Give Me Your Soda, Your iPhone, Your Sick Yearning for Healthcare
The public is stunningly misinformed about issues and concepts that are essential to understand if a democracy is going to thrive.
The Trump candidacy and presidency have exposed a powerful example of that problem since many who support Trump believe that the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare are different programs.
This important policy confusion is grounded, I believe, in larger concepts about which most in the U.S. are just as misinformed: race and social class.
Even among my college students who are well educated, few are aware that race has no basis in biology, but is a social construction. And people in the U.S. routinely over self-identify as middle-class, while also associating ethical and moral qualities to the classes (the poor as deserving their poverty due to character flaws; the wealthy as earning their wealth due to superior work ethics).
Further complicating the national beliefs about race and class is how the two overlap, specifically how lingering racism lurks beneath negative stereotypes about the poor.
Political leadership in the U.S., then, includes two powerful facts: most of Give Me Your Soda, Your iPhone, Your Sick Yearning for Healthcare | radical eyes for equity: