What the Known Demands

Lawrence Mead, a professor of politics at New York University, just dropped this piece: http://www.terpconnect.umd.edu/~pnc/temp/Mead2020_Article_PovertyAndCulture.pdf. Professor Mead employs pure speculation to conclude that BIPOC communities are poor because they are culturally unable to adapt to the individualistic culture of the United States. Put simply, they could be less poor if they tried harder to advance themselves as individuals.

His conclusion begs question after question. One question is the determinative power of culture, not as something I inhabit in interaction with others regularly but as something I inherited by birth. Another is the empirical — and accessible — research of the past decade (I am thinking Thomas Piety’s Capital, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make them Pay, and Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy) that demonstrates that poverty is a function of policy that privileges wealth hoarding over fair distribution of capital.

It demands to be read, I think, not because it speaks truth, but because it’s a perfect example of what William James calls “a certain blindness in human beings” and evidence that that kind of blindness hits all of us, even those who imagine they are skilled at analysis and truth-seeking. It is also an important reminder to those who would seek to address and redress inequities of wealth and race of the kind of thinking that motivates those who resist that redress. This is not an argument about the working of markets; it is a dispute about whether those who have not already acquired capital (both social and economic) deserve a chance to get their hands on some. Professor Mead basically argues no. There is, in BIPoC, a personal (rooted in cultural) failing that prevents them from deserving to be better off.

This pseudo-argument (pseudo because it lacks defensible conceptual logic or empirical evidence) appears at the same time that news articles are documenting the wild run on real estate and home purchasing field by long term mortgage rates below 3% at the same time that pandemic eviction protections have expired for renters. (See, for example, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/27/housing-inequality-coronavirus/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_mo st. The low mortgage rates are a direct result of Federal Reserve policy in response to the economic downturn associate with the pandemic and are allowing some to accumulate wealth (in the form of real property) even as others without resources to jump into the real estate market are experiencing the lost of a roof over their heads (as a result of a different policy). This is further evidence that poverty is not a function of some mythical phenomenon of culture marking bodies prior to social interaction but a material result of policies that require poverty as a feature of the social system.

There is a petition protesting the publication of this piece with more than 600 signatures at present https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfG1PPI4zzuKAU90Te7vpeZAtDMKEea1Isic2fGurjJRh6B4A/viewform. Go there if you are so inclined. As the petition organizers note, it will not alter the publication of Professor Mead’s piece (nor should it) or change his mind, but a significant list of signatories can subtly shift the context within which the piece is read.

I have often said that once I retired from paid labor, I would work on a blog to be entitled “How dumb are we?” I joked that I would have an infinite array of material — even if I stuck to topics related to education. Well, the events of 2020 (indeed, the past two decades) have certainly proved me correct. Political insanity, a global pandemic, and continuing environmental blindness only confirm my sense that we humans, well, at least we Americans, are intent on our own pain and suffering, if not destruction.

The classical American pragmatists — John Dewey, Jane Addams, William James, Alain Locke, Mary Parker Follett, W.E.B. DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper — understood that this didn’t have to be the case. They knew that we could and sometimes did act intelligently by fully interpreting and responding to “what the known demands” as Dewey put it. Our intelligent action was not guaranteed to be right, but it would, in the long run, be at least better. And pursuing co-ordinated intelligent action, as Follett would have it, was the only path that might enable win-win rather than win-lose outcomes.

I’m not going to ask every day “How dumb are we?” but I’m sure you’ll hear something of that in my tone. Instead, I’m going to think — with you, I hope — about what the known demands in this situation, under these circumstances, give the current context.

Education (including, but not only, schooling) will be my starting point, my point of departure. But as Dewey also observed, “Education is not preparation for life; it is life.” So be prepared to range far afield in order to come to an understanding of what education is and can be in this time and place.