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No new post this week. Instead, here are a few things I’ve read recently that I want to share with you. There’s short teaser excerpt from each article. This was really difficult! All of these articles, in their entirety, are worth your time.
Your Land Acknowledgment Is Not Enough by Joseph Pierce
The problem with land acknowledgments is that they are almost never followed by meaningful action. Acknowledgment without action is an empty gesture, exculpatory and self-serving. What is more, such gestures shift the onus of action back onto Indigenous people, who neither asked for an apology nor have the ability to forgive on behalf of the land that has been stolen and desecrated. It is not my place to forgive on behalf of the land.
A land acknowledgment is not enough.
We Mean Nothing to the Company by Bryce Covert
These firings are a symptom of the larger disease: the enormous power employers hold over our lives, with few checks on how they choose to wield it. “To an astonishing degree, workers lose their freedom when they enter the worksite in the United States,” said Gabriel Winant, assistant history professor at the University of Chicago. In a survey of management experts in the late 1970s, every respondent agreed with the statement, “In many cases control and power are more important to managers than profits or productivity.”
American Democracy doesn’t need saving — it needs creating by Jennifer Brandel and Aria Joughin
Democracy has never meaningfully functioned for many groups in the United States. Look no further than the continuous, systematic disenfranchisement of Black and African American communities, and the many moments throughout the last century in which the government took action against majority public opinion and popular vote. It’s no wonder that more than half of the people polled by the Pew Research Center in 2020 were neither satisfied with the way democracy was functioning in the U.S. and nor were confident that the system could be changed for the better.
josh
my name is josh martinez. i have always loved trying to understand systems, and the systems that built those systems. i spend a lot of time thinking about how to get there from here.
i'm the founder and principal consultant at Future Emergent.
say hello: josh[at]bethefuture.space
