Why I don't like the term "white privilege"

[shaayecanaan]

16. More so than that...

"progress" becomes a matter of simply adding women and minorities to the ruling class. When the Old Left was still a force, the rich had to actually contend with the idea of paying a fair amount of tax.

It used to be that fairness meant reducing the wealth gap between the working class and ruling class. These days it is simply a matter of making the ruling class more politically pluralistic.

I am not denying racism, eg black people not getting picked up by taxis or served quickly in stores. I am saying that those kinds of racism are a natural function of class and of white people have preponderantly more money - ie, "I wont pick up that Black guy, I'll pick up that white guy because he'll likely be wealthier and he'll tip me better". Even Black or Asian taxi drivers will pick up white customers more frequently than Black.

It is very, very easy to appeal to ethnic tensions, far easier than it is to build class consciousness. Bebel (leader of the German Democratic Socialists before WW1) said that "Anti-Semitism was the socialism of fools". He wasn't just being PC. He meant that appealing to ethnic resentment against Jewish capitalists, rather than class resentment of capitalists as a whole, was a fool's errand.