Thankful?

                                                                     

By Ricahrd Trotsky

While normally what I write focuses on issues of a national scale, my post today will be of a more personal nature. However it will in fact deal with a subject that is unfolding around us more and more with each passing day. That subject is racism, it’s gaining much needed national attention as it still is a serious social plague on our society.

Today is Thanksgiving Day, typically a day when many of us gather together with family for the traditional turkey dinner and reflect on what in life we are thankful for. For me, the main thing I have to be thankful for is my daughters. My beautiful, thoughtful, intelligent, articulate and compassionate 3 and 5 year olds.

It just so happens that my daughters are bi-racial. I don’t determine what kind of person someone is solely based on their race or ethnicity, but who their character declares that they are. To me race is not an important factor in determining who I choose to have relationships with, what’s far more important is who you are. This perspective has gifted me with 2 amazing little girls, whom I love dearly.

With that in mind, I’m concerned with the future my children will have. You see, my daughters have two significant obstacles that they face according to how our society sees people, one is that they are female, and the other is that they are half black. To me, this is an absolutely beautiful thing, knowing that two people can see past society’s essential grooming of our population to be divided along racial lines. However, sadly, there is still a divide.

In the employment world, statistically it’s proven that there are in fact less opportunities for anyone who happens to be a person of color. I recall one article I read in people where a man named Jose was sending out an estimated 50 resumes a day with virtually no responses. He then decided to drop the s from his first name on his resume to simply make it Joe and his resume started getting responses almost immediately. There was a study conducted (it’s a bit dated, but still relevant, as I don’t think much has changed since then) from 2000 – 2002 that proves the disparity statistically (http://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/discrimination-job-market-united-states).

So what then, am I supposed to do? Should I completely ignore the fact that my daughters have a very vibrant black culture and solely focus on the white aspect of it (which by the way can’t be considered Anglo as my family history traces back to Russia and other areas in Eastern Europe)? No, I won’t. I refuse to disavow that part of their heritage. I will not, under any circumstances, take that away from them. I have an obligation to them to stay steadfast in my struggles, our struggles, to ensure that people of all races have equal amounts of opportunity presented to them.

This brings me to gender equality in the workplace. Although there have been significant improvements in this area, more needs to be done. Statistically women only earn 77 cents to every dollar a man makes, why? Are men intrinsically more valuable than women? How is it that a man and woman can have the exact same qualifications and the man makes 23% more? I strive to instill in my daughters the importance of education, but this leads me to believe that even with an impressive degree my daughters will still be viewed as less in the eyes of corporate America.

What can I do to ensure that my beautiful daughters will have the successful life I desire for them, when the current economic system has done nothing but continually exploit workers for generations? The current economic system has severely increased the wage gap between executives and average workers. In 2014 the average gap was reported as 204 to 1, therefore if the average worker made let’s say, for example, $26,000/yr that would equate to the CEO making $5,304,000. I find this completely appalling and revolting.

At a time when average workers salaries are so low that many must apply for public assistance to be able to feed their families, I’m disgusted to know there are executives of these companies who have such stockpiles of money they couldn’t even spend it all in a lifetime. We are the lifeblood of these companies! Without us these companies would simply shrivel and die. I’d like to see an executive take to the floor of a company and run the equipment, file the documents, make the necessary appointments, manage the shipping timetables, tend to the customers, teach the students. They can’t and they won’t. They can’t because they don’t have the knowledge and understanding to do so, and they won’t because it’s seen as beneath them.

Under our current economic system we have seen repression at many different levels, with the average worker suffering an increasing toll on our livelihood. More so anyone who happens to a person of color, who have seen this repression and continued oppression for the last two centuries. I worry for the future of my children under this system, as it is obvious it no longer has any benefits for us as a whole. We are in need of change, we need a system that values the needs of the average person. We are in need of a system that places value on all peoples equally, regardless of race. We are in need of a system that is democratically maintained by the will of the people. What we need we in no way have now.