White privilege widespread

[Aspiring Humanist]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/05/24/scitech/main20065864.shtml

The biggest difference, however, was that whites believe that anti-white bias has increased as anti-black bias has decreased. On average, the researchers found, whites rated anti-white racism as more prevalent in the 2000s than anti-black bias by more than a full point on a 10-point scale. Eleven percent of whites said whites are currently "very much" targets of discrimination, compared with 2 percent of blacks who said blacks are "very much" discrimination targets.

[Aurorus Ruber]

Check out the comment section for extra depression.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Sorry, this is going to be long because I have two major points I want to make: first is on privilege theory which, personally, I think this theory obfuscates oppression in capitalist societies.

IMO White privilege isn't increasing, anti-black, anti-Latino, and anti-Arab racism are on the rise. These attitudes reflected in the polls are not just "passively racist" or the result of "white ignorance" as I think that privilege theory seems to suggest-- it is the result of a sustained and systemic attempt by the US ruling class to roll-back the gains of the civil rights era.

The people who influence society (the ruling class) employ various ideological methods to try and do this (because if they just said, "we are cutting affirmative action because the workforce is changing and we don't really need a lot of skilled people, so we don't want to spend the money educating as many people" they probably couldn't get away with it):

- co-opting the language and heroes of the civil rights era (even Malcolm X gets a stamp and liberals try and present a simplified version of this revolutionary as a "black bigot" who later embraced multiculturalism, rather than a more complicated, radical and dynamic figure who to the end was pushing forward and would inspire the next wave of late-60s radicals like the Black Panthers).

-Those still too dangerous to co-opt are vilified and isolated like the Black Panther Party... they are regularly equated to the KKK all over right-wing radio and TV with the help of liberals - Glenn Beck and Limbaugh even used the less political New Black Panther Party to smear the legacy of the Party from the 60s. When New BP members were outside polling stations as independent observers as some kind of political stunt about black voter disenfranchisement (which obviously has a very real history and many people believe it happened in 2000 and 2004) FOX news and the Tea Partiers made a whole big fuss about how this one guy from a marginal political group was disenfranchising whites - apparently if a black guy stands outside a polling station, white people are too scared to vote(?).

- there has been a long campaign to create the idea of "post-racial" America and what was the fringe right in the 1980s in regards to ideas about racism in the US are now repeated not only by mainstream Republicans and Democrats, but also Obama himself. This is not an idea that formed organically, it has been pushed from above and promoted in academia to counter discussions of systemic racism in the US.

- Wrapping discredited racist myths in new academic-sounding clothes. In the 1990s people like Denesh D'Souza argued that racism was not the root of inequality in the US, it was that "black American culture" isn't as good as "white American culture" - a fancy academic way of re-inventing the old racists lie that blacks/Mexicans/pacific islanders/native Americans/Asians are poor because they are just "lazy". Now even Obama says that education inequality is due to black people not wanting to "sound white" and that blacks do worse in schools because black dads are absent or "watch too much Sports Center".

- They do this by kicking the material roots of US racism out from under. They try and present racism not as something related to institutions like underfunded schools, segregated housing, sub-prime loans, the police, racial profiling, etc but as a "feeling" or something induvidual (which is also why I tend to reject privilage theory - I think it often ignores the need to actually combat the physical pillars of oppression and focuses more on white/male/straight people "understanding and acknowledging their privilage" - this approach serves to reinforce this induvidual and personal rather than systemic appproach racism IMO).

This ideas are not due to "privileging" the white experience (which whites anyway), it's about destroying the consciousness and institutions that came in the wake of the Civil rights and black power movement.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Ok, second part:

Think about what happened with that professor who got arrested in his own home - the media made it not about how even a famous, well-off, and middle-aged black man is considered a suspect by police, but about "miscommunication" and the cop and the professor was treated as "equally the cause of the situation". Think about how Glenn Beck said that Obama "has a deep-rooted hatred of white people" and think about how Limbaugh said that after Obama's election black kids beat up white kids for their lunch money. Think about how banks specifically targeted blacks and Latinos (and poor whites) for sub-prime loans (and then the right-wing has the fucking nerve to blame the housing crisis on the "generosity of banks in giving loans to poor people who couldn't afford them). Think about how Oscar Grant III was shot for absolutely nothing by a cop and how the media in the bay area reported stories about how this cop was voted "most huggable" in the yearbook but didn't mention racists incidents that got him in trouble at that same school. Think about Jena 6 and the wave of people hanging nooses in order to intimidate black people. Think about New-freaking-Orleans after the hurricane!

