In my opinion, this is as singularly brilliant a passage in a major speech as I've ever heard.Harris "understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a business or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. No. We don’t get to change the rules so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. We put our heads down. We get to work.”
It illustrates, succinctly and intuitively and - most importantly - universally, what the wealth gap in America MEANS. And it invokes race without being about race.
You will very often hear people who look like me say things like, "I don't care if someone is black or white or brown or purple or green." Those same people will tell you that affirmative action is something like reverse racism.
What I hear in these words - and I am biased, because I feel that this is representative of my own personal experience - is that race is secondary to what privilege really means, which is that our respective starting lines are SO far apart, and the shoes we wear SO different, and the surface in the first ten meters of each of our sprints SO inconsistent, that crowning a champion by place of finish or even top speed achieved is simply incoherent.
And THIS is the message that so many Trump voters - the ones for whom the Rs' policies are actively damaging - need to hear. Only one of the parties even believes in principle that people should have the opportunity to make their kids' starting line more favorable than their own.
What is the American Dream, if not that?
