Racism, Violence, and Bullying in Zimbabwe

September 1, 2011 by Jess in Africa, history, politics, race, Social Issues, violence, war, writing, Young Adult, Zimbabwe | 3 Comments

On the 17^thof April, 1980, at Zimbabwe’s independence celebration, Bob Marley sang his famous song for Africa’s independence: “Every man got a right to decide his own destiny, And in this judgment there is no partiality.”

Out of the Shadows

Part of the problem, of course, was that in Zimbabwe until 1980, blacks were denied the right to vote, were offered inferior education by the white minority in power, and were unable to own land, which had been appropriated by white settlers a century earlier. Black Africans in then Rhodesia were not masters of their own destiny. But, after a decade long war for independence, they now hoped that Zimbabwe could become a symbol of African pride and democracy.

By now, we all know what happened. Robert Mugabe, the prime minister who shone like a bright beacon of hope and promise in 1980, became a despot as early as the 1980s—terrorizing and killing the Ndebele peoples. In 2000, he began appropriating white farm land for his thug cronies and expanded his brutalization of the population to include all ethnicities, black and white, in order to remain in power.

Jason Wallace’s Out of Shadows bravely navigates this shifting terrain of power politics, deeply embedded in the problem of race that has plagued southern Africa for centuries. In 1983, Robert Jacklin moves from England to Zimbabwe with his family and attends an elite boarding school. Despite his father’s allegiance to the liberal party line—or perhaps because of his father’s almost rote preaching about the virtues of the new black government and the evils of the former white government—Robert quickly falls under the sway of a charismatic young man, Ivan, whose palpable anger over the loss of white power and prestige makes him a dangerous friend.

Robert soon realizes that lines at the boarding school are drawn between those who are willing participants in bullying the black students and those who befriend them. Robert absorbs his new friends’ racism and rage, rejecting his father’s beliefs and embracing the distorted but compelling world view of disaffected white Rhodesians. Ironically, his new-found racism and his alliance with young men whose terrifying values lead them to engage in questionable activities probably saves his life, a part of the plot I won’t divulge.

Though Robert never quite emerges from the philosophical and moral racial quagmire he’s sunk himself in, he does eventually jeopardize his own life when he comes to understand Ivan’s commitment to a radical and shocking plan of action to restore Zimbabwe to its former glory under white power. An epilogue with an adult Robert, who returns to the boarding school a couple decades later, demonstrates that though he’s managed to leave Zimbabwe and the virulent racism he encountered there, its impact reverberates, leaving him still confused about some of the moral issues raised by the book.

In Out of Shadows, Wallace has waded into a confusing political situation with admirable honesty. At times I longed for a strong black character to clarify the issues and effectively demonstrate, to the reader if not to Robert, that though Robert Mugabe turned out to be evil, African independence itself was both just and necessary. At the same time, moral realities are almost never black and white and are often gray. I appreciated Wallace’s ability to hold back and let the reader experience the reality of obfuscated moral realities, such as the one unfolding in Zimbabwe for the last two decades.

The Value of Art

August 30, 2010 by Jess in art, Cultural categories, politics, poverty, Social Issues, violence | 2 Comments

I’ve always been attracted to books that explore the darkness of humanity rather than books that explore sweetness and light. When I’m compelled by a romance within a book or a movie, it’s because the romance offers a three-dimensional understanding of how relationships work—the dysfunction and darkness riddled through with grace and redemption, or vice versa.

I think this is one reason why Flannery O’Connor’s work is read widely by people in the world and misunderstood by religious people. She saw grace emerging right in the middle of sin, mushrooms growing in manure, and she didn’t try to mitigate the ugliness of evil even while she demonstrated the human capacity for redemption in the midst of it. Her stories are completely believable, whereas the message that the church sent me while I was growing up—that redemption is found only in places and people that have already been cleaned up and redeemed and sanitized—I discovered to be patently false as I grew older.

Lately, I’ve been reading a ton of mysteries and thrillers. The central mystery of my life—the human need for redemption, the fact that some people seek it and others run away from it—revolves around deeper things than murder or kidnapping or the myriad of crimes that crop up in mysteries. Yet crime plays a huge role in my understanding of redemption.

