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Where do you get the idea that people "have equal chances"? I and my wife both have great jobs that both pay us well, and allow us to have the time to spend wit
by larkost 5y ago
Where do you get the idea that people "have equal chances"? I and my wife both have great jobs that both pay us well, and allow us to have the time to spend with our children where we are not stressed out about making end meet. We had the money to not think twice about sending our children to daycare, and then when the lockdowns hit, to a service that saw to them both being successful in online learning and with the ability to socialize with a pod of other children. I send my kids to piano, dance, swimming, and gymnastics lessons every week, and we will be back to German class once a week in the fall (maybe Hungarian again as well).
All of those things are absolutely giving my kids unequal chances above some of the kids in their school whose parents may be working several jobs an even then just barely making ends meet.
And the fact that my parents could provide much of what I am providing my kids to me was a big contributor to setting me up with the chances that allowed me the path I had to this successful career. Certainly I worked along the way, but others who worked just as hard (and were just as talented) did not active the finial stability that I now enjoy. And there is every reason to believe that the chances I am giving my children will wind up paying off in enhanced chances for their children.
On a statical basis (there are always outliers) wealth creates wealth. And the slaves that were released 150-odd years ago were released with nothing. Then we spent most of the time since that trying to make sure they had no voice (clear voting suppression), no property rights, no way to buy a house (redlining), inferior schools, and so many other hurdles and outright barriers to their advancement. Not to mention clearly unequal policing.
Looking at this pattern, how can I not credit, in some way, that my family is white? That in the 1950's and onwards they benefitted from the GI bill that help guarantee their mortgages, where black veterans were almost completely denied those same benefits? Because my family immigrated to the midwest initially, we were not one of the few families that directly benefited from slavery, but surely we benefited in aggregate from the work that was the only work available to black people at unequal pay.
We have made great strides in making the letter of the law more equal. On painting a patina of equality across our society. But the moment you scratch that surface and look at the outcomes it becomes very obvious that the real work of making a just society is far from done.
The one that always gets me the most are the repeated studies where they send the same resumes to companies, but change out the names from white sounding ones to black sounding ones, and suddenly the call-backs on them drop precipitously.