Spring New Shoulder Moon
A bit out of left field, more like right field where I played my entire (short) little league career, but occasioned by Tara’s visit yesterday with her son Vincent. Vincent had been explaining his understanding of general and special relativity to Tara and the conversation resumed at our table. He was explaining the difference between light and gravity, light is fast, but gravity is instant and I threw space-time curvature out there.
Anyhow, later on I read an article about a long standing argument on the left, which is more central, race or class. I’ve always been a class is more central guy, but I read an interesting article in the NYT about the sons of wealthy African-Americans. Seems, unlike their white peers, that they often fall through the cracks of our economy, reverting to a lower socio-economic position than their family of origin. Would seem to put race firmly above class.
As I was going to sleep last night, this image jumped into mind, that race and class are analogous to space-time. That is, they constitute an interwoven web of influences always acting on us, all of us; but, like gravity, when an individual interacts with larger bodies, think the moon and the earth, or the earth and the sun, then the curvature of race-class draws them in. So any one son in the instance of African-Americans has the smaller bodies of his wealthy family and their peers arrayed against the much larger bodies of institutional racism reinforced by white privilege (class) and shot through with bias against black males.
Wanted to write this down before it disappeared. So there it is.
