Totally makes sense.
Like I said, when Black women came for job interviews to financial offices (i.e., heavily white and male), they were accustomed to having their work history absences treated as some sort of personal failing on their part, because that’s how white men saw it.
Shame on them for not having nannies and servants to take care of all their domestic needs while they were working!
The context is Cain, who went to Morehouse.
As for the rest, most of us are delighted when our students find good employment when they graduate, especially employment related to their major, since that likely means it is something they are interested in. I don’t acknowledge a dark side to that. More generally, depending on the institution, graduation requirements are crafted to help the student be the best person we can help them to be. At a place like Morehouse that is a major part of its core mission. At an institution like mine, we are under pressure all the time from politicians, parents, and the students themselves to focus on what is essentially vocational training; most of us resist this as much as possible.
I was expanding on @Melizmatic’s point and addressing the wider context. Although who knows, perhaps he had a couple of “white saviour” profs in grad school.
I don’t either. No-one here has. What’s being discussed are educational priorities and what constitutes success in that regard.
This is a definite problem. If more professors resisted that, perhaps they’d leave the focus on their graduates’ financial success and legacies to the alumni fundraising office and instead assess their former students’ success based on their contributions to their research fields and to society at large (both of which Cain failed at).
As breathlessly riveting as it is discussing academia’s numerous responsibilities and failings, the subject at hand is Herman Cain’s death from C19.
Fair enough. Although I’d argue that has math education must not have included statistics, given the stupid way he died. Anyhow, back to Cain specifically, his dumb sell-out legacy lives on in other Black GOP politicians:
Human beings aren’t logical; even when we’ve been formally educated and should know better.
Especially when you factor in corrupting elements like greed, avarice and ego…
It was me, I did it
You wouldn’t find it on a syllabus, but many of my engineering profs did in fact teach us how to be decent human beings, especially regarding how to take our gifts of intelligence, education and resources and use them to serve humanity rather than just to enrich ourselves.
Again, what Cain was taught in school isn’t really on topic; though it should be acknowledged that while some people lose their ‘human decency’ over time with enough negative influence, but there are also those who never had it in the first place.
Now I’m not speculating that Cain was some sort of sociopath, though that is always a possibility; just stating that in the end the blame for his failure as a worthwhile human being rests only with Herman Cain.
I dunno, I think a lot of his failings fall or fit right in line with what our culture encourages us to strive to become – bigger, richer, more thoroughly selfish than anyone else around us. I mean, not all of us follow such messaging, but who knows what someone like Cain might have become in some other cultural setting?
It still comes down to the active choices we make, consistently.
Like:
“Do I take this unethical job which will make me a lot of money personally, but will make life harder for other people both now and later on?”
At some point in his life Cain had to have asked himself some form of that question, probably more than once.
And in the end:
I get what you’re saying, but I try to avoid that kind of “blame it all on the individual” way of regarding others’ lives. I mean, isn’t it basically the same context-free judgment as blaming those who struggle financially for “not pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps”?
When Cain chose this or that unethical job that he knew would call for hurting others, a whole culture encouraged him to do so. I think it’s on the rest of us (or ar least, on the caring, good ones among us) to build a better culture, one where people like Cain would be less likely to make those kinds of decisions.
But, I dunno, maybe we’re comparing apples and oranges here.
You’re not wrong that he was enabled and abetted by a corrupt society; that goes without saying.
Indeed, I would think so, which is why I was saying that his failure as a worthwhile human being doesn’t rest only with Herman Cain.
Put it like this; in the Egyptian judgment day ritual, if Herman Cain’s heart was weighed against an ostrich feather, it would not only fail the test, but Ammut would gleefully eat it with no regard to the conditions or external factors that helped weigh said heart down.
Like 45, I know he isn’t the problem, merely a symptom of a much greater, more detrimental problem; yet in his death, I am holding Cain individually accountable for his own lack of virtue, no matter who may have contributed to it.
There’s an interesting balance there. One one hand, people make choices and those choices matter. On the other hand, so do the circumstances that precipitate those choices in the first place. Sometimes, those choices are extreme (like the recent polish nazi sympathizer topic we had recently), but IMHO for the modern era, I think the drivers are more banal. Do the shitty thing to get ahead by justifying to yourself that everyone else is doing the shitty thing, too, versus taking the hard road and making the choices that are way more difficult a path, but morally sound.
Of course, fast forward to today, and as more and more people see folks make the right choice and take the moral stance, but nothing comes of it and those very people are tossed aside, you have to wonder if our future generations are going to grow up with the idea that there’s no point to taking that stance in the first place.
you have to wonder if our future generations are going to grow up with the idea that there’s no point to taking that stance in the first place.
And I guess that as a member of an earlier generation, it would be comforting (in a way) to think that if they choose a path that involves harming others, they’ll only have themselves to blame for becoming awful people. 
By the way, is anyone keeping count of many people contracted CoViD at Trump’s Tulsa Rally, and how many have died from it?
Admittedly it was a very poorly attended rally, so it probably isn’t a bigly number, but still…
