Sam Smith - Talking about “white privilege” works against its purpose and has probably helped the Trumpists convince lower income white Americans that liberalism isn’t on their side. In fact about 40% of low income Americans are non-latino white. Hearing liberals complain about their “privilege” doesn’t help bring them into the fold.
The con of convincing lower class whites that blacks and latinos are their enemies goes back to the Jim Crow days in the south and Trump has been quite successful using it again. Alternet news service described an example last August:
President Donald Trump, recalling the law-and-order themes that President Richard Nixon and segregationist George Wallace used in their 1968 presidential campaigns, has been trying to frighten suburbanites into voting for him. In one of his tweets, Trump claimed that if former Vice President Joe Biden is elected president, he will use "low-income housing" to destroy suburbia as we know ….
In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the term "inner-city" was often used in connection with African-American neighborhoods. … But gentrification has accelerated considerably in recent decades, forcing many working class African-Americans — and working class whites and Latinos, for that matter — to leave inner-city neighborhoods and look for more affordable housing in suburban areas… Suburban areas in general are much more racially integrated than they were 40 or 50 years ago. In a 2016 report for the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, Alan Berube (deputy director of the Brookings Institute) found that combined, blacks, Latinos and Asians comprised 35% of the suburban population in the United States.
The job for Trump and company has been made easier by a nearly two-thirds decline in union membership as a percent of the work force. Labor unions are not just organizing institutions but educational ones as well, helping to keep workers from being fooled by the likes of people like Trump.
Further, as
liberals have become better educated, their interest in the economic issues of
the least successful has declined. As Adam Harris wrote in the Atlantic, “In
the 2016
election, 48 percent of college-educated white voters voted for Trump,
compared with 66 percent of non-college-educated white votersFor example, Wikipedia notes that under Franklin Roosevelt, “The Works Progress Administration employed 8.5 million people in its seven-year history, working on 1.4 million projects, including the building or repair of 103 golf courses, 1,000 airports, 2,500 hospitals, 2,500 sports stadiums, 3,900 schools, 8,192 parks, 12,800 playgrounds, 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, and 651,087 miles of highways and roads.”
And as I noted back in the Obama years, “[New Dealer] Harry Hopkins got the same number of people working in four weeks as Obama promised he would in two years.”
There’s a way to reverse this trend away from effective economic programs: turn it into an issue that derives its strength by the common interests of lower income whites, blacks and latinos. One striking exception to the general underplaying of common economic issues is the Rev. William Barber who has revived Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign. As he told the NY Times last month about his advice to Joe Biden,” Seventy-two percent of Americans want a minimum-wage increase. Give them that. If you do that, all these people that are mad, they’ll say,’Wait a minute. I was told to hate this person, but he increased the living wage in my family.’ And these people in the South, in states that didn’t expand health care, they need it now. So do the policies that will help people in their pain. That will cause a lot of them to say, ‘You told me they were socialists, but they just passed policies that are making sure my child has health care.’ The way to heal the soul of the nation is to pass policies that heal the body of the nation.”
The secret is to blend the efforts of those Americans without privilege, whatever their ethnicity.
1 comment:
I concur. "White Privilege" is a stupid term. It completely misses the issue. Being treated in a decent fashion is not a privilege--it is the minimum to expect in a functioning democratic society.
While its use may have been ironic initially; it's use by mainstream middle class Whites doesn't seem to be that. White privilege as a description of how Blacks are not treated, would point to the goal being racial abuse for all races.
GOP and Trump have done a masterful job of pulling the White working class away from the Democrats. But it should also be noted that the Democrats have done an horrendous job, by letting White working class feel they are better represented by GOP.
In terms of poor phraseology, wouldn't we be better off if BLM was "Black Lives Also Matter". More inclusive and less likely to piss people off.
One other wording that has always annoyed me, in the area of labor rights for some reason, if one is covered by labor laws one is referred to as "non-exempt". Who wants to be "non-exempt"? Frequently being exempt confers a benefit. Why wouldn't the term have been "covered" or "included".
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