I’m terribly concerned by what I see all around me: how our society punishes people for being poor; how it ghettoizes poor people and then lets those neighborhoods rot and wallow in crime; how imprisonment is part of the status quo for young people growing up in poor neighborhoods, not because those kids start off bad but because there are few alternatives open to them beyond crime and gang life; how we feel justified in harsh prison sentences—after all, we’re protecting the rest of society from the bad guys; how we offer little that could uplift or redeem people out of violence and crime and poverty.

We offer neither mercy nor justice through our legal system or our welfare system or our education system. And we don’t uplift through those programs either. Though like anybody, I want to be protected from violent and evil people, I also understand the terrible cycle our society has created: though not solely responsible for what humans will do, we help create and maintain the criminal elements, and then we punish it. I’m horrified by the fact that we (both liberals and conservatives) pay enormous amounts of money for (and agitate for) systems that perpetuate the problem rather than alleviate it.

I’d like to see more redemption and less darkness. But I don’t know how to achieve it in human society, which often seems hopelessly corrupt to me. Yet I do see art as a shot of light in an otherwise dark situation. All forms of art—literature, music, film, paintings, etc—have the ability to reveal the truth of both darkness and light in a way that our political, legal, and educational systems can’t.

I guess that’s why I never became a political activist and, instead, spend my days reading and writing.

Justice in an Unjust World

Last May, while I was traveling around South Africa, a relatively new Christian told me the story of his salvation. He knew God was real and God was good the day God gave him a beautiful house at a price that was substantially below market value; the person who was selling it cheap had fallen on hard times and needed to get rid of it pronto.

“Isn’t it screwed up that you’re thanking God that somebody else has fallen on hard times?” I asked.

I don’t think he understood my unstated point: that a gift from God for one person should not represent injustice or hard times for another person. Even if we assume that the person who had fallen on hard times made bad decisions about their finances, can we really give God credit for our ability to, vulture-like, swoop in when the pickin’ is good?

Such logic leads to genocide.

Such logic has led to genocide, many, many times in history.

***

The first book I remember reading by myself was a biography of Harriet Tubman, an African American slave who not only escaped slavery herself but became known as “Moses” because she returned to the South over a dozen times and helped over seventy slaves escape to freedom. I was absolutely captivated by the phrase, “the Underground Railroad.” I imagined a literal railroad carved out of rock, deep underneath the earth’s surface, with poor, tattered slaves creeping along in the dark, only a candle to light their way to freedom.

Perhaps because that book represented a pivotal turning point in my education—the ability to read by myself—it also shaped my political and social consciousness. The first novel I wrote as an 11-year-old was the story of a young woman trying to help a slave escape on the Underground Railroad. As an adult, I’ve spent years of my life in graduate school, studying African history. Justice for people of color worldwide has been one of my abiding political concerns. I am bitterly aware of the privilege of my white skin, just as I’m bitterly aware of the disadvantages I face due to my gender.

(As a caveat to the conservatives who read my blog: I don’t believe the government to be a panacea to the social ills of our time. But it is obvious to me that injustice is built into the very fabric of our society, and thus into the warp and weave of every bureaucratic and religious institution and every policy that our government espouses. As a result, I don’t think we can create a solution without addressing it from a political and religious standpoint. This doesn’t mean that I believe the solution should be top-down—government forcing the people to do something that’s not in their heart to do. God, no. I HATE INSTITUTIONS. Plus, I am a firm believer in grassroots movements for social change, from the people on up. But the very point of democracy, and of grassroots change, is that at some point, we must change institutional structures as well—from governments to churches to schools. Anyway, that was a little diversion to my main subject today….)

As I’ve grown older, my concept of justice has grown increasingly complicated. I’ve come to recognize that righting the wrongs of the past so that the future can be more equitable might mean that a lot of Americans—white people, wealthy people of all colors, and, ah yes, even the educated middle-class, which includes me—will have to give up things they currently enjoy. Yes. Among many other changes, justice will definitely mean that we in the U.S. will need to give up our boats, extra cars, and expensive vacations and spend more money on groceries, on housing, on other things.

My preference, of course, is that we could right the wrongs of the past without anybody currently living having to suffer. But I’m not sure that’s possible. It’s not exactly that I believe a lot of people must lower their standards of living in order for the very most poor to be able to raise their standards of living. But I don’t think it’s possible for those of us in western nations to continue to ignore the fact that our wealth is based on our power; and our power comes at the expense of other people’s power which, ultimately, leads to their poverty. A person in India or China or Mexico who is hungry and living in a cardboard shack on the side of the hill will not say, “I demand a fair, living wage.” No, they will take what they can get, and so we continue to pay millions of workers worldwide a non-livable wage so that we can get our cheap products. “It’s better than nothing” is the basic attitude that supports our ongoing economic oppression of the global south. Of course it’s better than nothing. But it’s not enough, and we who have too much need to take Jesus’s words to heart: “The worker is worthy of his wage.”

