Race and Class Reductionism

I stand corrected. Indigenous people are very much excluded from being “Real White Americans™”, right from the beginning.

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This isn’t just a distraction, I’d argue. It has real world effects, which included hundreds of years of slavery then violent segregation, and continued entrenchment of white supremacy as an ideology. People don’t just embrace white supremacy because they are poor. Plenty of middle class and wealthy white Americans also embrace it, and not just because it’s a useful means of ruling the rest of us (which it is). People who promote white supremacy, whether they are rich or poor, are showing you who they are and what they believe. You should believe them.

And even if in the case of some elites using race cynically, it hardly really matters if the outcome is the same. Trump might not really be a raging racist, though he did pay for an ad in the NYT calling on the city to convict and execute the Central Park 5, and he had a history of racist practices in his buildings, but the effect he has had on the white supremacist movement in the past few years remains the same, regardless. There are actual people who are dead because of his rhetoric, so it really doesn’t matter if he believes it in his heart of hearts or is just engaging in cynical politics. Same with this on down the line. Whether or not Bull Connor was “really” a racist or not hardly mattered, considering what happened to those kids marching for basic human dignity.

I’d also argue that white supremacy is a white problem that white people can and must solve. Ignoring it and dismissing it as a distraction from “real” political issues like the economy won’t fix it. Black Americans (along with Latinx, Native American, and Asian Americans) have been marching and advocating for literally centuries to be treated as brothers, and white Americans, poor or not, have continually rebuffed them and treated them violently for asking for a hand in friendship. That’s not just about economic anxiety. It’s about a dangerous ideology that gives them a psychic wage that isn’t connected to economics.

And again, I don’t think anyone disagrees with you on the problems caused by our deep economic inequality, or that it can’t contribute to racism. Many of us believe you must tackle both to really make a change. Because if politicians are and do deploy racism cynically to fleece the poor white man, as LBJ said, they are still spreading racist ideology that leads to violence and death. :woman_shrugging:

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We really do need to tackle racism and economic inequality simultaneously. This thread has got me thinking again about how the H-1B visa system has loopholes that’ve been gamed and exploited in ways that make us worse off. IT companies who want cheap and essentially indentured labor to do low-cost entry-level work (ab)use the H-1B system for their own ends and pervert it away from its intended purpose to bring high-skilled workers to fill jobs that need to be done. It’s just another way the rich and powerful can abuse minorities and foment racism to keep people busy fighting each other instead of the rich and powerful who are causing all the problems.

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Economic inequality will generate racism, creating a poor versus more poor war.
Racism will generate economic inequality, because is an excellent justification to treat other people unjustly. An illegal immigrant or a black people is scared to go to the police so if is underpaid or is abused can’t get justice and a decent wage.

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So should “we” make ourselves “better off” by keeping all them dirty immigrants out then :confused:

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Shush. The Strasserists and National Bolsheviks know what is best for the world, not idealistic utopians like ourselves.

/s

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Nah, we should stipulate that the immmigrant being brought in should get the same salary as the citizen, which would benefit the immigrants and citizens, not the multinational corporation.

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Is anyone on the left not saying that?

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Dunno, where are we drawing the line?

As it is a topic about class reductionism, lets say between socialism and liberalism. Blue Labour and similar groups are not socialist.

I am fucking sick of the idea that people cannot work on more than one issue at a time, and that being BAME/LGBTQ+ doesn’t make being working class a lot harder. And as for the fuckwits who think I am not working class because I am trans, they can fuck off and keep fucking off forever.

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I don’t think I’ve ever heard a socialist express that sort of opinion, no.

Yeah, people seem to ignore the fact that social problems are additive, they don’t cancel each other out :frowning:

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since it appears to be on topic, I’ll drop these two articles here again.

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From the second article

But consider this analogy:

A serial killer has kidnapped ten people. The killer is an anti-Asian racist, so when possible, he likes to find Asian victims. Six of the ten victims are Asian. The other four are members of other races. Maybe one of the non-Asians was kidnapped because he stumbled on the killer kidnapping one of the others, and the other three were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

These ten people didn’t all end up in the killer’s basement in the same way and it would be callous and stupid to pretend they did. But right now they all need exactly the same thing–to work together to get out of the basement .

Is it OK to feel angry that the other people in the basement have decided that it is OK to let me be killed by the serial killer because I am first on his list?

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I’ve seen too many U.S.-based white male brocialists willing to throw PoC, women, and immigrants under the bus because “it’s all about the class struggle, ma-a-a-an!” to consider class reductionism a myth. There’s a nasty undertone to the whole “dirtbag left” movement that goes beyond their “edgy and ironic jokes” at the expense of downtrodden groups.

Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see some brocialists start expressing their anger at Biden’s Ctrl-Z administration by going beefsteak.

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Even the high skilled workers get treated this way. One of my H1-B jobs was at a company almost entirely populated by H1-B folks and it was well understood that we were all trapped. We all put up with brutal hours and below market pay because we would literally get deported if we complained.

Rich black people are scared of the police too. Heck, I’m middle class and white and I’m scared of the police. None of that fear has anything to do with class.

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That analogy is also deeply misleading because everyone in the basement is in equal peril. That’s nonsense of course. It’s more like people of color are in the basement and poor white people are forced to clean the serial killer’s toilet, but also got him elected.

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It reflects my feelings about how the British Labour party are treating transphobia right now.

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Funny, one only has to look around this thread to find mythological creatures.

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but the whole point of nationalism is to be pro-“us” and anti-“the world”

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