samizdat

"Life Chances"

Guernica: I’ve noticed that you often use the phrase “life chances.” Why not just say “the distribution of wealth”?

Dean Spade: I think that to me “life chances” is a phrase that captures the many, many vectors of harm and well-being that are being distributed in ways that I’m concerned about. For example, whether or not fresh groceries are available in your community, whether there’s toxic waste and polluting industry nearby where you live, whether in your whole life you’re likely to have a job that interests you, what level your local schools are funded at, whether someone in your family is dying or suffering from lack of healthcare and you’re carrying around the stresses of that.

Ruth Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” and I think that’s really useful for thinking about what we’re trying to get at. This definition turns our attention away from the questions that discrimination law gets us caught up in: did someone intentionally exclude you because of your identity and can you prove that? Instead, it lets us see that where we find population-level maldistribution of life chances, there is injustice. It doesn’t matter whether we can find one individual with a bad intention, or whether the law stated an intent to exclude a certain group. If a group is being exposed to premature death through overexposure to pollution, police violence, hunger, lack of healthcare, poverty, homelessness, military occupation—those conditions must be remedied and the systems causing them must be dismantled. Sometimes movements have gotten too concerned with law reform or just trying to get government recognition instead of actually trying to change people’s chances at living. We need to not be satisfied until people actually have good housing, healthcare, education, and all those things that you actually need to live well and thrive.

(Source: lowendtheory, via curate)