Attention 21st Century: It’s Time to Grow Up
Photos by Life Matters. Originally printed in AphroChic magazine Issue 6, Spring 2021.
Centuries are like decades. The first few years of one are mostly indistinguishable from the last few years of the one before. But eventually, new ideas and directions develop — often by recognizing the limitations of what came before — and slowly, an identity emerges.
We are now firmly into the second decade of the 21st century. Despite several pivotal moments, this century has yet to fully define itself or honestly evaluate the problems that have developed with ideas, systems, and paradigms that have run their course — and we continue to suffer for it. The year 2020 was a masterclass in the shortcomings of our society in many areas that we consider permanent. But they all had beginnings, so they can have ends. Here are a few things we need to admit that we’ve outgrown in the 21st century.
The Profit-First Society
When a nation forms its perspective on the relative value of people-to-profit by enslaving large portions of its population, there’s little question of where its priorities lie. While slavery is long past, it continues to shape our society and our perspective on people as “human resources.” Over the years our comfort with economic winners and losers has become increasingly problematic. But with the advent of the COVID-19 crisis the obvious flaws in this profit-first approach are revealed in all of the ways that it refuses to let us end this pandemic and all that we won’t do for each other while we’re in it.
By this time last year, we had a fairly good idea about how to beat the SARS-CoV- 2 virus. Wearing masks, washing hands, and most of all staying home promised to be the keys to stemming the tide. And to the extent they were implemented, they worked. Yet a year later, rather than seeing the end of the pandemic, we’re recovering from its deadliest period. Undoubtedly one of the major factors in the ongoing back-and-forth of infections and deaths has been our unwillingness to clearly privilege the public health need to stay home over the economic need to open up. Against the dictates of both sense and science, governors and mayors around the country have played a dangerous game with restaurants, bars, and schools. And it’s not difficult to understand the reasons why.
Reports on the impact of the virus routinely mention the economic toll in the same breath and often before the cost in lives. Governmental support for households struggling with lost ability to participate in the economy as workers or consumers is given a bit at a time. Lawmakers visibly struggle to balance a mountainous death toll with the fear of spending too much on helping people to survive. Certainly there are economic realities to be faced, but the clearest is that an economy preserved at the expense of the people whose work and spending support it is unlikely to thrive. But in a profit-first society, calls for suspended rents and mortgages are met with deferrals that promise bulk payments of back rent at their conclusion. Calls for grants to support small businesses are met with loans designed to profit from the debt. And those who can’t work from home are still being left with the choice to go out and risk disease or stay home and risk eviction. But it doesn’t end there.
There are numerous other examples of how a profit-first model is failing us, many of them exacerbated by the pandemic. Possibly the most overlooked is what we’ve learned about the healthcare system, who can access it, and what they can get out of it. As conversations accumulate about the disproportionate impact COVID has had on communities of color, disparities in wealth and access to healthcare are quick to be mentioned. But rarely is it ever questioned why the two should go hand in hand. We have become comfortable with the position that healthcare works on the same basis as every other transactional system in this country — you get what you pay for. Yet underlying this is the quintessential American assumption that life, health, and comfort are the right of every person to pursue, but only belong to those who can afford them. The rest of us can take our chances. But in a moment where the interdependent nature of public health is being made very clear, the rush to reopen schools so parents can return to work seems a bit short-sighted. One infected child will infect others; then teachers and parents; then workplaces, homes, and communities. And we know this, because it’s exactly how we got to where we are now.
Regardless of what Adam Smith may have argued, lust-for-profit has never led anyone to their best selves. But when a virus is devouring the world and we won’t do what’s needed to keep people from it, or when killer storms knock out power to entire states and collapsed power companies seize the opportunity to price gouge cold and hungry people, the failings of a profit-driven society are clear. It’s an old idea. It’s not working anymore. We’ve outgrown it.
White Supremacy
When Malcolm X called the Kennedy assassination a case of “America’s chickens coming home to roost” it was one of the most controversial moments of his career. The statement horrified many in Black and white communities alike. Still, there’s a logic to it that echoes today.
America was sowing violence both internationally with the Vietnam War and domestically with its war against Black people, making it difficult, from Malcolm’s perspective, for the nation to feign shock when that violence returned to claim one of their own. Only two short months into 2021, the circumstances have been strikingly similar.
As people of color living out the dark legacy of this country’s foundational trauma, we’ve been over this one for a while. Still, it has been interesting to watch the events of this year, beginning with the January 6 insurrection at the capitol and culminating in the second acquittal of Donald Trump. For many of us, the interest was not in the events themselves but in watching the nation feign shock as it comes to grips with the reality that America has spent 245 years building a society where it is extremely difficult to hold a white person accountable for their crimes.
As the only president in U.S. history to have been impeached twice, Donald Trump might be America’s biggest chicken ever — but he didn’t make white people angry. He harnessed that anger, weaponized it, merged it with a personality cult built around his image. He also used it to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power in an attempt to overturn a democratic election. But he didn’t create it. Even before January 6, hoards of armed, angry white people acting in contravention of the law were a trend as old as the first lynch mobs and as recent as the armed assaults on the Michigan and Oregon state capitols that preceded the D.C. insurrection. What they have in common, from the 45th president on down, is that almost none of them were ever held accountable for their actions. A Texas judge even allowed one January 6 insurrectionist to go on vacation in Mexico because she had already paid for the trip.
