That Ball Has No Sides
“You know that ball has no sides” (lyric from song, “Interstate 8”, by Modest Mouse)
A good friend of mine who heads a regional green-building non-profit recently told me that their organization hosted a racial equity training for its staff – standard-issue for non-profits these days.
I asked if it had been a paid training for the staff, to which my friend answered yes.
I asked if he was willing to hear me say something controversial, to which he also answered yes.
As an electrical contractor, it’s hard not to notice that the great majority of workers building locally are Hispanic. And although I am by no means certain, my guess is that the majority of these Hispanic workers are illegal immigrants, by which I mean they have no economic or political power.
I noted how ironic it was that staff working for a regional building non-profit are getting paid to sit indoors in a conditioned space to benefit from a racial equity training, while the people actually working on buildings in the region are not.
I also noted how ironic it was that the great majority of those actually working on our buildings today are of one race who mostly have no economic or political power.
But then I wondered, would it have been any less ironic if Hispanic illegal immigrant workers actually were paid to attend a training, so they could be educated about racial equity?
At some point, we need to drain the tub of rising irony before it spills over and destroys our house.
To be clear, I have no problem with illegal immigrants as individuals. Do I think our country is better for having them here? Of course. Every one I’ve met is a good person who’s willing and able to work.
Do I think our country is better for them being here illegally? Of course not.
When the majority of our country’s physical workers have no economic or political power for decades, then this is partly why we devolved from a country where one blue-collar worker could support a family 40 years ago, into a country where two blue-collar workers struggle to support a family today.
This is partly why for generations, parents have either consciously or unconsciously discouraged their children from learning physical work. Most folks do not want their children to grow up without economic or political power.
This is also partly why, over this same span of years, we’ve become a country where those with the most economic and political power know the least about how things actually physically work. How food is grown. How buildings are built. How things are manufactured. How utilities are provided.
This is, of course, a recipe for civilizational collapse. As if we needed any assistance on that score.
I’m struggling to distill a question in regards to all of this overflowing irony. Bare with me, for the distillation needs a little more time in the column.
I’ve been sitting with the fact that for myself and most of my readers, we live in comfortable homes with conditioned air. We have refrigerators and freezers in our kitchens. We have running water in our kitchens and baths. We even have hot running water on demand. We are able to eat out-of-season foods from all around the world. We enjoy an increasing stream of manufactured goods.
In other words, we daily experience luxurious privileges to which Kings & Queens couldn’t wrap their heads around just a few centuries ago.
And every single one of these luxuries is created by the intersection of two inputs: human physical work and energy-consuming technologies. Yet we’ve been bred to be increasingly blind to the human physical work and the energy-consuming technologies required to create our luxuries.
The more privileged we are, the more blind we tend to be to the underbellies of our luxurious privileges. (That may not be true for everyone, but it is definitely true overall.)
I can speak from experience. I was spoiled as a child. And I left home as blind as could be. I left home not having eaten one thing that I knew where it came from. I left home not knowing how to change a light bulb, change a car’s oil, or hammer a nail. I was raised to pay others to deal with physical reality for me.
Fortunately, most people didn’t have it as bad as I did. But it seems that each generation is becoming more and more blind to the underbellies of our privileges.
So my question is now distilled:
If racial equity training isn’t for illuminating the underbelly of our luxurious privileges, so that we can more clearly see the intersection of human physical work and energy-consuming technologies that create them, so that we can then identify and transform the unjust and unsustainable elements in them, so that we can then move more coherently into a future that has a chance of lasting, then what is it for?
Some, of course, will answer, “well, that is exactly what it is for, and that is what it is doing.”
I’m letting it be known: I am not convinced.
To help illuminate some of our way through this tricky question, I went ahead and transcribed the first two episodes of the 4th Series of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions Podcast, his series on the Haitian Revolution.
I discovered Mike Duncan earlier on when he was doing the History Of Rome podcast, and fell in love with his clear and succinct overviews of history.
He since has performed a huge service to us all by walking through the complexities of many historical Revolutions one ~30-minute podcast episode at a time. But to me, the Haitian Revolution really stands out as the most revealing. Which is perhaps why it’s the revolution we know the least about.
