On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts are partnering to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers–including artists, critics, writers, and curators–to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph on a keyword associated with one of the summit themes: Inequities, Occupations, Making, or Tactics. This posting is by Brea Willey, American Cyberculture student at UC Berkeley.
Keyword: Inequities
There is so much inequity across the globe that needs to be confronted, which is why it is so difficult to face head on. Thus, in order to fix the lack of fairness in the world we have to fix the issues one step at a time, in each country. For instance instead of attacking the globe, we need to address the inequalities of each nation starting from the smallness of injustice. Each country has its own problems and it is not all going to be related to just wealth. In America we need to address issues a state level first before tackling the national problems, so possibly starting with gay marriage, abortion, and marijuana usage. For just these three issues each state has different laws, and if we can not even attack these problems it is going to be really difficult to attack global issues such as wealth distribution and taxes. For other countries it may not be the same such as countries in Africa or the Middle East. In the Middle East injustice is more so related to religion, and not so much as wealth. Thus one cannot just sum up all of the world’s problem based off of wealth distribution because injustice is injustice in any form, and it is because of this that we need to address the smaller issues in each nation and then worry about the wealth distribution. Not only must we stop saying let’s confront the inequity across the globe, we need to actually do something about it. People have been saying lets confront the inequities of the world for ages, and clearly not much has happened; we have a lot of the same problems that we had back then now. There always has been and always will be rich people and poor people, but maybe we should start addressing why do the poor stay poor and how can we change that? We can always blame the rich for imbalance in the wealth distribution, but sometimes people have to look at themselves and question why they are in the predicament that they are in.