{"id":58784,"date":"2016-05-18T11:30:08","date_gmt":"2016-05-18T16:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=58784"},"modified":"2020-12-30T08:15:07","modified_gmt":"2020-12-30T14:15:07","slug":"philosophical-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=58784","title":{"rendered":"Philosophical Question"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, I wrote about Minneapolis City Councilor Alondra Cano and Minneapolis NAACP president Nekima Levy-Pounds complaining about being &#8220;victims of racism&#8221; &#8211; Cano for having been criticized by her fellow councilpeople, Levy-Pounds for being scolded for <del>barging in and interrupting<\/del> giving public input at a Park Board meeting where public input was not on the agenda.<\/p>\n<p>So I have to ask &#8211; is it even possible for&#8230;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Cano, a senior member of a one-party political system that controls Minneapolis no les scompletely than the\u00a0<em>Stasi\u00a0<\/em>controlled East Germany, a woman who has the sort of power that mere citizens can&#8217;t possible imagine, a woman who is guaranteed a much-better-than-living-wage for the rest of her life, between the political system and the rent-seeking non-profit sector, even\u00a0<em>if\u00a0<\/em>she doesn&#8217;t run for mayor or the Legislature (as, rumor has it, she will), and accede to even\u00a0<em>more\u00a0<\/em>power and long-term wealth, and&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Levy-Pounds, a professor with tenure &#8211; she can never be fired from her job (unless Saint Thomas law school closes) who earns an upper-middle-class income and has the sort of social and political access that\u00a0<em>nobody\u00a0<\/em>in this audience does, a woman who can get Betsy Hodges and Chris Coleman to say &#8220;how high, ma&#8217;am?&#8221; when she says &#8220;Jump&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8230;to feel &#8220;racism&#8221;\u00a0<em>in any way that matters<\/em> given their status as &#8220;One Percenters&#8221; in the social and political class diagram?<\/p>\n<p>I say &#8220;<em>that matters<\/em>&#8221; because after a certain point, as the great African-American and arch-liberal columnist William Raspberry once said, at a certain point you have to realize racism is just ignorance, and beneath you. \u00a0 Given the power and status that the likes of Cano and Levy-Pounds have accreted, isn&#8217;t &#8220;racism&#8221; to them sort of like Erik Pusey criticizing my writing &#8211; it is irrelevant, and has no\u00a0<em>real, tangible\u00a0<\/em>impact on my interaction with the real world?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, I wrote about Minneapolis City Councilor Alondra Cano and Minneapolis NAACP president Nekima Levy-Pounds complaining about being &#8220;victims of racism&#8221; &#8211; Cano for having been criticized by her fellow councilpeople, Levy-Pounds for being scolded for barging in and interrupting giving public input at a Park Board meeting where public input was not on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[355],"class_list":["post-58784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alondra-cano"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58784"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58785,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58784\/revisions\/58785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}