Structural Inequality Quotes

To insinuate that I would break an oath that I made to the ALMIGHTY for my own personal gain is an insult. An insult to me and an insult to the Order. An insult, worthy of death.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster'; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.

Continue your search for the truth but remember one thing--all things are possible.

I would have hoped you would have learned by now. No matter, a man who refuses to face his destiny offers himself to the GOD of chance—and chance is a wayward bitch.

You are one, and we are many, We are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We are the face of justice.

Fear, your fear takes hold of you…I can smell it. You are in my world now, and in my world, darkness is light.

Everyone is so enamored with the puppet; they never notice the man pulling the strings.

The Order? Here inside such a weak soul?” “His spirit is failing, his faith too old." “He cannot be saved." “Few have tried." “He is consumed by the lion." “He is overtaken by pride.

HANG THE LAW AND FUCK THE RULES! Where is your love for others? Where is your compassion? All these warriors want is a chance to serve. Doesn’t their love supersede your rules?

Boy, you are a hothead, Bane. Your rage makes you an exceptional warrior but quite a boring conversationalist. Good thing I did not keep you for your manners and charm, eh? Now calm down, your spittle is getting all over me, my feet do not require a shower." -Michael, The ArchAngel

You heard me. A creature from another world, a dark world, lurks the halls of Hellgate, tormenting victims at will. A grotesque, gnarled, twisted creature, with thick iron stakes impaled into its body, whip marks across its chest and back-- the beast got inside my brain.

Monster? Monster, you say?” He scratched his chest, blood dripping from what seemed to be an old wound. “No, my friend. I have SEEN real monsters. I have faced real darkness, heart beating out of your chest with death all around you. The stench of piss and shit as men empty themselves in their final moments. I have experienced real terror. Terror, a simple man like you, could never fathom

Have you ever thought about why GOD did it? Why tempt such fragile beings in the first place? Did GOD give the race of man free will, knowing that they would use that will to defy him, or to take it a step further since GOD knows all, did he know that Adam and Eve would eat the forbidden fruit, allowing him to cast them out of paradise to toil and suffer for a living.

A spark is exactly what it means. An igniting of something that spreads, and soon it becomes difficult to contain. The sparks, in this case, represent sin, not just any sin, a major undertaking of evil that spreads and infects life, changing the way humans live forever." " The Everlasting protects man for six of these catastrophes, but once there is a seventh, well… anything goes." "I’m not destroying man; I’m saving man--from themselves.

We are Knights of the Trinity, Angels of the Third Realm of Heaven Warriors of The Almighty Defenders of Righteousness, Truth. And Justice Protectors of the Weak and Downtrodden Guardians of the realms of men. We pledge our spirits, our swords, and our shields in service, Not for glory, not for pride, but for the honor to serve the Most-High May the forces of Darkness tremble in our wake and die at our hands! We are the Chosen Twelve, the Blessed, the Mighty War-riors of the Everlasting Order Hazah! Hazah! Hazah!

On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.

Despite long-standing claims by elites that Blacks, women, Latinos, and other similarly derogated groups in the United States remain incapable of producing the type of interpretive, analytical thought that is labeled theory in the West, powerful knowledges of resistance that toppled former social structures of social inequality repudiate this view. Members of these groups do in fact theorize, and our critical social theory has been central to our political empowerment and search for justice.

How much of our independence is and has always been the exploitation of others, the abuse of others? Today I'm in awe of how women of color are leading the way to not accepting it anymore

Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man -in temperament, character, and capacity - and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so.

The fact is, rape is utterly commonplace in all our cultures. It is part of the fabric of everyday life, yet we all act as if it’s something shocking and extraordinary whenever it hits the headlines. We remain silent, and so we condone it…Until rape, and the structures – sexism, inequality, tradition – that make it possible, are part of our dinner-table conversation with the next generation, it will continue. Is it polite and comfortable to talk about it? No. Must we anyway? Yes.” ‘To protect our children, we must talk to them about rape

Inequality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspiring retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world.

What worries me most about the proposals for legalized assisted suicide is their veneer of beneficence—the medical determination that for a given individual, suicide is reasonable or right. It is not about autonomy but about nondisabled people telling us what’s good for us. In the discussion that follows, I argue that choice is illusory in a context of pervasive inequality. Choices are structured by oppression. We shouldn’t offer assistance with suicide until we all have the assistance we need to get out of bed in the morning and live a good life. Common causes of suicidality—dependence, institutional confinement, being a burden—are entirely curable.

America’s education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.

When automated decision-making tools are not built to explicitly dismantle structural inequities, their speed and scale intensify them.

Maybe, through these small erasures, which we tell ourselves are ‘polite’ or whatever, we’re covering up a vast network of structural inequality.

Many supporters believe--or want to believe--that Obama will be a transformative political leader in a transformative time. They eagerly await the flowering of peace and social justice policies that will open a new chapter in the abatement of "the structural inequalities that our nation's legacy of discrimination has left behind." Whether Obama, carrying the weight of race on his shoulders in a manner no other United States president ever has, will provide leadership and initiative on these issues is yet to be seen. At every opportunity, we should remind him to try.

Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality. —

Those who benefit from the inequities of our society resist the stories of people whose suffering is in large part owed to the structures of our society. They do not want to have to change. We see this in a thousand forms of white fragility, male fragility, and transphobic and homophobic tantrums protesting the ground gained by trans and queer storytellers.

Elites do often make the environment worse and block solutions, but to blame the problem of elite capture entirely on their moral successes and failures is to confuse effect for cause. The true problem lies in the system itself, the built environment and rules of interaction that produced the elites in the first place.

Ah yes, the meritocracy. Isn't it amazing how so many of the 'best people for the job' always happen to be white, cis-het, middle-class men? It couldn't be that structural inequality and hierarchal privilege allows for such people to succeed by making their path to power smoother and more accessible than anyone's else's.

The contrast between an apparent concern about poverty and lack of concern about inequality was nicely summarized recently by English historian David Kynaston: “Everyone is happy talking about eliminating poverty, because this looks like an admirable and ethical response to the problem of inequality, while leaving the structures of power untouched.

… our nation's truly critical problems are built into the very structure of the economic and political system; they are not something passing in the night that will go away even when we elect forward-looking leaders and actively pressure them to move in a different direction.

My larger point is that since each of us struggles daily with good and bad impulses, we might want to restructure our social institutions in order to make it a little easier to be good.

As they walked, Tehol spoke. ‘…the assumption is the foundation stone of Letherii society, perhaps all societies the world over. The notion of inequity, my friends. For from inequity derives the concept of value, whether measured by money or the countless other means of gauging human worth. Simply put, there resides in all of us the unchallenged belief that the poor and the starving are in some way deserving of their fate. In other words, there will always be poor people. A truism to grant structure to the continual task of comparison, the establishment through observation of not our mutual similarities, but our essential differences. ‘I know what you’re thinking, to which I have no choice but to challenge you both. Like this. Imagine walking down this street, doling out coins by the thousands. Until everyone here is in possession of vast wealth. A solution? No, you say, because among these suddenly rich folk there will be perhaps a majority who will prove wasteful, profligate and foolish, and before long they will be poor once again. Besides, if wealth were distributed in such a fashion, the coins themselves would lose all value—they would cease being useful. And without such utility, the entire social structure we love so dearly would collapse. ‘Ah, but to that I say, so what? There are other ways of measuring self-worth. To which you both heatedly reply: with no value applicable to labour, all sense of worth vanishes! And in answer to that I simply smile and shake my head. Labour and its product become the negotiable commodities. But wait, you object, then value sneaks in after all! Because a man who makes bricks cannot be equated with, say, a man who paints portraits. Material is inherently value-laden, on the basis of our need to assert comparison—but ah, was I not challenging the very assumption that one must proceed with such intricate structures of value? ‘And so you ask, what’s your point, Tehol? To which I reply with a shrug. Did I say my discourse was a valuable means of using this time? I did not. No, you assumed it was. Thus proving my point!’ ‘I’m sorry, master,’ Bugg said, ‘but what was that point again?’ ‘I forget. But we’ve arrived. Behold, gentlemen, the poor.

There's a liberal story that limited opportunities, and barriers, lead to employment problems and criminal records, but then there's another story that has to do with norms, behaviors, and oppositional culture. You can't prove the latter statistically, but it still might be true.' Holzer thinks that both arguments contain truth and that one doesn't preclude the other. Fair enough. Suffice it to say, though, that the evidence supporting structural inequality is compelling. In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more rigorous conditions.

Once, modestly enough, Doremus had assumed that he had a decent knowledge of finance, taxation, the gold standard, agricultural exports, and he had smilingly pontificated everywhere that Liberal Capitalism would pastorally lead into State Socialism, with governmental ownership of mines and railroads and water-power so settling all inequalities of income that every lion of a structural steel worker would be willing to lie down with any lamb of a contractor, and all the jails and tuberculosis sanatoria would be clean empty.

There is an enormous difference between seeing people as the victims of innate shortcomings and seeing them as the victims of structural violence. Indeed, it is likely that the struggle for rights is undermined whenever the history of unequal chances, and of oppression, is erased or distorted.

For those who still believe structural inequality is a figment of feminists’ imagination, let’s recap some of the ways the financial odds are stacked against women. The gender pay gap sits stubbornly at around 18 per cent in Australia. (It gets wider the higher up the ladder you go, by the way). Female-dominated occupations are less well paid than male-dominated ones. Six out of ten Australians work in an industry dominated by one gender. Australia has one of the highest rates of part-time work in the world: 25 per cent of us work part time. Women make up 71.6 per cent of all part-time workers and 54.7 per cent of all casual employees. Australian women are among the best educated in the world but have relatively low comparable workplace participation and achievement rates. And just to add insult to injury, products marketed to women are more expensive than those marketed to men!

Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man — in temperament, character, and capacity — and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so. Parenthetically, what a stale and uninteresting world this would be if perfect equality prevailed! When you seek the taproot of reform movements, you find an urgency to eradicate these innate differences and to make all men equal; in practice, this means the leveling-off of the more capable to the mediocrity of the average. That is not Freedom.

Respectability politics are really about controlling group behavior with designations of appropriate or inappropriate behavior rooted in structural inequality. Gatekeepers of respectability push dominant narratives but don’t necessarily understand where their ideas of what is respectable come from, or how much of it is about mimicry and not innate value.

