White Americans Fail to Address Their Family Histories

[Wingus Dingus]

60. I believe white privilege existed, and still exists.

I'm not denying that. My Polish ancestors must have benefitted from it, perhaps less so for my Italian/darker-skinned ancestors, they looked foreign.

But beyond that, they had few advantages and many challenges in life, not a one of them had it easy. All of my great-grandparents and grandparents lived and died as struggling farmers and small business owners and working class people, with little to show beyond having raised decent, productive American children. I bristle against the reduction of them, and their lives and experiences as immigrants and Americans, to being either perpetrators of black or Native American racial injustice, or merely beneficiaries of a physical characteristic they couldn't help. Mostly they were consumed with their own problems and challenges and dreams, and I think that's fine.

This is the weakness of wokeness, IMO, and why too much of it hurts Democrats. I don't like using the term "woke", but seriously, asking people to examine their white ancestors through a negative blame-laden lens of today's attitudes, and "addressing" it--whatever the fuck that means--is just stupid.