These difficulties aren’t reserved for high offices and acts of treason either. They extend as well to crimes far more ridiculous, yet equally dangerous. Earlier this year, charges were dropped against Amy Cooper, the so-called “Central Park Karen,” who attempted to have a Black man arrested in New York for asking her to put her dog on a leash. Though the charges against her carried as much as a year in prison, prosecutors dropped the case because Cooper agreed to go to therapy.
This list could go on forever, but the punchline would remain the same. We know that this is not an issue we can simply outgrow, it must be uprooted and removed. But while the Republican Party is shrinking, much of what remains is becoming more tightly wedded to Trump. And they’re going local, attempting to pass laws in state legislatures that would allow them to do in the next election what they couldn’t in the last. So if you didn’t like living in Donald Trump’s America and don’t want to again, we have work to do. The best sign of growth, however, is that between the protests of 2020, the riot of 2021, and the overwhelming difference in police reaction to each, more and more people are declaring themselves ready to start uprooting.
Post-Modernism
If establishing the identity of a new century involves evaluating and potentially rejecting old paradigms, then this is one that deserves some attention. Many of the issues we’re dealing with today stem from the fact that post-modernism is beginning to show its age. As much as anything else, before the 21st century can begin to define itself on its own terms, this philosophy — or at least certain aspects of it — needs to be laid to rest.
If Modernism may be briefly and vastly oversimplified as focusing on the centralization of meaning through the establishment of such institutions as Colonialism, discrete academic disciplines and white normativity, then post-modernism may be equally defined by its push to decentralize meaning through its active disruption of concepts of normativity and universal truth and the democratization of speech through the introduction of tools like social media. We can say that Pan-Africanism with its central focus on Africa and the universal African-ness of Black people and Colonialism with its centralization of power among European empires were both Modernist institutions. Meanwhile Neo-colonialism and Diaspora, with their emphasis on de-centralization, are both post-modern in nature.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with any of this. Post-modernism emerged largely as a reaction to the clear deficiencies of a world in which Eurocentrism and patriarchy were the established norm for just about everything and the means of discourse were tightly controlled and regulated. To it’s credit, post-modernism did much to combat these issues and create space for new conversations. Yet like any idea, when pushed too far its own cracks begin to show, which is where we are now. Pushed too far, post-modernism’s rejection of universal truth becomes indistinguishable from a rejection of objective fact, essentially leaving all of reality as a matter of opinion with no meaningful recourse for arguing against a stated perspective. The democratization of speech eventually falls into a place where things like expertise, education and experience are no longer counted as meaningful requisites to authority on any given subject. The disastrous consequences of either eventuality would be easily imagined, but why bother imagining them? We’ve been living with them for the last twenty years.
What is bubble culture but a group of people who, having selected the sources they agree to be authoritative, often regardless of education or expertise, adhere to the version of reality that they subjectively create even in conflict against quantifiable, objective fact? Combine this state of affairs with a profit-first society that will happily sell any version of reality that people will buy and call it news, and a white supremacist history that all but indemnifies certain segments of society from prosecution and suddenly the events of January 6th are no longer an anomaly, they’re an inevitability — the logical conclusion of a worn out philosophy pushed well beyond its breaking point.
Conclusion
Not every bad idea with a shelf life is a tradition. And not every tradition needs to be upheld. We are well past the point where, “That’s the way it works,” is an acceptable answer because everything that’s happening in the world right now, from police violence to climate change, is screaming at us that it’s not working anymore. We can no longer afford to pretend that economies are more real than the lives and deaths of the people who comprise them. We can no longer afford to pretend that white privilege just happens without constant reinforcement through white supremacist structures woven into every part of our society. And we can no longer afford to pretend that reality is at all points mutable, that we’re not subject to circumstances that we don’t agree with or that we don’t have to contend with facts that we don’t like.
Between planet-wide climate change, a planet-wide health crisis, and planet-wide social injustice, there are plenty of reasons for us to wake up to the need for new ideas, but that doesn’t mean we necessarily will. First we have to acknowledge the need and be honest about the direction in which we have to go. But there is good news. We have some very promising options for our next philosophical epoch, like Intersectionality. Already a popular term, as coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw and extrapolated by Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality could be the right philosophical lens for the 21st century. Building from a social justice perspective could have wide-reaching applications that influence new forms of economy and healthcare.
Whatever direction we choose to go in, one thing is certain: Time will move on. Eventually humanity will find itself in the first decades of another century, again facing all of the things that old, outmoded structures can’t do. How much we will suffer for it and for how long will be determined largely by how quick we are to wake up to the need for something new, because as we are proving now, the problems are patient. They will wait for us to figure it out. So ok, 21st century. We had a bumpy childhood and a wild adolescence, but we’re in our 20s now, and it’s time to grow up.
