I appreciate the sentiment, but I typed a whole bunch of stuff and then read it and thought, “Oh god, what am I saying” and just deleted it. I’m all in on that Chris Rock quote. White people were crazy, now we’re a little less crazy. I hope to hell that we can get even less crazy.
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I more wanted to use your comment as a spring board. I know you don’t believe this, but plenty of people use the “elites are fooling working class whites with race-baiting” as a means of denying that racism is a real, structural problem in our society. I’d also say that working class whites are just dupes is really just denying them agency, and as a historian, I think that’s always a dangerous way to think about the world. People don’t have perfect agency, of course, but they do make choices that need to be accounted for, and those choices aren’t always righteous. As much as elites stoke racial animus, so to do regular, ordinary people make the choice to embrace ideologies like white supremacy. And in a country where outsiderness is prized, when the visible elites embrace multi-culturalism (in varying degrees, with varying amounts of sincerity), for some being an outsider or rebel means rejecting that. Even if there is a propoganda machine aimed at stirring up racial strife, people are still making that choice.
In generally, the more we can dispel this notion, the closer we are to dealing with root causes here.
Real talk.
The world might be a better place if we did.
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I got news for you; everyone is ‘crazy’, because we live in an insane world. There are just varying degrees, IMO.
But White folks are the ones currently running shit; and the incredible stress of keeping that ‘number one spot, on the top of the heap,’ no matter what, is not doing anybody any favors, when it comes to mental & emotional health.
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This is so well-said. There always seems to be a back-and-forth between “The elites are only racist to pander to the masses” and “The masses are only racist because they’re following the whims of the elites.” all depending on which group wants to be defended from being called racist.
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I do think it’s important to understand that it’s a major foundational ideology of our society, and that the elites have a vested interest in that. But often times, they are promoting racism, because they legitimately believe in it. Same with the non-elites. And they all believe it because it’s so strongly reinforced in subtle ways through out our culture. It’s a constitutive byproduct of the ethnic-nationalist age.
Decolonizing our minds of these sorts of poisonous ideologies is not as simple as “stop watching fox news” or “let the old racists die off”. It’s so intertwined with our economic and social systems that we almost need to completely transform all of that to change it.
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I do believe that. These days if you hear someone quoting Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech on TV odds are they are a racist trying to justify racism. The other day there was a post on here with stats about the realities of the benefits of immigration and my immediate thought was that racists would love those charts. I’m reminded of that Sartre quote about the anti-semite having no responsibility to use words accurately. Racists spin everything into racist mythmaking. There’s also the related position that rich and powerful people aren’t really racist they only care about power and only use race to get that power. Trump is racist, not just pretending to be racist to control people.
I don’t deny anyone agency or responsibility. I think that “rich people imposed racism to keep poor people oppressed” is part of the truth. It’s something that the whole truth has to account for. It was in my mind because that passage from Howard Zinn talked about a case where it seems super explicit.
I think that often when we discuss the effects of ideologies on society we make it sound as if everyone is making Machiavellian calculations. Rich people aren’t brilliant monsters and fabulous actors. They are mostly dumbasses. Racism is a power structure deeply woven into the fabric of society, and it is also a stupid thing some jackass thinks. Every way I can think of to talk about racism feels like it puts those two things at odds instead of recognizing them as two features of the same thing. Like we’re stuck debating whether light is a wave or a particle.
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I think I mis-spoke…wrote… I meant that people say that racism isn’t real, which I know you don’t believe… Does that make sense? I’m saying that I know that you know that it’s a more complicated problem than just some elites who don’t really believe in race peddling it to the rubes.
That doesn’t mean they don’t believe in racism. It’s not like the powerful have some kind of quality that ensures that have a clear-eyed view of reality, that they then use to spin out myths that use to trick the otherwise blameless white working class. In the MLK example, which is the case (or invoking Rosa Parks in a racist way), I think they DO legitimately believe that King would agree with whatever bullshit they are peddling, because that’s really all they know, and they probably don’t know it that well.