To right the global wrong of structural social and economic inequality will mean a dramatic decline in the material wealth of western, developed nations. Morally speaking, we cannot continue the system of demanding cheap labor that keeps millions poor around the world just so that we can enjoy cheap products. Morally speaking, I don’t see how middle-class whites in America can ignore the fact that every day, we still enjoy the benefits of slavery—and that millions of people of color still suffer because of it. Is it such a mystery that the worst schools in the nation are also in the ghettos, which were created by systematic racism that crowded people of color into small, crappy neighborhoods so white society could keep races segregated?

To stop oppressing people, we will have to give up some of our power and some of our wealth—and that will feel like suffering to a lot of people, even if it’s really not.

***

When I look at the global injustices, I quickly get bogged down with a what to do what to do panicky kind of feeling. The question I always ask is this: What is my individual responsibility to right global wrongs?

This morning, I received an email from a friend that had me asking another question about justice, one that represents a moral conundrum: What is my individual responsibility to right global wrongs when doing so may hurt another person?

In other words, where does justice begin and end?

My friend asked me whether she should sacrifice her career by staying silent about secrets she learned in the course of historical research, secrets that would shame an old woman and that woman’s children. Not revealing those secrets kills the basis of my friend’s argument in the monograph she’s writing. Revealing them allows her to explore important women’s issues within the context of religion. She wondered if she was serving the cause of justice by staying silent, in order to be merciful to this old woman and her children? Or was she furthering misogyny by staying silent? Which was it?

My friend is faced with a perplexing problem: two different definitions of justice, the personal (keeping somebody’s secret so that they can keep their dignity) vs. the global (advancing the cause of feminism). Which cause is more important? Many people would sacrifice one woman’s dignity in order to serve what they see as a greater cause, women’s issues or some other Big Cause. And okay, serving a Big Cause is important. But are we really serving a Big Cause if we sacrifice one person’s dignity in order to do it?

It reminds me of those old Life Boat Questions: Should we sacrifice one person’s life in order to save a million?

This is the logic of war, and it’s the logic of most political movements that advocate for one thing or another, but it’s a logic that leaves me cold. Its foundation is an either-or fallacy that fails to look for alternatives. Is it true that somebody must be sacrificed?

So I ask myself, Is it true that Americans must suffer a decline in living standards in order for developing nations to rise up out of the mire and muck of poverty? Or am I setting myself up with a political either-or fallacy?

My friend’s email went further. One of her friends had recently died in Zimbabwe because medicine for her cancer wasn’t available, and now my friend was wondering whether she was possibly serving the cause for justice if she spent most of her time making meals for her family, making sure they were cozy and warm with a fire at night, books, an apple pie for dessert.

She is not asking a simple question. On the surface, it may appear that she’s asking whether, instead of living a life of American comforts and domestic bliss, she shouldn’t be out there working 80-100 hours a week to get justice for Zimbabweans. And yes, she is asking that. But she’s asking so much more. The average American can’t link their daily life to the poverty of an African nation…but my friend can. Because she’s studied African history, I know she sees the many and varied links that connect the wealth of the westernized global north, including individuals like you and me, to the impoverishment of the global south, like her Zimbabwean friend who died of cancer because the medicine wasn’t available in her country.

So even more than asking whether she should be devoting her intellectual and creative career to the fight for justice, she’s wondering whether the very basis of her domestically blissful life is inherently flawed.

This is her question: If my good fortune comes at the expense of another, is it really good fortune?

If we Americans enjoy access to cheap medicine and cheap goods, and as a result, we have policies that destroy individuals, families, and nations around the world, resulting in a Zimbabwean woman’s inability to buy medicine for her cancer….can we really say we have good fortune?

