Monday, October 31, 2022

Get out the paint chips

 I packed 16 things last night and did a practice session. I am slowly improving, even if I'm only doing an hour or so an evening. 

The latest thing they're talking about on the radio is "affirmative action" which in the US is race-based because this country is obsessed with race. Get a job, enroll in college, buy car insurance, rent a place, anything, everything, they want to know your race. I've had census workers insist I'm Hispanic because I lived in a heavily Hispanic area and I even got papers I *had* to fill out come in the mail later, to clarify on this. You can't ignore any of these race papers, either. It's join in the obsession with race or no apartment, no car insurance, no college, etc. 

So of course affirmative action, a program intended to right past wrongs, is race-based. In a "laboratory" environment, say, a US Southern state where there are two classes: white and colored, it might work. A while back I saw a thing on TV about people recovering from a series of severe tornadoes in one of these Southern states. I noticed everyone was white or black. There were no in-betweens. The people were all really white, or really black. They were working together as friends and neighbors which was great to see, but in a place like that, you could assume that anyone white had things fairly well, and anyone black almost certainly came from a slavery background and was still far behind. 

But the US isn't like that everywhere and even isn't like that any more except in a few small areas. Instead you've got a real mix of races and classes. And this is the real issue. If they did affirmative action based on the student's ability to overcome things like poverty and bad education, they'd automatically help out more people of color, but they'd not be screwing over working-class white kids. 

But doing that is hard, whereas, they can just take one of those strips of paint color samples and compare skin color and call it good. Plus, since the US uses the "one drop rule" which means if you are say, 1/16th black, grew up upper-middle-class and have just a slight swarthiness and a little curl to your hair, you're considered  black and get tons of help even though you're upper middle class already. 

This is not how the French would do it. Firstly, France has national school standards and excellent schooling is available to rich and poor. College debt is not crippling there and if you're smart enough to go to college, you go to college. And colleges are just that - colleges. Not sports teams with a college attached. 

In the US if you're working-class and classified as white, college is only possible if you're good at a sport. You can be really dumb and it won't matter because it will be arranged for some smart kid to take your tests for you. The way these things work in the US goes back many, many decades. A favorite example of mine are Hewlett and Packard, who went to Stanford. Hewlett's father was a wealthy doctor who gave/bribed a lot of money to Stanford and their kid was going to go there whether he was a dunderhead or not. Packard was not wealthy but was big and good at football. Needless to say he got a full scholarship and could have been an idiot and it would not have changed a thing. 

Most working-class kids who are classified as white aren't good at a sport because it takes things like good, plentiful food and free time to practice, that working-class kids don't get. They're half-starved growing up and busy hustling somehow to help feed their family by the time their age has -teen appended to it. 

The best hope is to join the military and stay in the full 20 years, or get good at some hustle that *is* achievable, like becoming a barber or an HVAC technician or learning how to buy and sell stuff, or being a 'fence' or running a pawn shop. 

I took off for downtown with the bike loaded up with the 16 packages, and dropped them off at the post office. Actually 15 went there and the last one went to the FedEx just down the street  from Pizza My Heart, where I had a slice.  Then I went down to Walmart and got some things, and came back really loaded up. 

It was an interesting evening as there were trick-or-treaters all over the place, but also the usual smattering of actual zombies, resulting in some confrontations and yelling and so on, as the zombies had to be reminded they are not welcome among the living. 

I stopped at Nijiya and it was a huge mob scene, with the street closed off and tons and tons of parents and kids and I guess a lot of the stores handing out candy. I got in, got my snacks, and got out of there, though, because it was basically a superspreader event. As a country, we've decided that while 1000 deaths a day from covid are an outrage, 300 a day, our present rate, are perfectly fine. Not fine with me, though, byeee... 

 


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