General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: If you don't believe in (recognize) white privilege why the fuck are you on a Democratic Forum? [View all]Recursion
(56,582 posts)People here love the New Deal. But it was a white supremacist project; a combination of northern industrial corporatism and southern progressive racism (the 1910s-1920s incarnation of the KKK was entirely a Progressive phenomenon -- they championed prohibition, municipal reform, eugenics, women's suffrage... all the Progressive buttons were pushed). (This is another reason I'm not entirely comfortable with the label "progressive", because of its past.)
The New Deal created the white middle class by systematic theft from nonwhites. It was in some senses the "creator of whiteness", because prior to that time Irish, Italian, Slavic, etc. were considered "races"; after that all whites were "white" (the shift in language during this time period is quite striking). Examining white privilege leads to uncomfortable acknowledgements about the systems and structures many on this board put forward as the answers to everything.