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This American Life - “Monopoly”
#1
From this weekend’s episode (only partly quoted due to profanity):

“ We must never forget that economics was the reason that black people were brought to this country. We came to do the agricultural work in the south and the textile work in the north. Do you understand that? That's what we came to do.

Now if I right now decided that I wanted to play Monopoly with you and for 400 rounds of playing Monopoly, I didn't allow you to have any money, I didn't allow you to have anything on the board, I didn't allow for you to have anything. And then we played another 50 rounds of Monopoly and everything that you gained and you earned while you were playing that round of Monopoly was taken from you-- that was Tulsa. That was Rosewood.

Those are places where we built black economic wealth, where we were self-sufficient, where we owned our stores, where we owned our property, and they burned them to the ground. So that's 450 years. So for 400 rounds of Monopoly, you don't get to play at all. Not only do you not get to play, you have to play on the behalf of the person that you're playing against. You have to play and make money and earn wealth for them, and then you have to turn it over to them.

So then for 50 years, you finally get a little bit, and you're allowed to play. And every time that they don't like the way that you're playing, or that you're catching up, or that you're doing something to be self-sufficient, they burn your game. They burn your cards. They burn your Monopoly money.

And then, finally, at the release and the onset of that, they allow you to play and they say, OK, now you catch up. How can you win? How can you win? You can't win. The game is fixed. So when they say, why did you burn down the community, why did you burn down your own neighborhood, it's not ours. We don't own anything. We don't own anything.

Trevor Noah said it so beautifully last night. There's a social contract that we all have. That if you steal or if I steal, then the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation. But the person who fixes the situation is killing us! So the social contract is broken.“ ...


It is the last segment of the episode.


Transcript: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/708/transcript

Audio: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/708/here-again
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#2
Similar point from John Oliver
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