Don’t be a classist anti-racist! [View all]

[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/