I will not entertain the simplistic and foolhardy argument that Zimbabwe’s problems are Zimbabwe’s problems alone. Is Mugabe a maniac running his country into the ground? Yes. But are Zimbabwe’s problems a result of Mugabe alone? No. When you look at the history of that country, the political and other problems of Zimbabwe are directly related to colonial policies put in place first by Great Britain, then by the European settlers, and then, post-independence, exacerbated and compounded and made worse by World Bank and IMF policies. In fact, when you look at the history of every single impoverished country, they all have a symbiotic relationship with a wealthy country like ours, always to their detriment.

***

(P.S. This is becoming a book and I just meant to write a simple blog post on justice. Ha!)

***

And as to this question, “If my good fortune comes at the expense of another, is it really good fortune?”…well, I don’t have a simple answer to that either.

Back to my opening anecdote about the Christian who thanked God for his new house, even though it represented hardship for another person, and my statement that such logic has led to genocide….

When Americans thank God for the U.S., for the freedoms we enjoy, I wonder if we would still be so grateful if we thought about the millions of Native American who were killed so we could “get” this land? Or if we thought about the lives that are currently being destroyed because of Native American policies we created long ago, destructive policies that have never been rectified, but which were part of the very basis of our getting this land?

I’m not trying to make an argument of “poor noble savage” against “rich greedy white capitalists.” I’m simply pointing out that it was wrong to kill millions of Native Americans 200 years ago, and that it is wrong that we still have policies that continue to impoverish millions of Native Americans by offering inferior education on the reservations and allowing the cycle of welfare to keep generations in its grip. It was wrong to enslave Africans 200 years ago, and it was wrong to create race-based ghettos a hundred years ago, and it’s wrong that we make only half-hearted efforts to change the situation today.

Is it really God acting on our behalf to give us a cheap house, cheap goods, cheap food, cheap cars…when millions of people worldwide work hard 50 or 60 hours a week to give us those cheap goods and cheap food and cheap cars but yet they still live in shacks and fail to have enough money to feed themselves and their families?

I’m full-circle back to the either-or fallacy: to change the system, to bring justice to millions worldwide, means some of us who have never suffered will have to suffer.

The Old Testament disturbs me because it shows a God who would encourage his people, the Israelites, to commit genocide, and then “give them” the land they had just vacated through murder and mayhem.

I’ve never understood the logic of this kind of justice.

But.

This is the same God my friend was thanking when he said God had given him a cheap house.

This is the same God that Americans thank for giving them this land, despite the millions of lives that were sacrificed as a result.

This is the same God that Afrikaners thanked when they went to war to take land from Xhosas, Zulu, the Khoisan.

This is the same God that Mormons thanked when they came to Utah and massacred American-Indians and then took the land as theirs.

And is this the same God we continue to thank for our good fortune as Americans….? Is it really good fortune if it comes at the expense of millions of people worldwide? I would like to believe in a good and loving God but I can’t believe in the “good and loving” God that many American Christians define as being on their side and helping them get the things they both want and need….not when it comes at the expense of other people. Either that’s a fucked up God or those people are sadly, sadly mistaken—they call it “God” when it’s really injustice operating in their favor. (Ah, here we are, back to my either-or fallacy….Is there a third option?)

***

Daily, my emotional level is kept on a low simmer as I contemplate the multiple ways that American culture, lifestyle, and politics perpetuates poverty around the world. I feel overwhelmed every time I go to the grocery store and realize that, no matter what, shopping means that I’m participating in global oppression.

I realize I must eat, and that the grocery store is my only option as long as I live here….

Where does an individual begin, if he or she wants to right wrongs that exist on a global scale and that we all participate in?

And what does an individual like my friend do when they realize that it’s wrong to expose one woman’s shame in order to change a global injustice?

I wish I had an answer.

Culture Shock and the Writing Life

The thing that is both wonderful and terrible about immersing yourself in another culture is how quickly you find yourself humbled by your own flawed expectations about how the world should work.

When I first arrived, I stayed with a Zimbabwean immigrant family on the outskirts of Johannesburg. They run a small local paper, employ Malwaian immigrant workers, and live lives riddled by the contradictions of Zimbabwe/South Africa border politics. Currently, I’m staying with a white South African and her American husband in Pretoria, who have introduced me to local and national politics, the internal world of the ANC, and liberal white culture in South Africa. Read More

True democracy: it can look like total chaos

November 28, 2008 by Jess in Africa, Cultural categories, democracy, peace, politics, poverty, power, Social Issues, South Africa, Uncategorized, violence, Zimbabwe | Leave a comment

When I was staying at a guest house in Pretoria, South Africa this summer, I had an invigorating conversation comparing South Africa to Zimbabwe with a man named Simon, a conservationist who lives in Zimbabwe and works on land issues in Mozambique. Simon, a white man of British descent, grew up in Tanzania where his father ran one of the game reserves.

