Ganja feud
After she declared her candidacy for president in 2019, Dr. Harris proceeded to offer economic policy advice to the campaign. But he became angry a month later when the candidate told a radio show host that she supported legalizing marijuana and then added, “Half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?”
Dr. Harris issued a statement, denouncing as a “travesty” his daughter’s promotion of “the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker.” The father “took umbrage,” said Mr. Hutchinson, Dr. Harris’s friend, “because his family was blasting him for his offspring having embarrassed them in this way.”
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He enjoys tooling around in his silver Corvette.
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Both in essays and in the classroom, Dr. Harris argued that market economies should be inclusive rather than monopolistic. Some of his scholarly papers analyzed Marxist economic thinking, but by the early 1990s, “he had become more realistic, because he’d learned along the way,” said Anne Krueger, a conservative economist and fellow Stanford professor at the time. “He certainly had more faith in government than some of us did. But among the people I knew as Marxian economists, he was not there.”
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In the mid-90s, Dr. Harris took an early retirement from Stanford to return to Jamaica and coordinate what would become known as the country’s national industrial policy. That effort, which sought to transform a national economy fueled by debt into one sustained by an export-based model through public and private partnerships, took more than a decade for the financially hobbled government to put in place.
Once the policy did take hold, roughly a decade ago, the economy’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product was halved. The unemployment rate fell from 15 percent in 2013 to 5.4 percent today. “The national industrial policy was anathema to Marxists,” said P.J. Patterson, Jamaica’s prime minister at the time. “What Don was propounding was the notion of a market-based economy where the private sector, not the government, was the engine of growth. There was nothing in there about state control of industry.”
I can understand to an extent why Dr. Harris would be so insulted by his daughter embracing that ethnic stereotype in an interview. From talking to this one guy at work who came from the region (maybe a generation younger than Harris), the whole politics of respectability were very important to those generations that came of age in a post colonial world.
The use of that stereotype for w cheap joke certainly demonstrates his daughter's profound lack of understanding of that perspective and the context from where it developed.
I'm not saying I agree with it or it's ok, I just understand and was explaining a bit the context in which it came from. The conservativism implied by it is quite stiflingly oppressive and it showed when I talked to this man: the way he would speak down about people who didn't meet his standards.
The contradictions in this self-professed communist's way of thinking were laid bare in my conversations with him. I came to understood that his way of thinking about liberation of the oppressed, while having a strong foundation in understanding the nature of colonialism was glaringly deficient in a drive to challenge the other heiarchies of oppression that you imply in the above comment. The man's way of thinking ultimately makes for an incomplete understanding of what a liberatory struggle should be, since in the case of some in that generation, their respectability politics reproduced those heiarchies of oppression that subsequent generations of left theorists strongly criticized as being part of an intersection of oppressions that should all be dismantled to achieve that egalitarian society that is the goal of Communism.
It's ultimately why I could never consider the man to be a comrade: because of his strong adherence to the oppressive cishet patriarchal heiarchies that we criticize here on this site. And I was quite disappointed with that, because before I got to know him more and understand this, I thought I had found a comrade in the workplace.
That's rather ironic, since the right-wing economists at Stanford's Hoover Institution would normally consider anathema any mention of "national industrial policy", even if it was dressed up with all sorts of niceties about "public-private partnerships" and similar nonsense. The careers of so many there (Sowell, etc.) are predicated on a near-religious belief in the old Thatcherism "there is no such thing as society". Similarly, for Hooverites, "there is no such thing as the public sector", or at least there ought not to be.
Dr, Harris may live inside ivory towers and ivy-covered walls, but he apparently doesn't understand that he's a lot closer to the old plantation than he realizes. Something tells me that his heterodox "progressive market theory" (or whatever he would call it) is tolerated more because of his Third World background than for any other reason.
oof!