From the article: Our economic system has always required winners and losers. It has always required that a select few occupy the top tiers, while the rest are forced into their respective rungs lower on the ladder. Race has always been one of the easier identifiers for those who need to designate an “other” for exploitation.” This could also be a sentence describing class struggle. I feel we get mired in the very real and destructive facts about slavery. The fact that black people suffered in America and gave their bodies to build this nation with free labor had less to do with their blackness and more with accidents of history. In gross language, they were available to be taken by this emerging system that relied on forced/free/slave labor. Capitalism consumes everything it touches and is indiscriminate of its victims. It will even swallow the best of its socialist critics in the form of book sales and advertisements on podcasts. This is not to excuse or not fight against racist systems and the racists who build them, but race was merely a tool of capital in many respects. Capital perpetuated that narrative because it was profitable to see certain people as subhuman. To fix this, we must use the system itself to rehabilitate the system. There is no other system currently. You don’t get a choice here. And the rehabilitation probably shouldn’t come in the form of continuing the racial animus that created the system initially. More racism won’t solve racism. Social Justice from a class based approach instead may better target all poverty and injustice regardless of race. This $20 is a win. I don’t care if it’s symbolic. Narratives are symbolic and we need new narrative. I’m a white guy in the reddest county in a now purple-ish, but historically very red state and I can’t remember not thinking of Harriet Tubman as anything but a hero. Even if it was for a month every year. That too is a win.