Sure, but I’m saying that they believe in what they are peddling more often than not. There might be the odd person who really is a charlatan (Alex Jones comes to mind), but I have little doubt that someone like Tucker Carlson believes in much of the bullshit that comes out of his mouth.
We are in full agreement here.
Totally. Same with juxtaposing race and class or race and gender or race and sexuality. We would all do well to read more Audre Lorde or bell hooks, I think.
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I think we totally agree and it is just hard to say because our language is constructed to hold individual thoughts and social constructs as distinct things. I’d only add that I don’t think a lot of people who spout that kind of bullshit have the same relationship with the truth that we do. When you take someone like Carlson (or Trump) I think they use language to perform their beliefs rather than to express meaning. So when Trump calls people from Mexico rapists, it’s not an assertion of fact about whether or not they commit the crime of rape (not to say that Trump doesn’t think they do, but Trump also doesn’t really care if someone is a rapist). Trump would have just as easily called them thieves or murderers, or even just dirty or ugly. The statement is performing the act of hating Mexicans, and “rapist” was selected because it was the strongest way to express that hatred.
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Yeppers. That’s why I sometimes like to communicate in gif form on here. Sometimes written language can’t get at the nuance we need to actually communicate meaning in a full way.
That’s a very good point… It’s part of the reason why people on either side talk past each other, it’s an entirely different relationship to language and the truth. The key, though, is that they are still being “truthful” to their beliefs when they do so, even if it’s not actually the truth.
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I think we keep talking sideways. By the absolutist reasoning you use, you are correct. But it’s the same reasoning that leads to “there are no poor people in America“, when you compare them on a global average.
You seemed to be suggesting that slave labor exclusively, or at least primarily, benefited people who owned slaves.
We have been attempting to explain how a slavery-based economy had economic benefits for white Americans across many walks of life whether they owned slaves or not. That’s one of the main reasons so many non-slave-owning people were willing to fight a goddamn war to preserve the practice.
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No, you read it that way, targeting single introductory sentences, ignoring the context and specifics that follow.
And yes, it was primarily the large scale plantation owners that benefited. That class does it to this da, in every capitalist society. Depending on the size of disruption in intervening centuries they may be not relate d to the original members, but they are there.
I stop with this note: not making this a binary thing about black slaves, who, again, had it worse by orders of magnitude, and white benefactors, isn’t necessarily relativism. It is when any mention of black slavery gets countered with “whites where poor/treated like slaves, too”. Like with that Irish slaves myth.
But pointing that the system is dependent on various groups of disenfranchised people kept busy which each other is absolutely necessary. The story isn’t “you are white and have to face that you are privileged” but “THIS. And certain people want to feel you angry about realizing this and tie your hands by pushing POC and minority groups and women away instead of reaching out and change the system together.”
So… you ARE making the exact claim I just said you appeared to make?
Honest, I’m not trying to play gotcha or quote you out of context here.
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That was a bad wording owed to me being on a smartphone.
As long as a capitalist system extracts labor and growth from slavery labor, the nominally free workers benefit from this, the same way all Americans and Europeans right now benefit from dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Fucking over people who can’t fight back (because they live in the future/slave barracks/Africa or Asia) to award the paid working class with trinkets while extracting literally 90% of the profits.
Honestly appraising historical slavery and recognizing that it was a system that gave stolen benefit to a majority of white Americans will not “push POC and minority groups and women away”. False equivalencies and soft-pedaling a genocidal system is traditionally what make POC and others wary of working with someone.
It wasn’t a few rotten apples. While some profited more than others, it was a systemic imbalance. It’s good to be aware of who made the most, but try not to erase the experience of those who had it the worst.
Maybe read something like this to help you understand how deeply white people of all economic levels unfairly benefited from slavery:
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