Vance Miguel Johnson’s Reviews > The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis > Status Update

“Moreover, since America is a procedurally egalitarian nation, it was only a matter of time before whites demanded and received the same treatment as blacks, and appropriated the mechanism of community control for their own uses. And this, of course, left blacks once again disadvantaged.” (Pg. 212)

The word “procedurally” is doing so much heavy lifting in this quote.

“This black cultural critique was a powerful one. It exposed the weak underside of American national values: mindless materialism, rampant individualism, and invidious competition.” (Pg. 207)

Unions + just cause + racism = bad

Okay, I’ve gathered that in NYC in the 1960s the general racial education divide was based in that white educators were promoting the idea that they worked an “objective” meritocracy, and blacks communities and educators were show in their actions that prioritized values like the cooperative and legitimizing of lower-class black culture, that the city’s governing bodies did not.

Meritocracy is unusable as a system of valuing people without first unpacking the entire history of the ideology’s use! How can you say you’re judging people by merit without acknowledging that less than a hundred years ago much of what grounds U.S. “merit” as we know it today was racism, misogyny, homophobia, and imperialism!

And of course after WWII the NYC government transitioned it’s advertisement of production line jobs to promote government jobs. The transition from the factory to the cubical.