At the time of our conversation, the violent attacks on Zimbabwean refugees in South African cities was still a fresh topic. And Mbeki was busy brokering talks between the leader of the MDC, Morgan Tsvangirai,Â and Robert Mugabe. Zimbabwe was the talk of the town.

I mentioned that many people in South Africa, especially those critical of Jacob Zuma’s likely ascension to presidency in 2009, are afraid that they’re setting up for a long and terrible fall similar to Zimbabwe’s. “Is that where we’re headed?” they ask. They’re afraid (and who can blame them?) of becoming a place where food security is an enormous issue, where the value of currency plunges so low that you can’t afford to buy a loaf of bread with your monthly salary, where democracy is a joke, and where elections are an excuse for the state to use extreme violence to keep political dissidents in line.

But Simon had an entirely different take on the issue.

“They would be damn lucky if they get to Zimbawe’s state,” Simon declared, “when people are deciding for themselves what they’re going to do, irrespective of the state.”

I would not have had that perspective before talking to Simon. I was too disturbed by pictures of people with their heads split open by military operatives acting on behalf of Mugabe.

I don’t want to under-emphasize the very real violence occuring–or ignore the fact that some people have suggested it may be genocide but I think Simon’s onto something. Democracy doesn’t have to be something endorsed by the state to occur. And maybe democracy doesn’t have to do with voting for a particular candidate. If you think about it, that’s a pretty narrow (and pretty demoralizing) definition of democracy. There’s a saying that “People vote with their feet,” meaning that they migrate to places where they believe they can build a better life. If that’s true, even if it’s only true for some people some of the time, maybe it’s also true that people in Zimbabwe are voting in other ways, every day. By sticking together and helping each other out, they’re voting for neighbors, for friends, for family members. They’re voting for Zimbabwe.

Scary picture

November 11, 2008 by Jess in Bay Area, Cultural categories, feminism, free speech, marriage, Photos, politics, polygamy, race, religion, sex, Social Issues, women | 3 Comments

This picture was taken in Sacramento near the capitol steps prior to voting on Proposition 8, the proposition that banned gay marriage in California. While I find this man’s views appalling, I think he has a right to express them. And although I find his views abhorrent, I prefer someone who is clear on what they think about these issues, who at least is honest about what he thinks, who doesn’t provide mealy-mouthed, watered-down versions of his truth. But I wonder how many Mormons would be as honest as this one? Or how many Mormons would agree with what this man is proclaiming for Mormonism?

The Day After, with a bit of a hangover

November 5, 2008 by Jess in politics | Leave a comment

I didn’t realize how stressed I was until last night. I will say one last political thing and then I will return to my former, less political blogging.

I don’t know if Obama will be a great politician, but I hope he is a great president. What I mean by that is this: I don’t know if Obama will create great policies, and he sure is facing an uphill battle with a ton of landmines planted all around him, but I hope he is able to unite this country and help us all feel some pride in being an American again–not just pride here in our own country, but around the world. He has not earned the right to be compared to Nelson Mandela, but my hope for Obama is that he is able to do with Mandela did.Â Nelson Mandela was not a great politician in the sense of creating great policies, but he did restore dignity to allÂ South AfricansÂ and heÂ became a shining beacon of hope and reconciliation.

We will see. For a blog posting that is notable in its support for Obama while providing a checklist for reality, read here.

And now, on to other, less divisive topics!

Voting

November 4, 2008 by Jess in politics, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Chris just came back from the polls, having cast his ballot (though they had no record of his registration so his vote, like perhaps thousands of votes around the country, was “provisional”). He brought me a sticker so I could go get my free Starbucks coffee.

It’s not that I didn’t vote–it’s just that I voted two weeks ago, through California’s special Vote Through the Mail program, a program I love because it allows me to sit down at leisure, in front of a computer, and decide with knowledge and foresight (sort of)Â which propositions I’m voting “yes” on and which I’m voting “no” on.Â I don’t know if other states have so many propositions, but we sure do.