Culture thus is a matter of shared meanings, but it is not only that: it is also one of the ways in which exclusion, inequality, and power structures are maintained and reproduced.

US inequality in 2010 is quantitatively as extreme as in old Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century, but the structure of that inequality is rather clearly different.

the level of inequality is above all society’s ideological, political, and institutional capacity to justify and structure inequality and not the level of wealth or development as such.

Healing imagery is also problematic because it implies that the damage being done is primarily emotional. The goal becomes one of "getting along" better by being nicer and more tolerant toward one another, forgiving and forgetting, living in more authentic ways. I don’t object to this goal, but it ignores the fact that a lot of the trouble doesn’t begin and end with interpersonal relations and emotional wounds. Much of it is embedded in structures of power and inequality that shape almost every aspect of life in this society, from economics to politics to religion to schools and the family. The idea that we’re going to get out of this by somehow getting to a place where we’re kinder and more sensitive to one another ignores most of what we have to overcome. It sets us up to walk right past the trouble toward an alternative that doesn’t exist and can’t exist until we do something about what creates privilege and oppression in the first place. And that is something that needs to be changed, not healed.

The politics of whiteness transcends the colour of anyone's skin. It is an occupying force in the mind. It is a political ideology that is concerned with maintaining power through domination and exclusion. Anyone can buy into it, just like anyone can choose to challenge it. [...] Those who perceive every critique of white-dominated politics to be an attack of them as a white person are probably part of the problem.

All the while, the breakneck speed of change ushered in by the internet and consumer capitalism is reshaping the entire spiritual and community landscape. Nearly everyone I know feels as if they are falling short of some predefined standard that is completely out of reach so that our near-constant state of not feeling we are enough frustrates our enjoyment of moments that could and should be meaningful. These structural inequities literally steal our joy.

When capital has bumped up against limits to profit-growth in the past, it has found fixes in things like colonisation, structural adjustment programmes, wars, restrictive patent laws, nefarious debt instruments, land grabs, privatisation, and enclosing commons like water and seeds. Why would it be any different this time? Indeed, a study by the ecological economist Beth Stratford finds that when capital faces resource constraints, this is exactly what happens: it turns to aggressive rent-seeking behaviour. It seeks to grab existing value wherever it can, with clever mechanisms to suck income and wealth from the public domain into private hands, and from the poor to the rich, exacerbating inequality.

In 1999, the anthropologist Christopher Boehm addressed this issue in Hierarchy in the Forest, which reviewed the lifestyles of dozens of small-scale human groups. Perhaps surprisingly, he found that they are egalitarian. Material inequality is kept to a minimum; goods are distributed to everyone. The old and sick are cared for. There are leaders, but their power is kept in check; and the social structure is flexible and nonhierarchical. It looks less like Stalin’s Russia and more like Occupy Wall Street.

Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man — in temperament, character, and capacity — and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so.

A society that grows at 1 percent per year, as the most advanced societies have done since the turn of the nineteenth century, is a society that undergoes deep and permanent change. This has important consequences for the structure of social inequalities and the dynamics of the wealth distribution.

It is not a problem of the market form but of markets deformed - deformed by the long shadow of historical injustices and the ongoing, continuous exercise of legal privilege on behalf of capital. The market anarchist tradition is radically pro-market and anticapitalist - reflecting its consistent concern with the deeply political character of corporate power, the dependence of economic elites on the tolerance or active support of the state, the permeable barriers between political and economic elites, and the cultural embeddedness of hierarchies established and maintained by state-perpetrated and state-sanctioned violence.

The modern-day version of easily deniable racism may be able to cloak the invisible structure that created and maintains hierarchy and inequality. But caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like.

It's a worthy, essential aim to seek 'youth from every quarter.' Institutions and individuals have a responsibility to work against centuries of structural inequality. And I've see both as a student and as a professor the myriad ways diverse voices do indeed make for a richer learning environment. But it should go without saying that it's not enough for elite institutions to accept students from racially, ethnically, and economically diverse backgrounds if those students are then told in a thousand ways - ways tiny and large, oblique and direct - that they are there only at the whim of the powers that be, that they haven't paid for the privilege to err or falter, that, at root, they don't belong.

To be sure, it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the intuitive knowledge that everyone acquires about contemporary wealth and income levels, even in the absence of any theoretical framework or statistical analysis. Film and literature, nineteenth-century novels especially, are full of detailed information about the relative wealth and living standards of different social groups, and especially about the deep structure of inequality, the way it is justified, and its impact on individual lives. Indeed, the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac paint striking portraits of the distribution of wealth in Britain and France between 1790 and 1830. Both novelists were intimately acquainted with the hierarchy of wealth in their respective societies.

corruption. Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is that such a terrible thing? In the future will she have to pay the Lokpal representative, too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary people lie in addressing the structural inequality or in creating yet another power structure that people will have to defer to?

It is not out of the question that the two forces of divergence will ultimately come together in the twenty-first century. This has already happened to some extent and may yet become a global phenomenon, which could lead to levels of inequality never before seen, as well as to a radically new structure of inequality. Thus far, however, these striking patterns reflect two distinct underlying phenomena.

