SON: Connections - Winter 2003

Headlines | Briefly | From the Deans Desk

Who is covered by "we"?
By David Allen

The gift of a letter from the world of 2032 reminds us that linguistic forms often struggle behind social change. The rhetorical strategies of "objectivity" (the world seen from nowhere and everywhere), and especially the "royal ‘we’" pervading the letter, are anachronisms, legacies of Enlightenment certainty. These anachronisms are no mere historical curiosities—they support social privilege.

Within the United States and globally, both the industrial revolution of the late 19th century and the technological revolution of the late 20th century exacerbated the maldistribution of resources and opportunities. Until the largely-successful purge of leftists from universities in the 1950s, Americans had a vocabulary of "class interests" to debate such maldistribution. Although an even more extreme concentration of wealth occurred in the technological revolution, there was not an effective language for organizing a response to it. Prisons replaced alms houses.

Nursing was not exempt: non-licensed staff, LPNs, and ADNs came from less economically privileged backgrounds. The further up the career ladder one went, the whiter it became. There was a strong correlation between the income of nurses and the number of people extruded from the health care system.

Technological "fixes" are a means and what requires embracing and debating are the ends: What sort of a world do we WANT to live in? As Martin Luther King said, we are asked to care for beggars but we need to question a system that produces beggars.

Under such conditions, the royal 'we' of this letter leaves one wondering who is and who is not covered by it. Technology has never been a wave that lifted all boats—who sank below the surface of this visionary future? On whose backs was it constructed?

David Allen is professor of Psychosocial and Community Health

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