And now the excitement begins. Which devil do we get? Do we get the smooth-talking, intelligent-sounding, polished devil? Or do we get the blustery, red-faced, looks-like-he’s-about-to-keel-over-and-die devil? Apologies to all of you who love one of those devils! I belong to theÂ Green Party, with itsÂ platform of grassroots democracy, decentralized local politcs, and (best of all!) non-violence.Â It would be great to get two women, and two women of color no less,Â into the White House! Maybe I just love the underdog, and sorry, folks, McCain is no underdog.

Still, I actually got a huge lump in my throat the other day when I was listening to This American Life talk about the good work going on in combating racism during this election. Regardless of what you think about Obama, and some prettyÂ terrible lies are being spread around about him, one of the very good things that has come out during this election is the fact that some folks have been facing theirÂ internal racism, confronting it, and dealing with it in order to move on and vote for who they believe to be the best candidate. I heard somebody say recently that racism in America has been alive for 200 years, and it’s only got a 50-year-scab on it (dating back to the Civil Rights movement.) I hope that if Obama wins, he is able to bring some healing to the racial wounds that are still occuring daily in this country.

Poverty & levels of inequality

October 25, 2008 by Jess in Africa, America, homeless, politics, poverty, race, Social Issues | 7 Comments

A few years ago, I got myself into an uncomfortable argument with aÂ graduate studentÂ who was aÂ Communist sympathizer. This graduate student–we’ll call him Bill–had never traveled outside of the United States. But he kept insisting that the level of poverty experienced by Americans in urban areas was equal to or WORSE THAN the level of poverty experienced by people in India.

Â Now, poverty is one of the issues I’m interested in and one of the conditions I’m interested in alleviating. Further, I have traveled to India–spent three months there in 1995–and so I knew, far better than Bill, that the level of poverty here in the United States cannot in any reasonable way be compared to the level of poverty in India. They are not even in the same league. Saying that the poorest of the poor in America are as poor as the poorest of the poor in India (excepting the chronically homeless who, I might point out, still have resources that the poorest in India completely lack) is kind of like saying that getting pricked by the head of needle is as painful as getting run over by a semi-truck.

I mean, come on. This guy’s ideology was so entrenched–he was so determined to insist that the U.S. and all its systems were completely and utterly evil–that he couldn’t look facts in the face. We all do that to some extent, but sometimes our ideology can lead us to making absolutely absurd statements.

Unfortunately, my insistence that the poverty experienced by poor Indians was far greater than the poverty experienced by poor Americans ruined our friendship.

This article reports that the UN recently found that some major U.S. cities, including New York & Atlanta, have levels of inequality that rival levels of inequality in some cities in Africa. While this doesn’t surprise me at all, I find the report misleading. What it doesn’t offer is the idea that when comparing the gapÂ between levels of income, you can’t in any way indicate the relative nature of poverty that is actually occuring. In other words, the poorest families in the United States (excepting the chronically homeless) don’t come anywhere close to reaching the level of poverty experienced by the poorest families in African cities. ThisÂ report merely says that a family in Atlanta that makes $12,000 a year compared to another family in Atlanta that makes $12 million a year has the same gap that a family in Joburg making $12 a year has in comparison to the family in Joburg making $1.2 million a year. The family in Atlanta making $12,000 a year has far more resources available to them with food stamps and welfare and other food banks than the family in Joburg making $12 a year. And the family in Atlanta is not living in a one-room, mud-floor shack built out of discarded boxes and sheets of metal, lacking clean sources of water or electricity, and without access to a sewage system.

So the disparity in income levels may be the same–but it doesn’t actually explain the poverty that is experienced by folks in Africa, which we in America do not experience (except, as noted before, in the case of the chronically homeless.) What would be really interesting to do is compare the level of poverty experienced by that family making $12 a year in Joburg with the level of poverty experienced by that family in Atlanta making $12,000 a year. This would be a more true and accurate picture of how people around the world actually experience poverty.

Now, having said all that, of course I find it horrific that the family in Atlanta does not have sufficient income to meet their needs. And having said that, I would like to say that I think it is as important to fix the problems with poverty here just as much as it’s important to fix the problems with poverty over there. And having said that, I would like to also say that naturally race is part of the reason why there is such a poverty gap in the U.S. and until we fixÂ the racism that lingers in our various institutions and governmental systems and the people of America itself, we will never eradicate poverty in the U.S.

I just don’t think it’s very useful or helpful or honest to try to make comparisons that distort the true picture.

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The Day After, with a bit of a hangover

Voting

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