Because leftists are more likely to believe in the innate, inner quality of all people, they attribute the world's inequalities to outer, structural injustices. In particular, the left sees many power hierarchies as unmerited and exploitative. Leftist morality is rooted in the imperative to equalize, to various extents, discrepancies in power (especially through education). Compared with conservatives, leftists have a lower tolerance for inequality. In this leftist worldview, evil comes primarily from undeserved inequalities in strength or power: from capitalists who exploit workers, unscrupulous corporations that deceive consumers, colonialists who leach off third-world countries, soldiers and police who abuse civilians, men who mistreat women, humans who disrespect the animals and plants in their environment, and so on.

The processes of corporate power do not work in isolation. The economic and legal mechanisms that allow the privatization of the commonwealth, externalization of costs, predatory economic practices, political influence-buying, manipulation of regulation and deregulation, control of the media, propaganda and advertising in schools, and the use of police and military forces to protect the property of the wealthy-all of these work synergistically to weave a complex web of power. Activists have dedicated lifetimes of necessary work to deal with the results of corporate power, by trying to mitigate the results of power: an ever-increasing disparity in wealth and power and continual economic, political, environmental, and human rights crises. For social justice campaigns to be strategic, it is also necessary to examine how privatization, externalization, monopoly, and other corporate power processes have been institutionalized. This institutionalization is exemplified in the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and in recent "free" trade agreements which have culminated in the creation of the World Trade Organization. An understanding of such institutions provides a necessary tool for achieving the long-term goals of environmental sustainability and social justice.

Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.

Whereas the structural trend toward increased inequality was gradual and went for a long time unobserved, the crises in the lives of the urban poor were public and dramatic. The new armies of the homeless that seemed suddenly to materialize in every major city in the early 1980s, sleeping in doorways, camped under elevated highways, spreading their temporary cardboard shelters over office tower heating grates, were a startling and disturbing sight. Not since the Depression had the least-advantaged Americans been so starkly visible to the rest.

Like an earthquake, World War II had shaken and destabilized the nation’s racial system. After Black men had fought and died to save democracy and freedom, the hypocrisy of their treatment became more difficult for some white people to ignore, especially as Black people organized to do something about it. The key to the organizers’ success, Myrdal said, would be finding allies among those newly awoken white Americans. “The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American,” he wrote. “It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle goes on.” But Myrdal suffered a serious blind spot, as he later acknowledged: he largely ignored the structural inequality in the American North and West, failing to anticipate that many liberal white people would find it easy to criticize the South but difficult to accept change in their own communities. King would major in sociology at Morehouse, and he would go on to call out the hypocrisy of northern whites who explained away their own discriminatory systems of housing, education, employment, and law enforcement.

The construction of femininity is historical. It is lived by women economically, socially and ideologically. Women occupy a particular position within a patriarchal, bourgeois society, a relation of inequality to its structures of power. Power is not only a matter of coercive forces. It operates through exclusions from access to those institutions and practices through which dominance is exercised. One of these is language, by which we mean not just speech or grammar, but the discursive systems through which the world we live in is represented by and to us.

...sometimes, a couple’s home will turn into an arena of threats and coercion, where unborn children become instruments of power and negotiation—and sometimes, children are born to preserve the relationship. Despite the growing notion that female-male partnerships are equal and symmetrical, this presumed balance is not necessarily reflected in reality. This means that the different power structures—manifest, latent, or invisible—that are often formed between partners attest to an ongoing gender inequality when it comes to deliberations such as the decision to have children.

The middle and working classes no longer think of the present society as structured around classes. Current opinion holds that the rich are deserving and the poor are not, while an incalculable number of people linger between the categories. A huge section of public opinion in the Western world tends to regard oppression and exploitation as residual abuses, not inherent features of a specific social order. The prevailing society is neither rationally analyzed nor forcefully challenged; it is prudently psychoanalyzed and politely coaxed, as though social problems emerge from erratic individual behavior.

…the assumption is the foundation stone of Letherii society, perhaps all societies the world over. The notion of inequity, my friends. For from inequity derives the concept of value, whether measured by money or the countless other means of gauging human worth. Simply put, there resides in all of us the unchallenged belief that the poor and the starving are in some way deserving of their fate. In other words, there will always be poor people. A truism to grant structure to the continual task of comparison, the establishment through observation of not our mutual similarities, but our essential differences.

What is most frightening about Vautrin’s lecture is that his brisk portrait of Restoration society contains such precise figures. As I will soon show, the structure of the income and wealth hierarchies in nineteenth-century France was such that the standard of living the wealthiest French people could attain greatly exceeded that to which one could aspire on the basis of income from labor alone. Under such conditions, why work? And why behave morally at all? Since social inequality was in itself immoral and unjustified, why not be thoroughly immoral and appropriate capital by whatever means are available? The

The Dialectic of Sex was published in 1970. Shulamith Firestone believed that women's capacity for reproduction was the source of their opression. Therefore in order to eradicate social inequality, a biological revolution is needed. An egalitarian society, she argued, could be achieved only through an androgynous system whereby it no longer matters culturally who possesses the womb. Under this system, the traditional structure of the family which ascribed clear sexual roles to each gender would dissolve, as heterosexuality would no longer be compulsory and women would be freed from their domestic confinement.

