Don’t be a classist anti-racist!

[NewSystemNeeded]

While naming “white privilege” is an important part of exposing and dismantling structural racism, I can see how the term “privilege” is hard to swallow for white folks on the downside of our economic system. Being marginalized in one power system doesn’t mean you can’t be privileged in another. But this particular form of pushback should not be so easily dismissed as generic white resistance to confronting white privilege. Rather, the resistance I experience from poor and working class white people feels like an important opportunity to check my own class privilege and cross-class competence, as well as to develop either different language or perhaps different techniques to help the language resonate more clearly. Force feeding doesn’t work with anyone, and it gets in the way of building cross-race solidarity.

This race/class conundrum is both ironic and predictable. We know from the excellent tools developed by anti-racism trainers and capacity builders like dismantlingRacismWorks and Western States Center that the whole race construct, from its creation, has been intertwined with class. We know that “white” or “whiteness” is not a biological condition, but was deliberately constructed in order to give people of European descent a common identity against Africans and indigenous people. This was necessary because the men with political and economic power were small in number, and they needed to break up the natural affinity poor Europeans felt toward their oppressed brothers and sisters. By doling out a handful of privileges, including the privilege of believing in the myth of meritocracy, the white elite bought racial solidarity from oppressed whites.

In my opinion, some of our modern-day tools for dismantling racism reinforce this construct to the detriment of us all. An un-nuanced approach to understanding white privilege as it intersects with class dynamics prevents us from building a truly powerful coalition of people of color and poor and working class white people.

http://www.classism.org/classist-antiracist/

[guillaumeb]

1. Welcome to DU and thanks for the link. eom

[brush]

2. Welcome to DU.

This graph from your article just nails a lot of the push back we see here o the term "white privilege".

"Take, for example, racial diversity policies in university admissions. To whatever degree they still explicitly exist, they understandably frustrate white people who also face barriers to advanced education. They intentionally, though not explicitly, pit people of color against low-advantaged white people to fight over the bare minimum of opportunity while leaving the exponential privilege of the white elite untouched."

If we can get people identifying with others of different ethnicities in the same economic class instead of being manipulated into vying against them by the one percent and those that work for them, we'd be well on our to empowerment.

Would you please talk more about the false construct of race. I've read something similar before that so called racial characteristics are nothing more than adaptations to climate. For example, melanin in darker-skinned people allows them to survive better in hot, tropical climates with much sun; northern indigenous people have shorter, squat bodies that help preserve body warmth in arctic weather, and so on.