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The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

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Keith Payne

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“Economic and social deprivation, if accepted by its victims as their lot in life, breeds passivity, even docility. The miserable yield to their fate as divinely ordained or as their own fault. And, indeed, many Negroes in earlier generations felt that way. Today young Negroes aren't having any of this. They don't share the feeling that something must be wrong with them, that they are responsible for their own exclusion from this affluent society. The civil rights movement--in fact, the whole liberal trend beginning with John Kennedy's election--has told them otherwise. These young Negroes are right. The promises made to them were good and necessary and long, long overdue. The youth were right to believe in them. The only trouble is that the promises were not fulfilled.”

EqualityCivil RightsInequalityAfrican AmericansBlacksPromises
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“As the civil rights movement progressed, winning victory after victory in public accommodations and voting rights, it became increasingly conscious that these victories would not be secure or far-reaching without a radical improvement in the Negro's socioeconomic position. And so the movement reached out of the South into the urban centers of the North and the West. It moved from public accommodations to employment, welfare, housing, education--to find a host of problems the nation had let fester for a generation. But these were not problems that affected the Negro alone or that could be solved easily with the movement's traditional protest tactics. These injustices were imbedded not in ancient and obsolete institutional arrangements but in the priorities of powerful vested interests, in the direction of public policy, in the allocation of our national resources. Sit-ins could integrate a lunch counter, but massive social investments and imaginative public policies were required to eliminate the deeper inequalities.”

RaceRacismEqualityCivil RightsInequalityAfrican AmericansBlacksCivil Rights Movement
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“So much about being a woman who's had the good fortune to be offered some choices, and yet not good enough fortune to live in a world with gender equality, is about giving up some of what we want and making peace with not "having it all". Many women give up dreams and ideals as they patch together careers, marriage, children. My career-centrered path should not be read as a rejection of the domestic and care aspects of life.”

Inequality
Author:Teo You Yenn
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“To understand why kids from low-income households do poorly in school, we would do well to understand what their lives at home are like. But we must also step back and situate their lives within the broader social context. This includes trying to understand whta material conditions are like for parents, what school experiences are like for kids, and finally and least often done, what higher-income families are doing for their kids. It is when we do all this that we can have a more complete and accurate understanding of how kids from low-income families, within this system, are compelled to play a game they cannot win because someone else is setting the rules.”

Inequality
Author:Teo You Yenn
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“In state discourse about poverty, notions about 'charity', and about those with more 'helping' those with less, have become increasingly salient. In tandem with this, a slew of new specialized agencies, programs and schemes, and personnel have been constructed to deal with'the needy'. This way of framing the problem of poverty isolates it - detaches the issues and challenges faced by a small minority of the population from those faced by everyone else. It dislodges the issue of poverty from the broader political economy in which it is produced. Importantly, it frames public intervention as 'charity', as 'help' - in other words, beyond public responsibility - and recipients as 'recipients' rather than as members of society with rights to certain basic levels of well-being and security.”

Inequality
Author:Teo You Yenn
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“They worry that I am assigning too much blame to the system and not granting "agency" to the low-income. They want me to say more about this group and they want me to suggest the right "nudges" that would push people to behave in certain ways. They want to know: what can we do to help "empower" the low-income so that they can help themselves? The problem with this mindset - not of those who are powerless but those who are relatively powerful - is that power is not a frame of mind but a material condition. People sitting in positions of authority are powerful not because they feel empowered bu because they have power. Their feelings of empowerment are an outcome of their actual ownership of power, not the cause. One can think - and indeed many of the low-income people I speak with do this - "I can do this. I must try". But if one is in fact lacking in power - lacking in control over time; lacking in leverage in the labour market; lacking in bargaining power with managers, teachers, social workers, landlords, creditors - no amount of merely changing how they think about themselves will change these realities.”

Inequality
Author:Teo You Yenn
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“Un ami à qui je racontais ma mésaventure m’a dit en riant : « Ça t’apprendra à admirer des fascistes. » C’était expéditif et, je crois, juste. Herzog, capable d’une vibrante compassion pour un aborigène sourd-muet ou un vagabond schizophrène, considérait un jeune cinéphile à lunettes comme une punaise méritant d’être moralement écrabouillée, et j’étais quant à moi le client idéal pour me faire traiter de la sorte. Il me semble qu’on touche là quelque chose qui est le nerf du fascisme. Si on le dénude, ce nerf, que trouve-t-on ? En étant radical, une vision du monde évidemment scandaleuse : übermenschen et untermenschen, Aryens et Juifs, d’accord, mais ce n’est pas de cela que je veux parler. Je ne veux parler ni de néonazis, ni d’extermination des présumés inférieurs, ni même de mépris affiché avec la robuste franchise de Werner Herzog, mais de la façon dont chacun de nous s’accommode du fait évident que la vie est injuste et les hommes inégaux : plus ou moins beaux, plus ou moins doués, plus ou moins armés pour la lutte. Nietzsche, Limonov et cette instance en nous que j’appelle le fasciste disent d’une même voix : « C’est la réalité, c’est le monde tel qu’il est. » Que dire d’autre ? Ce serait quoi, le contre-pied de cette évidence ? « On sait très bien ce que c’est, répond le fasciste. Ça s’appelle le pieux mensonge, l’angélisme de gauche, le politiquement correct, et c’est plus répandu que la lucidité. » Moi, je dirais : le christianisme. L’idée que, dans le Royaume, qui n’est certainement pas l’au-delà mais la réalité de la réalité, le plus petit est le plus grand. Ou bien l’idée, formulée dans un sutra bouddhiste que m’a fait connaître mon ami Hervé Clerc, selon laquelle « l’homme qui se juge supérieur, inférieur ou même égal à un autre homme ne comprend pas la réalité »”

ChristianityInequalityFascism
Book:Limonov
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