I came to realize that this was about more than not offering up what some of his opponents craved—the picture of the angry black man, or the lectures on race that fuel a sense of grievance among white voters. Obama also didn’t want to offer up gauzy words to make well-meaning white people feel better. The fact that he was a black president wasn’t going to bring life back to an unarmed black kid who was shot, or alter structural inequities in housing, education, and incarceration in our states and cities. It wasn’t going to change the investment of powerful interests in a system that sought to deny voting rights, or to cast people on food stamps working minimum wage jobs as “takers,” incapable of making it on their own. The “last person who ever thought that Barack Obama’s election was going to bring racial reconciliation and some “end of race” in America was Barack Obama. That was a white person’s concept imposed upon his campaign. I know because I was once one of them, taking delight in writing words about American progress, concluding in the applause line “And that is why I can stand before you as president of the United States.” But he couldn’t offer up absolution for America’s racial sins, or transform American society in four or eight years.

American Christianity’s theological core has been thoroughly structured by an interest in protecting white supremacy. While it may seem obvious to mainstream white Christians today that slavery, segregation, and overt declarations of white supremacy are antithetical to the teachings of Jesus, such a conviction is, in fact, recent and only partially conscious for most white American Christians and churches. The unsettling truth is that, for nearly all of American history, the Jesus conjured by most white congregations was not merely indifferent to the status quo of racial inequality; he demanded its defense and preservation as part of the natural, divinely ordained order of things.

Another great mystery for economists and central bankers is why businesses are not investing more. It is a puzzle why they're returning almost all cash to shareholders rather than doing more research and development or spending it on new factories and equipment. Larry Summers, the former Secretary of the Treasury and Harvard economics professor, shares the view with the 1930s economist Alvin Hansen that we're experiencing a “secular stagnation.” Supposedly, the economies of the industrial world suffer from “an imbalance resulting from an increasing propensity to save and a decreasing propensity to invest.”59 This means that the slowdown is structural and not cyclical. He blames inequality and technology. “Greater saving has been driven by increases in inequality and in the share of income going to the wealthy.

The argument that technology cannot create ongoing structural unemployment, rather than just temporary spells of joblessness during recessions, rests on two pillars: 1) economic theory and 2) two hundred years of historical evidence. But both of these are less solid than they first appear. First, the theory. There are three economic mechanisms that are candidates for explaining technological unemployment: inelastic demand, rapid change, and severe inequality. If technology leads to more efficient use of labor, then as the economists on the National Academy of Sciences panel pointed out, this does not automatically lead to reduced demand for labor. Lower costs may lead to lower prices for goods, and in turn, lower prices lead to greater demand for the goods, which can ultimately lead to an increase in demand for labor as well.

By structural violence, I mean the violence committed by configurations of social inequalities that, in the end, has injurious effects on bodies similar to the violence of a stabbing or shooting. This is what the English working men described by Friedrich Engels called 'social murder'. Much of the structural violence is organized along the fault lines of class, race, citizenship, gender, and sexuality. (...) Symbolic violence works through the perceptions of the 'dominating' and the 'dominated' (in Bourdieu's words), while it tends to benefit those with more power. each group understands not only itself but also the other to belong naturally in their positions in the social hierarchy. (...) Structural violence - with its pernicious effects on health - and symbolic violence - with its subtle naturalization of inequalities on the farm, in the clinic, and in the media - form the nexus of violence and suffering through which the phenomenon of migrant labor in North America is produced.

A lot of us don’t see ourselves in our bookshelves, our libraries, or our bookstores. Our bookshelves tend to be disproportionately white and disproportionately male and do not represent who we are in this country or who we are becoming. Long histories of bias, racism, and exclusion created and perpetuate these dismal inequalities. And none of this will change unless we work actively, mindfully, and collectively to dismantle the often-obscure structures of power that exist both within us and without. Our bookshelves need to look like the future and not the past; they should be brimming with writers of color, women of color writers, indigenous writers, immigrant writers, women writers, LGBTQIA writers. If the Law of the Old Bookshelf was cruel exclusion, the Law of the New Bookshelf should be Radical Joyous Inclusion. This is what we mean when we say “decolonize our bookshelves.” The only thing decolonizing seeks to exclude are the forces, systems and habits that have excluded so many of us for so long—forces, systems and habits that continue to have too much power in this world, and in our hearts.

What I think I’ve come to understand, more deeply than ever before, is that the enemy is not technology itself, but rather inequality and centralization of power and knowledge, and that the answer to these threats are education, diversity and justice. You don’t need artificial intelligence to work that out. You need actual intelligence. But more importantly, you need all the actual intelligences – every person, animal, plant and bug; every critter, every stone and every natural and unnatural system. You need a crab computer the size of the world. The problem is never technology itself; after all, remember, the computer is like the world. I remain as excited as ever about the power and possibilities of computers and networks as I have ever been; I just abhor the structures of power, injustice, extractive industry and computational thinking in which they are currently embedded. But I hope I’ve shown, to some degree, that it doesn’t need to be this way. There are always other ways of doing technology, just as there are other ways of doing intelligence and politics. Technology, after all, is what we can learn to do.

