made it, only for the world to turn around and make like your life, thoughts and ideas don´t have any values is a special kinda of hell that should be rid off.
I’m happy to finally share a thesis I’ve been chewing on for a little while. I call it The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class, which states: The higher you ascend the ladder of the Educated …
“The higher you ascend the ladder of the Educated Gentry class, the more you become Michael Scott.
(…)
So, twelve years ago, Venkatesh Rao wrote a lengthy and fascinating series of essays called “The Gervais Principle”, which walked through the NBC show The Office, an American adaptation to Ricky Gervais’ original British series. The essays go after a particular aspect of organizational behaviour, around how organizations that survive tend to self-stratify into three predictable layers. (To a large extent, his analysis derives from another magnificent book, The Organization Man by Holly Whyte.)
In the bottom layer, you have around 80% of the office, who occupy the rank-and-file roles. They are the losers. Rao carefully notes that “losers” does not mean uncool, or unworthy; he specifically means “economic losers.” Losers are the people who are set in roles or stations in life where the output of their effort is wholly realized by someone else. As they learn throughout their careers, their skill or engagement might lead to incremental career progress, but no real leverage of any kind. Hence, they are “economic losers”, and they know it. They see the world through clear eyes, and cope.
(…)
Meanwhile, at the top you have Corporate. These are the sociopaths; the economic winners. They are smart, they care about getting power, and little else. The sociopath characters in The Office include: David Wallace, the CFO; Jan (before her series of breakdowns); Ryan the temp, who brilliantly grabs real power only to immediately squander it. And finally, the one character who never quite goes over to the dark side but certainly thinks about it (the real will-he-or-won’t-he drama of the show) – Jim.
The losers and the sociopaths are actually pretty alike. They are alike in that they both see the world through clear eyes, as it actually is. The losers basically understand how the world works, and how their role fits within it. So do the sociopaths.
But in the middle, in between the losers and the sociopaths, is a very different group. That group is the middle managers: the clueless. In The Office this group is an iconic trio: in ascending order of cluelessness, Andy, Dwight, and of course – Michael.
(…)
Michael’s job both shapes, and selects for, a particular kind of detachment from reality. Middle management is a fascinating construct: your employees have literal jobs and responsibilities, and your bosses have literal jobs and responsibilities, but Michael spends his entire day in a construct of his own creation. Everything about his world is subjective and arbitrary. These are people who, in effect, have slipped into a job, worldview, and self-image that is friendly but deeply alienating.
(…)
The first major speech pattern between the characters is Posturetalk. Posturetalk is everything said by Michael, Dwight and Andy, to anyone: the staff, the execs, or each other. Everything they say is some form or another of meaningless, performative babbling. This is the language of living inside a construct; where your entire world lives within arbitrarily drawn boxes, and you have nothing concrete to attach to. It’s the only language that Michael knows how to speak.
When people speak back to Michael, Dwight and Andy, they use a different language: Babytalk. Babytalk is the language spoken from the literal, to the clueless. It’s placating, soothing, or often misdirection: “There, there. You have no idea what you’re saying. Why don’t I distract you with something over here.”
The three other languages spoken, which don’t involve the Clueless, are Powertalk (the Sociopaths’ internal language, which is entirely about competitive information-gathering and retroactive deniability), Gametalk (The Losers’ internal language: recurring games or coded rituals to get through the day), and the rare instance where Corporate actually speaks directly with the losers: Straight Talk. It’s the one and only time where people actually speak directly, with zero encoding.
(…)
Several years ago, Michael Church wrote a neat summary of the American social class system, and how the traditional metaphor of “climbing the ladder of social class” is wrong in an important way. There isn’t one single ladder; there are three – each with different values, norms and goals. You have the first, and largest ladder, Labour. Next, you have the “Educated Gentry” ladder that corresponds to what we typically call the Upper Middle Class. And finally, you have the elite ladder. And the remarkable thing about these ladders is how perfectly they correspond to the three-tiered pyramid in The Office, of the losers, clueless, and sociopaths.
Climbing the labour ladder means making more money. At the bottom are really tough jobs, typically paid hourly, informally, or with tips. Above that there are stable, but modest blue collar jobs; then high-skilled or good Union-protected careers. Finally at the top you find “Labour leadership”, which doesn’t mean being a union boss, but means, “You’ve made it. You own stuff. You drive a new F-150, you have income properties, you enjoy nice things.”
If you’ve made it to Labour leadership, you are by no means hurting for money. But you have not actually escaped the category of “economic losers”, because the Labour ladder does not create paths to leverage. That is the fundamental difference between how the labour ladder works versus how the elite ladder works. The people on the labour ladder fully understand this. They see the world as it is, with clear eyes, like Stanley, Pam or Darryl – or the one person who actually makes the jump, Ryan – in The Office.
