Sustainability - White, middle class and safe?

It wasn't the first time this had struck me - that those talking about people and planet are usually focussed to a far greater extent on the latter, but it was underlined when Charles Eisenstein wrote recently on the matter of racism.

"You can say, for instance, that black people deserve to be poor because they are black. Without racism and other forms of chauvinism, you see everyone as brothers and sisters equally deserving of a good life, and economic injustice becomes intolerable. However, racism isn't the cause of economic injustice; it is one of its justifications or excuses. Inequality, intensifying inequality, is built into the system, and if it didn't fall along racial lines it would fall along some other lines. If you could magically remove racism, in our present system there would still have to be some on top and others on the bottom. In fact, I have read arguments that racism was basically invented as a justification for slavery – an effect of slavery and not a cause."

A key point made in the argument for a people-centered form of economics is that the belief that some people are of less value, effectively disposable and that finding their lives threatened, they have the right to fight back any way they can and would.

In that it is a fundamental predicate of "people-centered" economic development that no person is disposable, it follows that close attention be paid to those in the waning Industrial Age who are not equipped and prepared to take active and productive roles in an Information Age. Many, in fact, are scared, angry, and deeply resentful that they are being left out, ignored, effectively disenfranchised, discarded, thrown away as human flotsam in the name of human and social progress. We have only to ask ourselves individually whether or not this is the sort of progress we want, where we accept consciously and intentionally that human progress allows for disposing of other human beings.  . 

Many a fortune had been made on the backs of enslaved people and though slavery may have been abolished we have a powerful lobby which opposes a living wage. In North Carolina, where our own advocacy started it's plain to see that Black Amerricans are well represented in the Forward Together campaign.       

 

It was more than 50 years ago that Martin Luther King Jr said at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

"It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of its colored citizens. This sweltering summer of the colored people's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end but a beginning. Those who hope that the colored Americans needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual."

Today the challenge to "business as usual" is a neoliberal palliative prescribed by Sir Richard Branson.

I'm not a black man, but it's all too obvious that when it comes to sustainability, most advocates are white, mostly male, upwardly mobile and clinging to a lecturn of some form. Not quite how we saw it.

The term “social enterprise” in the various but similar forms in which it is being used today — 2008 — refers to enterprises created specifically to help those people that traditional capitalism and for profit enterprise don’t address for the simple reason that poor or insufficiently affluent people haven’t enough money to be of concern or interest. Put another way, social enterprise aims specifically to help and assist people who fall through the cracks. Allowing that some people do not matter, as things are turning out, allows that other people do not matter and those cracks are widening to swallow up more and more people. Social enterprise is the first concerted effort in the Information Age to at least attempt to rectify that problem, if only because letting it get worse and worse threatens more and more of us. Growing numbers of people are coming to understand that “them” might equal “me.” Call it compassion, or call it enlightened and increasingly impassioned self-interest. Either way, we are all in this together, and we will each have to decide for ourselves what it means to ignore someone to death, or not.

It was the Washington Post last year which suggested the inspiration of Spartacus.

"It is widely believed that it is the duty of the oppressed to struggle against oppression. Hence the admiration for Spartacus and his successors. But there is no moral law that the struggle against oppression, in whatever realm, must be carried on only by the oppressed, nor any historical analysis that holds that the struggling oppressed, on their own, must succeed in ending their oppression.

The direct route to the end of oppression is for the oppressors themselves to work with the oppressed to end it. It is also the moral responsibility of those keeping the gate of educational opportunity closed to join hands with those behind it, to work together to remove that barrier to the fulfillment of the promise of emancipation."

I too fit the category of while and middle class but well  aware of the power of neoliberalism which should not be underestimated. A while ago, I suggested from a perspective of experience, that business might use profit for social benefit rather than use a social cause to generate profit. Choosing to to do to one of the sustainabiity elite didn't go doen well, it got me barred from participating in all Guardian discussions.

Today, what I argued, profit for purpose not profiting from a purpose, is being celebrated in the UK at Social Saturday.

Or is it? How can we be sure, if not included?