How capitalism and racism are connected? And what reform needs to look like.
The racism in this country was palpable even 9 years ago. Within the first three months of immigrating to the USA, I could feel the racism viscerally. At that time our society was commenting on Obama’s fist bumps or how our first lady looked.
I noticed it in the lack of healthcare insurance for the marginalized, many of whom were disproportionately black. I noticed it in the very divided education system, where your zip code determined how good an education you got.
It sickened me. What was surprising was that it wasn’t low level, people to people, implicit, but rather systemic, structured and explicit.
When you have a country where your two most important public goods (health and education) are used to oppress the most marginalized rather than lift them up, you get the unravelling of society.
Over the next week, try to tune into it. You’ll see it everywhere. Not just in the police injustice or the criminal system. But in every single aspect of society.
There is historical context to the injustice here. But when I try to understand how it has been enabled to continue? I believe it’s the very thing that makes America great. The capitalist system we have encourages competition. The government does the least amount of work so that it can ‘get out of the way’ of entrepreneurs and industry so that they can ‘fight to flourish’. Government benefits and handouts are not encouraged. In USA, people’s will power is what is worshiped the most. We as people are required to rise and fulfill the American dream. It works for some. America has one of the fastest recovering economies of the post-Covid world, partly because of its concentration of technology companies that were able to withstand the crisis better. These very founders and companies benefited from America’s capitalism and were able to rapidly deploy innovative scalable technologies, precisely because the government got out of the way. However, America has one of the lowest social mobility of any OECD country. Which means, if you are born in a lower rung of the ladder, the chances of you moving up a rung is much harder to do in the USA, than most other developed economies.
This system works when everyone has the chance to reap their seeds on the same soil. What happens when someone’s soil is rich in nutrients and the other’s is arid, simply due to where they were born? Naturally, for those that the soil is arid, the government should step in and provide nitrogen fixation technology and nutrients. But our lack of attention to public goods, and the large scale privatization of healthcare and education, makes equity of opportunity difficult to achieve.
As a physician, I wasn’t surprised at all that COVID-19 hit our black communities disproportionately more. It’s just science. They are the most vulnerable. What’s disturbing is that this insight from understanding science has been available to our policy and law makers for decades, yet so little has been done to fix it.
We need reform. We need it now. And yes, we should do more to help those that need it the most. This is not a sign of our weakness, this is a sign of our society’s strength.
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I’m a Product Manager at Google. I am also a Physician and have been a two time tech founder and a non-profit anti-poverty founder. Because I’ve switched fields so often, I’ve learnt to learn much faster and more in depth than most people. I wholly believe if you improve yourself by 1% every day, you get to be 37x better by the end of the year. And if you do that repeatedly for a few years, you get to be in your own league.
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