Marijuana possession warranted years behind bars while, for years, doctors dispensed addictive opioids, legally.
Life goes on in America.
Instead of teaching as a full-time professor, only an adjunct position is available. Instead of teaching three courses, five must be taught for the same salary as three but less for the professor, tenured, teaching one or two classes, and receiving a living wage. And your students, attending college in hopes of better opportunities on the job market, turn down courses in African American literature or Comparative art (non-Western) because, according to their social-network news feed, such trifling courses aren't worth your time or money.
Off some Americans go, having put aside some money to treat themselves to a night at the symphony, or to Disney World with the three children or two grandchildren where workers, or to dinner at a restaurant where you come wearing a tie and dress in your best, and you anticipate being seated next to those who only look like you and your partner or family members.
And you think, it's all been worth it!
In the meantime, the next day, little LaLita, sitting in a classroom without a sufficient heating system, reads a story about the enchantingly beautiful little blue-eyed Lolita, brushing her blond hair 20 times before she falls asleep at night. What is LaLita with wonderfully dreaded hair to think about her image seen nowhere in the textbooks or in the documentary films shown at school.
On the same day, another study reveals that raises for the average American isn't forthcoming again this year. Well, when have wages kept up with inflation, anyway? The creative writer, dreaming about writing a children's book for all the little LaLitas to read and see themselves in dreads, no less, will have to wait. Stay on the job longer. Maybe next year will be a good time to quit the job paying minimum of 7.25. Maybe next year, there will be enough money to send he and his wife's LaLita to piano lessons in the afternoons or weekends.
Americans stare at the commercials suggesting that buying a home is possible! Very possible. But for the student loan and the paying of interest from that student loan taken out ten years ago!
Believe it! The "man upstairs" has a plan! He's got something in store for you! Leave it to him! But the ones watching folks below them, through lenses, visible and obscure, are fellow Americans. If any thing is growing at breakneck speed in the US it's the surveillance industry, looking for the "suspicious" unhappy. The ungrateful with the status quo.
While most Americans have become increasing too busy to think critically about the legacy of slavery (no doubt, many reject the notion that there is a legacy!), nonetheless, there are chains in which blacks and whites, linked to a heartless and dehumanizing economic system, work for the benefit of the few, the 1%. And it's this 1%, who as presidential candidate Bernie Sanders argues, shouldn't exist!
Billionaires and millionaires shouldn't be if in America we mean to create a society that is justice and protects liberty for all citizens and non-citizens.
The construction of whiteness is a weaving of tropes, allegories and metaphors, as a way to maintaining a racial hierarchy of whites at the top social ladder and others below. It permits the powerful, then, to adjudicate justice in favor of those pledging allegiance to a narrative in which the subject, "America," sanctions the racial superiority of one "race" of humans.
Such an arrangement of humanity, in the long run, can't be maintained if life on Earth is to exist. Capitalism won't abide by a sane and humane ordering of humanity. Capitalism's motto is all for the few and none for the many. It's as if it were demonically profit driven, fueled on blissful ignorance of all from CEO to the homeless.
We know why the majority of Americans hesitate to denounce capitalism. The mean-spirited and nefarious don't just reside in that house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Elizabeth Warren is a hard worker. A relentless fighter who wants to do away with monopoly capitalism, not capitalism all together. There's "good" capitalism that could move America forward, she believes.
Given American history, how's a "good" slaveholder to make a difference?
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