I spent time yesterday and today immersing myself in the student debt crisis. And it is an enormous problem. Entire futures are being stripped bare of pleasure and purpose by the US higher education system (or lower ed, as I understand Tressie McMillan Cottom has described it). Previously, I've written on how government inaction on problems like AIDS and poverty are a form of predatory delay, where the powerful have all the time in the world and the powerless have none. Societal responsibility can be deferred altogether for people seen as deserving their fates. This is becoming the case as well for student debt, and, as always, its impact is felt disproportionately by the marginalized.
Yet this is affecting the white and well-off as well. And that's most likely why it's netting some attention lately. The problem is that it's a decentralized problem, so previous efforts to organize (LGBT people against AIDS, the Civil Rights movement against segregated poverty) are not being replicated in a modern context. I think there are two interesting things to consider here. First, the atomized middle class has less sense of social cohesion, so they experience this structural problem as a personal one (with all the attending guilt, shame, and despair). Second, this new and widespread precarity could manifest in unexpected ways. I think back to Bue Rubner's Viewpoint essay on Catalonia all the time, in which he persuasively argues that the 15M movement grew so large because the petulant middle class traversed their usual social strata. It remained a temporary alliance, and one which served Catalonia very little in the end, but it suggests that middle class in anxiety can lead to leftward drift. I believe we are seeing that with the Millennial generation in the US, who are rapidly flanking the Democrats from the left.
The question would then be if this alliance has any more value for the US left than it did for the Catalan/Spanish left. I'm not optimistic. If a pragmatic liberal-leftism is oriented toward gaining what its participants consider "rightfully theirs," then those young white college graduates will wave goodbye to their truly oppressed peers once a middle class lifestyle opens back up to them. It's depressingly easy to imagine this scenario; look how the boomers turned out, after all. The work lies in reframing student debt as something more than an obstacle to the perpetuation of an economic system that's already untenable. A more radical critique would bring down the entire system with it, connecting student debt to financialization, a blight that's afflicted schools and politics and healthcare alike, all to the detriment of life on this slowly collapsing planet. The silver living is that plenty of people, especially the younger generation, have already made and articulated these connections. The dark cloud, however, is a settler-colonial empire whose subjects would largely prefer to sustain an illusion right until they're at the waterfall's edge. For that, I have neither hope nor optimism.
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Are reparations the only answer for Baltimore? The answer is, unequivocally, yes. On the micro-level, communities of color are being terrorized and traumatized by the everyday violence of this city. But on the macro-level, racism is deeply entrenched and close to intractable without radical change. That's the argument Laurence Brown, one of the smartest scholars on Twitter, makes in this interview. Efforts to redress the historical wrongs suffered by Baltimore have been demonstrably inadequate. Much larger efforts are needed. (Even the Baltimore Sun has been paying attention, and while the paper itself is commonly an embarrassment, it can be a good barometer for how mainstream ideas of racial justice are becoming.) You can look at some very useful maps of the "Black Butterfly" (Brown's coinage) here. Since the conditions are historical, structural, and ongoing, there can be no piece-by-piece amelioration. It must be part of a concerted reconfiguration of how Baltimore is organized along racial boundaries.
Japan will recognize indigenous Ainu people for the first time.
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