Thread by @rgunns

i know that this article came out last week, but i wanted to spend the weekend thinking about black people – not racism – so i kept my thoughts to myself. but believe me, I HAVE THOUGHTS. and most of my thoughts are about how mad this makes me 1/
nytimes.com/2020/06/18/cli…

of course, i'm mad because black mothers, families, and children are suffering and, in some cases, dying because of systemic racism. but i'm also mad because, once again, racial capitalism has led us to build *stupid* systems that will inevitably collapse in on themselves. 2/

the U.S. has a long history of using black people to backstop economic systems and, in doing so, to prop up economic relationships that inevitably have to end. we did it with slavery. we did it with the new deal. and we're currently doing it with the fossil fuel industry. 3/

this is not news. many people have written about this. but what seems to be news to many people – including many people who help design policy – is that shunting the worst parts of these relationships off to black folks almost certainly ensures system collapse. 4/

systemic racism in policy may allow us to "isolate" an issue to poor black and brown communities for a time. but it also acts as a prism; it takes an initial problem and refracts it, scattering pain everywhere and multiplying the problems 1000x. 5/

THEN we expect systems that are racist and thus inherently inefficient to address these new problems. and when you combine all that with the fact that the poor black and brown folks are treated as unreliable narrators – even by policymakers – and WHEW GIRL it's a mess 6/

you end up with a system that not only destroys people but breeds problems like gremlins until it implodes in on itself. and the worst part is? most folks who design policy are not trained to think about any of this. 7/

we are trained to value efficiency – especially as problems become more pressing and severe. but efficiency often means nothing more than "how well does what you propose fit into what already exists," which encourages folks not to question the current system. 8/

when you combine this with the fact that the pace of policymaking is fast and few people actually know the racial history of the systems that they are trying to design policy for? you get structural racism being treated – implicitly or explicitly – as a viable design choice. 9/

this is bigger than individual volition. to me, this is a matter of how policy is structured as an industry, what's valued in "policy" spaces, and our metrics for "good" policy.

what would be possible if we designed policy to share and bear, rather than, displace pain? 10/

what kind of systems would we build?

i don't know, but honestly y'all, anything would be better than this. it's either white supremacy or a functional economy + society – there are no other choices.