Today I picked up the newspaper (yes I still read a physically tangible paper) and read not one but two articles back to back that in my mind were slightly bullshit. The first was talking about the 1% (because of all this 99% business) and how those people are deserving of the money because they are all well educated as opposed to the lower end of the scale who aren’t. Well no shit, except it fails to mention that higher education COSTS MONEY!
Article number two is about a hockey player and his girlfriend dressing up as Jay Z and Beyonce. Not too terrible until you find out they colored their skin a la blackface! There was no malicious intent, it was more ignorance than anything. Lots of people are defending what they did which is, whatever. I take issue because the excuse for why they didn’t know any better was because they are Canadian and being a hockey player is a very insular environment. They rationalize that Canadians were never taught about Al Jolson and blackface. I remember learning about this in grade 4! We don’t have the same issues that America has but we still have things like black history month to at least inform us about basic racial issues.
1- education and the 1%: I’d point out that a lot of people in the 99% have degrees. Even phDs.
2- Ignorance/blackface: Well there are some people who don’t know about the Holocaust. And that other Ford brother didn’t know who Margaret Atwood was. Though to me, you can’t know everything and that is ok.
I think there’s an odd view among a lot of people today that as it’s the 21st century all of the social issues of ‘modernized’ societies (countries that have already industrialized and can no longer be classified as developing or third world) have been sorted out, and anyone who continues to talk about social inequality is just making a mountain out of a molehill. Of course that’s not the case–it’s just that social inequality isn’t as obvious as it used to be. I thank you for pointing out those two examples and writing about them, because not a lot of people do.
As for the articles, my view is that people who come from a privileged background often don’t realize that just because their life is peachy doesn’t mean there aren’t any serious problems for anyone else–so we get people left and right dismissing the concerns and opinions of the not-as-privileged. Hence, the bullshit article that says higher educated people deserve more money without mentioning the cost of said education, and the ignorant people who still think black face and cultural appropriation is okay because they haven’t bothered to think about it too hard.