Skipping the middle ladder for a second, we move to the Elite ladder. The Elite ladder has a lot in common with the Labour ladder: it’s straightforward. You move up by getting more money and more power. The only fundamental difference is that you climb the Labour ladder by working hard, whereas you climb the Elite ladder by acquiring leverage.
The bottom of this ladder is an entry point – junior Investment Banker roles you can jump into, or founding a startup now also qualifies. The next rung up are the executives who run successful businesses. They are powerful, but nervous. Above them is Old Money: the multigenerational dynasties with power that extends beyond business and into media and politics, like the Bushes and extended Vanderbilts. And finally, at the top of this ladder, are the Barbarians. These are the scariest people in the world.
The middle ladder works completely differently from the other two. This ladder isn’t about money or power; it’s about being interesting. You climb this ladder by being more educated, and towards the top, by having costly habits and virtues.
At the bottom is also a transitional layer: it’s how you get onto this ladder if you weren’t born there, often via Community or 1st generation College. Above that is the upper-middle class Petite Bourgeoisie. Higher up the ladder are “elite creatives”, people with obscure or virtuous-sounding PhDs, notably interesting lives, or Blue Check Marks on Twitter. (They may well earn less money than those below them on the ladder – this ladder isn’t about income.) At the very top of this ladder is an exclusive group: “Cultural leadership”. The litmus test for attaining this group is, “could you write an opinion piece in the New York Times.”
Generally speaking, the farther you go up this ladder, the more detached from reality you get. Importantly, this isn’t seen as a problem: it’s actually a virtue, so long as you portray it correctly. Sixty years ago, this group sought refuge and status in the suburbs, explicitly detaching themselves from the reality of dirty, dangerous cities. Now, it’s fashionable to move back downtown, detaching ourselves from the reality of gas-guzzling, chain restaurant normie suburbs. The farther you go into expensive, performative habits (Doing triathlons, eating farm-to-table) and coastal echo chambers (“I don’t know a single person who voted for Trump”; “We should ban cars”), the farther you progress up this ladder.
On the way up the ladder, you earn social status by doing things that detach you from normie reality. David Brooks wrote a fabulous book on this phenomenon called Bobos In Paradise, about the peaceful merger between the Bourgeois and Bohemian classes that created this strange but durable social tier. These are people that would be mortified to show off a $10,000 watch, but excitedly tell you about their $100,000 kitchen remodel filled with 100-mile diet cookbooks and single-origin Japanese knives, or their 6-month work sabbatical they spent powerlifting. This is a group of people where a Subaru is a higher-status car than a Cadillac, but the highest status car is none. (Or, now, a Tesla.)
(…)
What’s interesting here isn’t the language of Labour or of the Elites – both of these groups see the world more or less as it is. It’s the language spoken by and to the Educated Gentry. Both reveal the extent to which this group has become detached from normal reality, and also the care taken by others (mostly labour) to manage this detachment carefully.
(…)
Language is the fundamental reinforcement mechanism of why arbitrarily constructed environments eventually turn you into Michael Scott. The more you have committed to being seen as interesting within your particular area, the more you detach from reality and move into a construct of your own creation. As this evolution takes place, more of your and your peers’ language will become Posturetalk, and more of the language that gets spoken to you by outsiders will become Babytalk.
As more of the language surrounding you becomes Posturetalk and Babytalk, the more conclusively you will double down on being “serious” about whatever you’re pursuing, as both a defence mechanism and in pursuit of real praise. This drives the cycle forward again, as your values and environment become increasingly defined by doing Triathlons or whatever. Eventually, you become Michael Scott.”
"The ranks of the abortion rights campaign did not include substantial numbers of women of color. Given the racial composition of the larger women's Liberation movement, this was not at all surprising.
"When questions were raised about the absence of racially oppressed women In both the larger movement and in the abortion rights campaign, two explanations were proposed in the discussions and literature of the period: women of color were overburdened by their people's fight against racism; and/or they had not yet become conscious of the centrality of sexism. But the real meaning of the almost lily-white complexion of the abortion rights campaign was not to be found in an ostensibly myopic or underdeveloped consciousness among women of color. The truth lay buried in the ideological underpinnings of the birth control movement itself."
Trump's Presidency Linked to LGBT Mental Distress, study finds
The study: The rise in extreme mental distress among LGBT people during Trump’s rise and presidency
The linked study in the journal Economics and Human Biology found that extreme mental distress increased among LGBTQ people (or GSM–gender and sexual minorities) during Trump's ascension and consequent presidency. Extreme mental distress as defined in this study means reporting poor mental health every day for the past 30 days.
"This study found that the 'extreme mental distress gap' between LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people “increased from 1.8 percentage points during 2014–2015 to 3.8 percentage points after Trump’s presidency became a real possibility in early 2016.” Even seemingly small increases in extreme distress are important, the study notes, because such distress is not common."
Read more here: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-health-and-wellness/trumps-presidency-linked-lgbtq-mental-distress-studies-find-rcna2871