The VCs were prolific. They talked like nobody I knew. Sometimes they talked their own book, but most days, they talked Ideas: how to foment enlightenment, how to apply microeconomic theories to complex social problems. The future of media and the decline of higher ed; cultural stagnation and the builder’s mind-set. They talked about how to find a good heuristic for generating more ideas, presumably to have more things to talk about. Despite their feverish advocacy of open markets, deregulation, and continuous innovation, the venture class could not be relied upon for nuanced defenses of capitalism. They sniped about the structural hypocrisy of criticizing capitalism from a smartphone, as if defending capitalism from a smartphone were not grotesque. They saw the world through a kaleidoscope of startups: If you want to eliminate economic inequality, the most effective way to do it would be to outlaw starting your own company, wrote the founder of the seed accelerator. Every vocal anti-capitalist person I’ve met is a failed entrepreneur, opined an angel investor. The SF Bay Area is like Rome or Athens in antiquity, posted a VC. Send your best scholars, learn from the masters and meet the other most eminent people in your generation, and then return home with the knowledge and networks you need. Did they know people could see them?

Neoliberal economics, the logic of which is tending today to win out throughout the world thanks to international bodies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and the governments to whom they, directly or indirectly, dictate their principles of ‘governance’,10 owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked, as such, to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies. It is the universalization of a particular case, that of the United States of America, characterized fundamentally by the weakness of the state which, though already reduced to a bare minimum, has been further weakened by the ultra-liberal conservative revolution, giving rise as a consequence to various typical characteristics: a policy oriented towards withdrawal or abstention by the state in economic matters; the shifting into the private sector (or the contracting out) of ‘public services’ and the conversion of public goods such as health, housing, safety, education and culture – books, films, television and radio – into commercial goods and the users of those services into clients; a renunciation (linked to the reduction in the capacity to intervene in the economy) of the power to equalize opportunities and reduce inequality (which is tending to increase excessively) in the name of the old liberal ‘self-help’ tradition (a legacy of the Calvinist belief that God helps those who help themselves) and of the conservative glorification of individual responsibility (which leads, for example, to ascribing responsibility for unemployment or economic failure primarily to individuals, not to the social order, and encourages the delegation of functions of social assistance to lower levels of authority, such as the region or city); the withering away of the Hegelian–Durkheimian view of the state as a collective authority with a responsibility to act as the collective will and consciousness, and a duty to make decisions in keeping with the general interest and contribute to promoting greater solidarity. Moreover,

If you are an evangelical reading this book, then I would ask you to look around and see what your witness has wrought. The nation is polarized. The candidates you back want to take us back to a mythical time—apparently the 1950s—that honestly did not exist. The bile and hatred of some of the leaders you emulate make it impossible for people to believe whatever witness you have left. While you are clinging to God and guns, mothers are clinging to pictures of children who have been shot dead in classrooms, in streets, in malls, in cars. More people go hungry today than ever before. Inequality is mounting. Calls for law and order mean more Black and Brown bodies dead at the hands of the police. The nation’s infrastructure is failing. Disdain for science has left America behind during a pandemic, while the rest of the world moves forward. The president you followed slavishly declared “American carnage” in his inaugural speech. Look around. You helped make this carnage we now experience. All of these things have occurred because evangelicals, through religious lobbying and interference, supported the political structures that curtailed, limited, or struck down truly important issues. The polarization we are experiencing in government has stymied progress. That polarization has taken on a resemblance to ideological and theological battles. Your nationalistic evangelicalism is hurting others. Your racism is actively engaged in killing bodies and souls. My analysis and prognostications may be dire, but it is never too late to make amends.

The shift in focus served to align the goals of the Civil Rights Movement with key political goals of poor and working-class whites, who were also demanding economic reforms. As the Civil Rights Movement began to evolve into a “Poor People’s Movement,” it promised to address not only black poverty, but white poverty as well—thus raising the specter of a poor and working-class movement that cut across racial lines. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders made it clear that they viewed the eradication of economic inequality as the next front in the “human rights movement” and made great efforts to build multiracial coalitions that sought economic justice for all. Genuine equality for black people, King reasoned, demanded a radical restructuring of society, one that would address the needs of the black and white poor throughout the country. Shortly before his assassination, he envisioned bringing to Washington, D.C., thousands of the nation’s disadvantaged in an interracial alliance that embraced rural and ghetto blacks, Appalachian whites, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans to demand jobs and income—the right to live. In a speech delivered in 1968, King acknowledged there had been some progress for blacks since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but insisted that the current challenges required even greater resolve and that the entire nation must be transformed for economic justice to be more than a dream for poor people of all colors. As historian Gerald McKnight observes, “King was proposing nothing less than a radical transformation of the Civil Rights Movement into a populist crusade calling for redistribution of economic and political power. America’s only civil rights leader was now focusing on class issues and was planning to descend on Washington with an army of poor to shake the foundations of the power structure and force the government to respond to the needs of the ignored underclass.”36

