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The problem I have with the narrative you advance is that you, like so many others I've seen in the past few years, seem to just ignore the existence of poor wh
by nilkn 8y ago
The problem I have with the narrative you advance is that you, like so many others I've seen in the past few years, seem to just ignore the existence of poor white people. This country has entire towns and cities of poor white people who are facing the same sorts of situations I described, but you make statements that suggest that it's only nonwhite people who experience this sort of thing regularly. Do you think harsh treatment from a landlord would have been a surprise to all the white people I grew up around as a kid who were on food stamps living in rented trailers? These folks had to move around every few years because they got kicked out or couldn't make rent. A sympathetic landlord would have been the surprise to them.
This is exactly the viewpoint I was trying to deconstruct with my original story -- that having all the white privilege in the world does not stop these things from happening to you, no matter what the narrative is, and that these experiences are simply not exclusive in any way to nonwhite people. You are either unaware of a huge demographic of people in the US, or you willingly ignore their presence.
None of this is to say that white privilege just flat-out doesn't exist, but it does explain why your manner of discussing it is highly unlikely to connect with white people who have regularly experienced all the things you seem to suggest only happen to minorities with high frequency. You appear to be discussing an alternate reality that does not exist for them.