There is a reason we can't have nice things in America. Racism.

https://the.ink/p/jim-crow-america-inspired-the-nazis

I keep thinking about the testimonies to @JoeBiden's personal kindness this week. And thinking about why it has so often failed to blossom into systemic kindness.

@Isabelwilkerson points to a reason: racism destroys any sense of a stake in each other. http://The.Ink 

And so where there is a lack of popular will to institutionalize our compassion, to systematize our decency, we are left with the admirable but inconsequential kindness of the gesture, the look in the eyes, the soft words, the cell number.

In that sense, the kindness of @JoeBiden risks becoming a lot like philanthropy by the super-rich: something you do instead of kind structural change, not in addition to.

There has been, as Noam Chomsky and others have noted, positive movement in recent months in certain areas -- and less in others.

But if you were @JoeBiden and you wanted to go bold, which I don't know he does, your opportunity is to fight this root cause of a mutuality deficit.

The optimist in me says: Maybe it takes an older white guy to explain to a lot of white people that an every-man-for-himself country isn't much of one.

Maybe he has identity inoculation against that sounding radical to people.

But he has to want to go there.

Because what I can't shake from my mind is this: If @JoeBiden's evident compassion were to become the American way, it would require doing things Biden doesn't seem to want to do, like: get rid of lobbyists, tax the plutocrats up the wazoo, guarantee healthcare as a right, etc.

So the work from the outside, as I see it, is to relentlessly remind Biden of the duty to systematize his own best qualities, to turn his instincts into institutions. Not to let them stand in for real change.

And to attack the culture of non-mutuality that underpins all of this.

And read the rest of my conversation with @Isabelwilkerson, which stirred these thoughts: https://the.ink/p/jim-crow-america-inspired-the-nazis