From the New York Times:
Black America and the Class Divide
The economic gap within the African-American community is one of the most important factors in the rise of Black Lives Matter, led by a new generation of college graduates and students.
By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr. FEB. 1, 2016
… The class divide is, in my opinion, one of the most important and overlooked factors in the rise of Black Lives Matter, led by a new generation of college graduates and students. I hear about it from my students at Harvard, about the pressure they feel to rise, yes, but also the necessity to then look back to lift others.
I asked Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence, a senior, what was behind the racial unrest on campus. Ms. Matsuda-Lawrence is co-founder of “I, Too, Am Harvard,” a multiplatform campaign that gives voice to students who often go unheard and that brought the concept of micro-aggressions into the light. …
Here’s an NYT video of Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence complaining about a child who touched her hair. Judging by the voluble video, Professor Gates’ assumption that Ms. Matsuda-Lawrence “gives voice to students who often go unheard” seems more gentlemanly than realistic. The two non-Asian black coeds sitting with her can’t seem to get a word in edgewise.
(By the way, back in 2004, Gates and Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier pointed out that most of Harvard’s affirmative action slots for black students seem to go to exotics, either foreign or immigrant elites or individuals with a non-black parent, rather than to normal American blacks. Gates and Guinier seemed to give up this observation with the subsequent rise of the ultra-exotic Harvard Law grad Barack Obama. But I wonder if Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence’s bid to become the loudest black activist on the Harvard campus triggered any troubling memories in Gates?)
Will the fight against police brutality, symbols of the Confederacy and society’s plethora of micro-aggressions become the basis of a broader movement for the improvement of underfunded public school education, for the right to a job with decent wages, and for the end of residential segregation that relegates the poor to neighborhoods with murder rates as alarming as those on the South Side of Chicago?
What is certain is that the outrage that led to Black Lives Matter and its spinoffs will be with us for years to come unless these legacies of slavery and Jim Crow become remnants of a racist past.
COMMENTS:
* Has anyone established the base unit for microaggressions? How bad is a single “aggression”. I propose that the unit be all of WWII. World War II was a single “aggression”. Thus, asking to touch someone’s hair is one millionth as bad as that particular global conflict. As another example, the holocaust was roughly a deciaggression. Etc.
* Imagine that, a black woman who’s vain about her “weave” and is ready to pummel anyone who touches it. You never see that.
* Kimiko’s blonde hair dye is an aggression against reality, but I’m not sure of its exact magnitude.
* Micro-aggression would be a good name for a bug eyed neurotic Chihuahua. That, or Diesel.
* If she asked for a light for her cigarette, spliff, or crack pipe and the flame set off her hairdo, would said flames constitute a “microconflagression”?
Just askin’. That do and weave and chemical slick on that woman’s head reeks of Michael Jackson, circa 1985 Pepsi video.