There's no fucking question of who gets targeted for racial oppression in the US more when it's between average white people and average black people - so where do these ideas come from? They come from the top of society and are pushed through think-tanks and carried by footsoldiers in the media and academia.
So why, at a time when anti-black racism is as kicking as much (if not more) than anytime of the last generation is the ruling class trying to argue that white people suffer more and that anti-black racism doesn’t really occur/matter anymore? This happened in the 1990s and was centered on education – a false myth was created and pushed that affirmative action “gives” undeserving or otherwise ineligible people from minority groups spots that should “rightfully” go to white students with good grades. Seriously, I was in college then and it was like the white-bigot’s urban legend… “I have a friend whose cousin’s neighbor got a perfect SAT score and straight As in high school, but he couldn’t go to college because of Affirmative Action!” Back then it was the start of trying to lower working class expectations for achieving a college degree and it’s been a downhill slide ever-since in California and now students pay more than double what I had to pay 14 years ago and college is becoming more and more out of reach for all working class people.
Now it’s a similar process but the ruling class has an even bigger need to ramp up racism (and other oppressions) on the one hand and convince people who are not directly targeted by the racism that THEY are the real victims and anyone who says otherwise is “playing the race-card” or getting some kind of “entitlement”. The reason is that they are engaged in an attempt to drive down the conditions for the entire working class. It’s similar in Europe and other regions and because of imperialism, the capitalists are trying to out-do eachother in making their working classes more exploitable. A positive response is Greece, Egypt, Spain, UK and US student protests… this is what the ruling classes want to avoid, but since they can’t avoid trying to “fix the recession on our backs, they are looking for ways to divert that class anger or neutralize it. Rascism is the best tool the ruling class has for doing this because it allows them to divide and conquer the working class. They can directly attack an isolated group of people to set a precedent that then effects all workers. So in Europe they are attacking immigrants and the roma and in the west of Europe, eastern-europeans etc. In the US it’s (Latino) immigrants, Latinos in general, Blacks, Arabs.

[Nehru]

White privilege may still be intact after all these years, but part of it is due to the inferiority complex that nonwhite people suffer. Whites alone are not to blame - without cooperation from the exploited, the exploiter can never succeed. Gandhi said something similar, I think.

[Jimmie Higgins]

White privilege may still be intact after all these years, but part of it is due to the inferiority complex that nonwhite people suffer. Whites alone are not to blame - without cooperation from the exploited, the exploiter can never succeed. Gandhi said something similar, I think.I don't know if I agree with what you are arguing here, I don't think we should or can blame the oppressed for their own oppression in any way. But I think one thing that can be said is that the lack of independent grassroots working class struggle or even civil-rights-like progressive struggle (of workers of all ethnic or sexual or religious backgrounds) makes it much harder to push back ideologically against racist arguments pushed by the ruling class in the mainstream.

For example, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh can only claim that ACORN or even Obama are radicals or militant (I think beck said that Obama was a radical who believed in black reparations) is because there are no high-profile unapologetically radical activists organizing right now. Imagine if Limbaugh claimed that Obama was in favor of reparations and there was a current analogue of Malcolm X who would then go on TV and say, "Unfortunately Obama does NOT support that, I do and this is why people should demand it!". It's the same in most of the post-1970s movements: when NOW or feminist groups equivocate on abortion rights, then it weakens our ability to win people to what would have been a mainstream position back in the day when abortion was legalized (under the Nixon admin no less).

[Nehru]

I don't know if I agree with what you are arguing here, I don't think we should or can blame the oppressed for their own oppression in any way. But I think one thing that can be said is that the lack of independent grassroots working class struggle or even civil-rights-like progressive struggle (of workers of all ethnic or sexual or religious backgrounds) makes it much harder to push back ideologically against racist arguments pushed by the ruling class in the mainstream.

For example, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh can only claim that ACORN or even Obama are radicals or militant (I think beck said that Obama was a radical who believed in black reparations) is because there are no high-profile unapologetically radical activists organizing right now. Imagine if Limbaugh claimed that Obama was in favor of reparations and there was a current analogue of Malcolm X who would then go on TV and say, "Unfortunately Obama does NOT support that, I do and this is why people should demand it!". It's the same in most of the post-1970s movements: when NOW or feminist groups equivocate on abortion rights, then it weakens our ability to win people to what would have been a mainstream position back in the day when abortion was legalized (under the Nixon admin no less).

All I am saying is that white supremacy is accepted, albeit grudgingly, even by nonwhite people. White standards are normally accepted as universal standards even by the nonwhite communities - this is too evident to be dismissed. Nor am I blaming the oppressed, just saying they're too busy trying to fit into a framework set up by the Europeans.

[Aspiring Humanist]

by ChrisDallasTX May 29, 2011 2:46 AM EDT
No one is more a victim of racism than the white, Christian, man in America. Any other religion, race, parasites, etc get perferred treatment, but we have left out and we are ready to strike back hard at them who took our country away.




I have lost faith in humanity

[Jimmie Higgins]

I have lost faith in humanity
I know what you mean, but it's not really humanity's fault, it's the result of a conscious and systematic attempt by our rulers to divide people and erase the gains of the post-war era working class - both economic and social gains. Replacing jim-crow with a new way to get the same results (demonetization, obfuscating systemic racism, imprisonment and repression etc).

Also, don't aspire - be a humanist! Being a humanist doesn't mean that you have to overlook some of the shit, it just means that you know it's possible for humans to change the conditions that produce the shit. Vonnegut, Upton Sinclair, Eugene Debs, Zinn, and even often-misanthropic Mark Twain were all humanists who recognized both the good and evil that contemporary and past people do - they just knew, to various degrees, that it wasn't an inherent and unchanging condition for human society to be fucked up and for people to do fucked up things.