After the plan was in place, there were administrators and the legislators who had fought against doing anything and who all of a sudden realized that they could "embrace" the plan in order to never having to do anything else. And I find these latter-day proponents guilty of everything you accuse them of.
That's exactly it: I bristle against the idea of holding up the Texas plan as a model - as if class-based alternatives offer a fair compromise because they're "colorblind," or that they accomplish basically the same thing, as conservatives would have us believe.
If you rephrase this as "institutional change usually protects and extends the hegemony", Rex will want a high five.
And if you rephrase "Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time" to "Pete Maravich is the greatest basketball player of all time", Ben Shapiro would drag out his footstool and shake your hand.
My point was less about the obdurate nature of institutions/hierarchies than the intersectional nature of inequality. Money isn't the only issue and, even then, the family who has the luxury of investing their stimulus check stands to earn a greater financial return than the family forced to spend theirs on food or rent. It's about pushing back on the idea that fairness only means "treating everyone the same" even though our needs and challenges are not interchangeable.
I mean, if you mean that wealth effects are not directly income effects, then sure., I guess. But if you're willing to take second and third order consequences into account, I think that the debt relief will absolutely reduce income inequality.
The clear caveat is that if Person A has $1 and Person B has $2, giving them each one dollar hasn't changed the absolute difference between the two - but it would change the
relative difference.
Unfortunately, we're only dealing with a $1 gap in the sense that,
for every cent of wealth held by families with Black children, White families hold $1. At a certain point, and we saw this argued convincingly by Pikkety with regards to income inequality,
some form of redistribution becomes unavoidable if we want to actually address the problem.
Even then, and I think this is especially crucial, we should completely reject the notion that, as Richard Delgado put it in his essay about false empathy, "blacks are just whites who happen not to have any money right now."
How many people seriously believe that we can use "class based solutions" to end sexism? To your point, we can't properly treat these inequities without first reforming the judiciary.
Plans like Cory Booker's proposed baby bonds would empower a lot of people, and they're absolutely worth doing, but they can only go so far. In this case, we're not even talking about something that would apply to everyone, or even to everyone carrying debt - only to student loan debt.
I don't think it's unfair to suggest that the people threatening to take the ball and go home over it have a very odd conception of "not me, us." It was never supposed to be the be all, end all to begin with.
But then, I'm still confused as to how
student loan debt relief became "socialism" in the first place.
From each, according to their ability, to each, according to their line of credit?
