I recently corresponded with an American academic. He was spending his summer in South America working on issues of climate change. He imagined himself to be at the forefront of an anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle. Perhaps on the surface he was. It's a safe bet that dirt poor farmers will be hit by the misery of climate change well before the effects ripple outward towards the emerging global middle class. But the ubiquitous nature of American academics reaching out to the world, as their own country falls apart in front of them bears examination.
Academics who participate in such behavior have several excuses that become less valid on examination- a skill that paradoxically many in academia lack. The first excuse is that poverty in the first world and the US is unlike the poverty in the third world. This assumption is less and less true every day if it ever was. Just go ask someone in Detroit living without water. Just go ask an undocumented worker American trying to get decent health care. Just go ask anyone in the black community about their relationship to the state.
The issues of the black community serve as good example of how third world the US of America is. At present the wealthy divide between black and white America surpasses that of the wealth divide between whites and blacks in South African at the height of Apartheid. People living on less than 2$ a day? Yeah, we have that too....in fact if non-white USA were a nation, we would probably have more people living on 2$ a day or less than the Palestinians. Think about that the next time you hear about the oppression of the Palestinian people. All in all, it isn't clear that the Palestinians aren't getting a somewhat better deal than blacks in America. And, no, I'm not referring to the 5 or so extended clans of uber-rich politically connected Palestinians in Ramallah or Haifa. I'm talking about your average Joes, Joses, Jamals and Muhhameds. Ultimately, these things are always individual, but sadly some people on either side of this comparison pay the most extreme prices. State sponsored violence has a noted tendency to cut the lives of the young men of both communities. But if we are to weigh all lives equally, the comparison is stark: Matti Fiedman pointed out that " In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago" in an article examining the enlightened world's hostile fixation on the problems of Israel.
Still, the eyes of America's academic class, a community which heavily overlaps with the wealthier classes, look outward. They look away from a brewing mess of oppression at home, to study problems abroad. Unfortunately, their efforts may be largely futile until inequality at home is addressed. The politically palatable solution to American poverty is never redistribution, but exploitation, externalization, and neocolonialism. At it's extreme this philosophy becomes absurd: everyone should enjoy equally in exploiting the environment and other people- which is absurd because because eventually you run out of environment and other people to exploit. To see a concrete example simply examine the "struggle" of upper class women in America to self actualize, and how it has been aided by numerous poorer women who have taken over the tasks they found beneath them right down to even carrying their babies as surrogates. To be fair the US is not the only country with an expansion of equality by exploitation model. The shifting unclear borders of the middle east often have to do with a political calculation about housing- i.e. even the poor can have a house, if we only take someone else's land and appropriate it to ourselves. Somehow this calculation is more politically palatable than just taking some houses from the rich; so unfortunately, the numerous outward facing academics who ponder problems of people they have never met may be simply wasting their time except assuring themselves the mental health value of self congratulatory feelings of beneficence. If anything they bring a certain level of malignancy to the world stage for reasons too numerous to cover in one blog post.
The question remains: why? Why would intelligent people choose to ignore malnourished children 20 miles from them to worry about malnourished children in places they can not even pronounce. Perhaps it is due to the same psychological mechanism that keeps the rich concerned with certain bird species. Taking a real concern about the immediate community would require that such people look in the mirror, and examine their own very real contributions to inequality and misery. Who prepares their food, takes care of their children, takes care of their parents, and in short makes their very lives livable- and how do they treat and compensate them? Millions of angry health care and food workers already know the answer too well. Let alone the small army of impoverished workers academics have created such as certain adjuncts (the ones who lack rich husbands or fathers) sharing the same buildings with them, trying to exist and raise children on insecure, poverty level compensation.
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