A daunting example of the impact that the loose talk and heavy rhetoric of the Sixties had on policy can be seen in the way the black family—a time-bomb ticking ominously, and exploding with daily detonations—got pushed off the political agenda. While Carmichael, Huey Newton and others were launching a revolutionary front against the system, the Johnson administration was contemplating a commitment to use the power of the federal government to end the economic and social inequalities that still plagued American blacks. A presidential task force under Daniel Patrick Moynihan was given a mandate to identify the obstacles preventing blacks from seizing opportunities that had been grasped by other minority groups in the previous 50 years of American history. At about the same time as the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moynihan published findings that emphasized the central importance of family in shaping an individual life and noted with alarm that 21 percent of black families were headed by single women. “[The] one unmistakable lesson in American history,” he warned, is that a country that allows “a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder—most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.” Moynihan proposed that the government confront this problem as a priority; but his conclusions were bitterly attacked by black radicals and white liberals, who joined in an alliance of anger and self-flagellation and quickly closed the window of opportunity Moynihan had opened. They condemned his report as racist not only in its conclusions but also in its conception; e.g., it had failed to stress the evils of the “capitalistic system.” This rejectionist coalition did not want a program for social change so much as a confession of guilt. For them the only “non-racist” gesture the president could make would be acceptance of their demand for $400 million in “reparations” for 400 years of slavery. The White House retreated before this onslaught and took the black family off the agenda.

When I am queen of the world, I’ll abolish the class structure and redress the inequities of capitalism.

(his) actions also underscore the limits of symbolic gestures toward social justice that we also often see in the world of philanthropy. We often pay homage to what needs to change and attempt half measures, but we rarely challenge our own complicity in the structural inequities.

Controlling images were never just about the object of study—popular culture memes or characters from movies and television shows—but about the process of reproducing structural inequalities in our everyday lives. Social psychologists study how we acknowledge and reproduce status groups like “man,” “woman,” “black,” “white,” “Asian,” “poor,” “rich,” “novice,” and “expert” in routine interactions. These are statuses of people that we recognize as meaningful categories. When we interact with someone, a few things happen. We size up the person we are engaging with, scanning for any risks to our own social status. You don’t want to be the person who mistakes the company president for the janitor, for example. We also scan others’ perception of us. This is how all kinds of impromptu moments of cooperation make our day go smoothly. It’s the guy who sees you struggling to get something on the bus and coordinates the four people around you to help you get on. Or it’s the three women in a fast food line who all grab for a baby’s bottle just before it hits the floor. We cooperate in micromoments and in longer settings like the waiting room of a doctor’s office. And, when we are cooperating with strangers or near strangers, we are using all kinds of ideas about status to make the interaction work to our benefit.

What this means is that today’s societies are very different from the societies of the past, when growth was close to zero, or barely 0.1 percent per year, as in the eighteenth century. A society in which growth is 0.1–0.2 percent per year reproduces itself with little or no change from one generation to the next: the occupational structure is the same, as is the property structure. A society that grows at 1 percent per year, as the most advanced societies have done since the turn of the nineteenth century, is a society that undergoes deep and permanent change. This has important consequences for the structure of social inequalities and the dynamics of the wealth distribution. Growth can create new forms of inequality: for example, fortunes can be amassed very quickly in new sectors of economic activity. At the same time, however, growth makes inequalities of wealth inherited from the past less apparent, so that inherited wealth becomes less decisive. To be sure, the transformations entailed by a growth rate of 1 percent are far less sweeping than those required by a rate of 3–4 percent, so that the risk of disillusionment is considerable—a reflection of the hope invested in a more just social order, especially since the Enlightenment. Economic growth is quite simply incapable of satisfying this democratic and meritocratic hope, which must create specific institutions for the purpose and not rely solely on market forces or technological progress.

Ah, yes, passion, that great "equalizer" - the passion to manage an entire household staff, the passion to have been born with the right bracelet. It might seem small, this lie by omission, but its roots worm and wend all the way down to America's original sin, our fundamental delusion: the bootstrap ethos, the notion that the comfortable deserve their place, that capitalism is an opportunity for the exploited to prove themselves, that success is a proportional reflection of hard work, that the rich are rich because they are good and smart. This deliberate spackling over of structural inequality - the death of luck - is the only thing that gives Donald Trump any authority.

It is objectively destructive to fetishize the past, to dismantle social safety nets, to deny the existence of structural inequalities and leave the most vulnerable to face impossible odds without succor. It is a fundamental betrayal of everything a society is for. There is no cool version of conservatism, no ethically responsible version, no rational version ready to reclaim the tiller after Trump leaves office. The word itself betrays an inherent violence: to conserve is to avoid change, to embrace stasis, to freeze frame the now because the now is treating certain people very, very well.

It felt wrong, to be sure. It felt like both trespassing on whoever owned the place and trespassing on society for enjoying something so decadent. Did I take baths in the giant soaking tub with a view of both the Hudson and the East River (and everything in between)? Yussss. But I had complicated thoughts about structural inequality while I did it.

In a world of extreme inequality, what kind of economic system is just? By conforming to a system structured solely to maximize shareholder returns, we avoid taking personal responsibility for the answer to that moral question.

Reduced to an apolitical dreamer, he can be a tool to divert energy away from forming structural solutions to inequality and injustice while spreading grade-school-level bromides in favor of kindness.

I can, hopefully, contribute to systems and structures and ways of thinking, and acting, that eliminate unfairness, and eliminate injustice and inequality. I think that matters.

Thus, according to the survey, individuals’ behaviors are mainly to blame (i.e., lack of willpower), though respondents still often recognized the multifaceted nature of inequality and the role of structural factors such as educational opportunities and discrimination

To study poverty without inequality leads to tendencies to misrecognize structural issues for individual failings.

