It boggles the mind to consider the persistence of racism. Don’t we know better than to believe “white” people are superior or that the US is “our” country? Didn’t we all learn in school about the evils of slavery and Nazism, that Europeans took this land away from Native Americans, that the US has been a multiracial nation of immigrants since before it was founded?
One way to make sense of the senselessness is to consider how race and other convenient differentiators such as nationality or sex serve a function within our socioeconomic system: to structure the hierarchy of entitlement to control over the sources of wealth and power. Perhaps this function is a necessary feature, not of any human society, but of any society based on the exploitation of nature. In a system of exploitation, there must be a way of determining who gets priority in access to and disposition of choice resources before they are used up. We purport to use neutral tools, money and property rights, to perform this function, but they have systematically accrued in a pattern that duplicates, legitimates, and intensifies the underlying hierarchy.
The truth about this system is not taught in school. Instead, we learn the falsehood that our system rewards any individuals who work hard, regardless of demographic distinctions. And we learn that humans preside comfortably over nature, not that we are embroiled in constant struggle against each other to consume it first. If only we were taught to see the role of nature-exploitation in structuring our society, we might learn to live in harmony with all life, especially each other.
Into the ulterior 
One thought on “Tragedy of the ulterior”