Thanks to Marilyn W.
By Naomi Ishisaka Seattle Times columnist
It seems whenever I write about structural power and privilege, people who benefit most from those systems respond that they are now victims of an unfairly stacked deck.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the pushback against what some dub “critical race theory,” or what I would call a more accurate portrayal of our country’s history. The following week, I wrote about the hidden stories of Dalit oppression behind Seattle’s recently passed caste discrimination ordinance.
In both cases, people who have benefited from the unearned advantages of white supremacy or caste privilege have complained they are the ones who are really suffering.
Like this reader, who started his email about my column on teaching history by decrying the “lies” he said that are unfairly lifting up children of color and lowering white children. He wrote, “What you really want is for the State to control children and white children specifically, to groom and condition them into believing they are evil and inferior to blacks/browns. … Why do you hate white children? Why do you [hate] white people in general? Why do you hate heterosexuals? Why do you hate this country so badly?”
The following week, when writing about caste discrimination, I got a lot of feedback — mostly on Twitter and Reddit — following similar lines. One reader tweeted the issue of caste discrimination was, “Searching for a solution to a problem that does not exist so you can jump on the lucrative victimhood business and carve out a good career and money out of opinions without evidence.”
Another tweeted about the Dalit woman I interviewed for my column, “If Maya were persecuted in India with no oppty wonder how she landed in US for her masters. This is just a cheap trick to get some reservation over there as well who can’t perform or want to have stuff handed out to them like in India without doing anything.”
In India, “reservation” means programs to remedy thousands of years of systemic oppression and open up educational and professional opportunities to Dalit and other oppressed-caste people. The system is akin in some ways to affirmative action in the U.S., and the backlash to it is very similar.
The reaction reminded me of something the anti-caste discrimination organization Ambedkar International Center wrote in an email to the Seattle City Council last week. The organization was advocating for a “yes” vote on the ordinance: “When the oppressor is accustomed to dominance and impunity, the idea of equity seems like oppression to the oppressor. The oppressor cloaks themselves in victimhood, cries foul and spins facts to justify the systems of oppression.”
But even more than that, the belief that when one group is free of oppression it necessarily means someone else loses, speaks to the pervasive idea of a zero-sum society.
Heather McGhee, the former president of progressive think tank Demos, wrote about this phenomenon in her book “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.”
Using the metaphor of a swimming pool, McGhee argues the U.S. is struggling with “drained-pool politics,” where beginning in the 1950s, white families opted for public pools to be paved over rather than face the horror of integrated swimming pools that everyone could use.
“When the people with power in a society see a portion of the populace as inferior and undeserving, their definition of ‘the public’ becomes conditional,” she writes. “It’s often unconscious, but their perception of the Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they’ll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.”
Consequently, McGhee said, the U.S. has divested from the idea of public good, willing to abide crumbling infrastructure, inequitable schools and inadequate health care in order to ensure that the “undeserving” don’t get a piece of the opportunity pie. This willingness to cut off our collective nose to spite our face has been decades in the making.
“With the exception of about forty years from the New Deal to the 1970s, the United States has had a weaker commitment to public goods, and to the public good, than every country that possesses anywhere near our wealth,” she writes.
This trend will only increase if we can’t find ways to see our interdependence and shared humanity. But that will not happen if learning about our country’s true history or rejecting the cruelties of caste are changes to be feared, not opportunities for us all to grow and evolve.
Naomi Ishisaka: nishisaka@seattletimes.com; on Twitter: @naomiishisaka. Naomi Ishisaka is The Seattle Times’ assistant managing editor for diversity, inclusion and staff development. Her column on race, culture, equity and social justice appears weekly on Mondays.