All in all, therefore, it seems to us that high marginal income tax rates, applied only to very high incomes, are a perfectly sensible way to limit the explosion of top income inequality. They would not be extortionary, since very few people will end up paying them; top managers will simply not get these kinds of income anymore. And from all we see, they won’t discourage anybody to work as hard as they can. To the extent they affect people’s choice of career, it will likely be in a positive direction. This is not to deny the importance of structural economic changes, which have made it increasingly difficult for those with low education to succeed, generating an increase in inequality even within the remaining 99 percent.

...unique character of each human life as well as the distinctive gifts that each individual brings to a family should not blind us to the way that membership to a broader social group matters in the creation of inequality. Social group membership structures life opportunities. The chances of obtaining key and widely sought goals: high scores on standardized tests such as the SAT, graduation from college, professional jobs, and sustained employment are not equal for all the infants whose births are celebrated by their families. It turns out that the family into which we are born an event over which we have no control matters quite a lot. It matters in part because the system of institutions is selective building on some cultural patterns more than others... The social structure of inequality is not all determining, but it exists." (Part III: Chapter 12 10:19:00 audio book)

Rising S, a Texas-based company, does build bare-bones underground shelters for that crowd. But since 2012, Lynch has been catering to a different group—wealthy citizens who want all the comforts and amenities of home if and when catastrophe strikes. “We’ve revolutionized the bomb shelter,” he told me. “Everybody was building cold and clammy structures, with no color, no nothing, just a storm shelter with some shelves. You could drive to work in a Kia but what if you want a Mercedes and can afford it? Our clients are like that.” Lynch’s upscale clients share the view that society is splintering and fear the consequences for the privileged in a world where the collective trust in public institutions has weakened. It’s a dark take on American society, but one that keeps Rising S’s nearly 100,000-square-foot factory humming with new orders. “We are one unjustified police shooting away from having riots across the United States,” Lynch said. “A lot of people are worried about war, social and civil unrest.” So far, that’s meant building an underground swimming pool for one client, while another ordered a hidden stable to keep his valuable stud horses safe.

Dr. King’s treatment as an “infallible oracle” is not laziness; his perceived infallibility is related to the message he has been chosen to deliver. Reduced to an apolitical dreamer, he can be a tool to divert energy away from forming structural solutions to inequality and injustice while spreading grade-school-level bromides in favor of kindness.

The case for assisted suicide rests on stereotypes that our lives are inherently so bad that it is entirely rational if we want to die. (...) It is not about autonomy but about nondisabled people telling us what’s good for us. In the discussion that follows, I argue that choice is illusory in a context of pervasive inequality. Choices are structured by oppression. We shouldn’t offer assistance with suicide until we all have the assistance we need to get out of bed in the morning and live a good life. Common causes of suicidality—dependence, institutional confinement, being a burden—are entirely curable.

What American Healthcare Can Learn from Italy: Three Lessons It’s easy. First, learn to live like Italians. Eat their famous Mediterranean diet, drink alcohol regularly but in moderation, use feet instead of cars, stop packing pistols and dropping drugs. Second, flatten out the class structure. Shrink the gap between high and low incomes, raise pensions and minimum wages to subsistence level, fix the tax structure to favor the ninety-nine percent. And why not redistribute lifestyle too? Give working stiffs the same freedom to have kids (maternity leave), convalesce (sick leave), and relax (proper vacations) as the rich. Finally, give everybody access to health care. Not just insurance, but actual doctors, medications, and hospitals. As I write, the future of the Affordable Care Act is uncertain, but surely the country will not fall into the abyss that came before. Once they’ve had a taste of what it’s like not to be one heart attack away from bankruptcy, Americans won’t turn back the clock. Even what is lately being called Medicare for All, considered to be on the fringe left a decade ago and slammed as “socialized medicine,” is now supported by a majority of Americans, according to some polls. In practice, there’s little hope for Italian lessons one and two—the United States is making only baby steps toward improving its lifestyle, and its income inequality is worse every year. But the third lesson is more feasible. Like Italy, we can provide universal access to treatment and medications with minimal point-of-service payments and with prices kept down by government negotiation. Financial arrangements could be single-payer like Medicare or use private insurance companies as intermediaries like Switzerland, without copying the full Italian model of doctors on government salaries. Despite the death by a thousand cuts currently being inflicted on the Affordable Care Act, I am convinced that Americans will no longer stand for leaving vast numbers of the population uninsured, or denying medical coverage to people whose only sin is to be sick. The health care genie can’t be put back in the bottle.

Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, “Things are so much better,” while you think, Things are the same. You are told, “Asian Americans are so successful,” while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria. A 2017 study found that the ideology of America as a fair meritocracy led to more self-doubt and behavioral problems among low-income black and brown sixth graders because, as one teacher said, “they blame themselves for problems they can’t control.” Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.

Racism, firmly set within the structures of Cuban colonial society, should have received specific attention from the beginning, alerting the masses to form a resistance culture and to face the problem, not to turn it into a dead zone, into a “taboo,” as was the case during the first years of the sixties. Until recently and in very discreet ways, we have begun to speak out against the racial problem.

Class discrimination is less difficult to eradicate because racial discrimination resides and is exercised within the working class itself. Racism and racial discrimination transcend the limits of classist structure, becoming a more general phenomenon that does not disappear with the elimination of capitalism.