(February 20, 2019 at 5:42 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I'll give you a perfect example: Dave Chappelle's bit about the last election-- he joked about knowing right away Trump was going to win when he showed up to vote, and he saw a bunch of tractors and stuff in the parking lot. But he also said: "You know what I didn't see? I didn't see any Deplorables." That kind of understanding is the right way, in my view.
Well, I don't think of poor white people and/or Trump supporters as "deplorables" either, unless they spout some blatant racist shit such as "we have to tolerate black people here". For me, the real deplorables are some of those among the top in terms of wealth and power,; they're the ones fucking us all up at the end. So I agree with Chappelle 100% here. And I'm pretty sure the others you have been conversing with agree as well.
But let me be clear here once again about something that can't be overemphasized, and I say this based on my interactions with you over several threads of this sort. I have never once argued that white people who are poor are not struggling and not suffering various obstacles in life that the other classes have not had to face. I think it's horrible that, again and again, we see extremely large disparities in income and wealth between the poor and the rich. It's why I was an avid supporter of Bernie back in 2016, and still to this day agree with his economic policies (I also agree with his policies when it comes to social justice issues, such as the need to fix the gender pay gap).
So whenever I have said poor white people as well have white privilege, you always need to keep in mind I'm applying that term rather passively to them. They certainly don't have wealth privilege or any really obvious privilege of the sort. The privilege they do have is a passive [and potentially active] one, in the sense that the perceived color of their skin never gets in the way of them achieving their goals. They face many many obstacles for sure, but skin color is not one of them (and skin color is a major one when it is an obstacle, unfortunately). So when you happen to be poor AND also of color, the issues compound.
And I say all this as someone who comes from a Middle Eastern background. I am not exactly considered a white person. If anything, I am more whitish, but even then I acknowledge I am privileged in at least a couple of ways. I am certainly of male gender, not transgendered, heterosexual, and ... if that counts at all, of good looks. Even with my quirks and all that, I've noted how other people treat me compared to how they treat (say) Indian people coming from overseas to work in the same company I work at. And yet, naturally, I used to have the same mindset I see some of you having. I remember the times people of color would exclaim about how white people are privileged and I would get triggered that they would even say such a thing, considering I personally never clearly felt that privilege. And when feminists criticized the patriarchy, I used to take it personal and think they were attacking me for being a man. It's only like a few years ago (in fact, sometime shortly before I registered in this forum) that I began to seriously read about these topics and listen to what people of color and what women themselves have to say about these issues. Once it got to that point, I no longer saw them as screeching feminists or SJWs or whatever, but I saw human beings who really struggled with various obstacles in their lives that we never have to face, and they were really frustrated that they weren't being listened to or that we seem to be more likely to sympathize with assholes in MRA and/or white supremacy groups than we do with them. It also doesn't help that we have shitty videos all over YouTube by white men and boys making fun of women and people of color for talking about their experiences in passionate and emotional ways or making controversial points that are actually quite reasonable but seen negatively by these uploaders.
I guess there is this feeling of offense in us white/whitish men that, when we're told we have privilege or told we have implicit biases that may be racist or sexist, we don't naturally take the time to seriously consider this because (even though we don't all understand exactly what is being said) we don't often imagine ourselves to be that bad. And this is a psychological thing that one cannot really help. Most of us do like to think that we're really really good people who've worked hard to get to where we are (which may very well be the case), but we tend to always miss the point by thinking so. So we lash out and we say things like "but if you knew me, you'd know there's no way I'm racist or sexist or privileged" or "racism is there but it's not as bad as you make it out to be, stop with the conspiracy nonsense" while disregarding the experiences that these other people have had to face. They call this white anxiety, or as an expert puts it, "white fragility".
So yeah, I fully agree with Chappelle there, but I think that brief video does not give you the full picture of what he would've said if he had more time.