I highly recommend reading or listening to those first two episodes for yourself when you get the chance. But I’ll go ahead and provide a quick overview of them here:
Beginning in 1791, the French Colony of San Domingue had a revolution and became the country we now call Haiti.
Before the revolution, San Domingue was the wealthiest colony in the New World, producing more wealth for France than the Central and South American gold and silver mines were producing for Spain. This wealth primarily came from producing sugar and coffee from the combination of brutal slave labor and capital-intensive sugar mills.
It turns out that addictions can be immensely profitable. Who knew?
In San Domingue, there were as many slave-owners that were of African or mixed-African descent as there were slave-owners that were of French-only descent. Historians often use the linguistic handle of Coloreds for the former and Whites for the later, whereas Blacks refers to the slaves, which were all African. (White indentured servants were also tried for plantation labor, but didn’t work out so well).
A couple of generations before the French Revolution started, with the Haitian Revolution quickly following on its heels, a Frenchman, Emilien Petit, began to realize the dangers of the colony breaking away from France, and of France losing its cash cow. (This was a generation before the American Revolution, so Petit was rather far-sighted here).
We should note that what began the French Revolution was King Louis XVI calling the Estates General in 1789 to inform the realm that France was broke and could not pay its debts. In other words, the last thing France could afford was to lose its cash cow – the colony of San Domingue.
I’ll let Mike Duncan fill in the details on how France tried to hold onto its cash cow:
“But the other key part of Petit’s reforms was to introduce a system of proto-apartheid that divided the whites from the coloreds. Petit believed that if those two groups joined forces, that it would be a matter of when, not if, the colony broke away from France. So, one side of the coin was building up the self-esteem of the white colonists by treating them better. The other was abusing and denigrating the free coloreds so that the two groups would never recognize how much their interest actually intersected.
So around about 1763, an officially racist regime started being implemented in Saint Domingue. In 1764, coloreds were forbidden from certain prominent professions, medicine, law, government jobs. In 1773, a freed slave and his or her family were forbidden to take the name of their white patriarch. This was to break the lines of inheritance and any family connections that might bind together prominent whites from their colored relatives. In 1777, blacks were barred from the France completely, and free coloreds were forced to register upon arrival. In 1779, the coloreds were hit with a Sumptuary Law forbidding them from wearing swords in public or dressing in European style, which meant wearing the good silks. They were also forbidden from being addressed using formal titles like Madame and Monsieur. Manumission Papers proving freedom were required for wills and marriage licenses, and oh, by the way, there's now a huge tax on manumission (freeing a slave) to prevent the free colored population from growing too quickly.
Local notaries were ordered to keep track of racial identifiers on legal paperwork so the colonial government could start keeping a record of who was white and who was colored. After all, sometimes a colored was whiter than a white. But you never could be sure who was inferior to whom.”
A generation of young Colored students from San Domingue, freshly graduated from University in Paris, were shocked when they returned to a dramatically changed, institutionally racist home.
One of the big lessons from the Haitian Revolution is how horribly brutal, inhumane and racist we humans can be to one another.
However, one of the even bigger lessons from the Haitian Revolution is how racism itself can be instituted as a “divide and conquer” strategy in order for those in power to hang on to their power when it's clear it would otherwise be lost.
I still haven’t given my own direct answer to my earlier question – what is racial equity training for?
We’re getting closer. But there’s more unpacking to do. And that will have to wait until future posts.
In the meantime, know that I’m consciously wading into a subject here that digs deep into our current cultural divide. My intent is to not pull any punches, to honestly call it how I see it, but ultimately, to get to a place where where we can all see – that ball has no sides.
“You know that ball has no sides.”
Thanks for your Time & Attention.
Take care,
P.S. Please do check out Mike Duncan’s first two podcast episodes on the Haitian Revolution when you can.
For those who prefer to read Mike Duncan’s first two episodes on the Haitian Revolution, here are the links to the transcriptions:
Revolutions Podcast 4.1: San Domingue - Transcription
Revolutions Podcast 4.2: Web of Tension - Transcription
For those who prefer to listen to Mike, here are the links to the original audio podcasts:
I don't live in America but the shenanigans get tried everywhere. Nice read.
Oxy
This is a very interesting discourse on the intersection of luxury, equity, and immigration.