10 ms·

That's why I really don't like the "white privilege". Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US yet they're being lumped with the ric

That's why I really don't like the "white privilege". Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US yet they're being lumped with the rich white people as if they have the same privileges When you're poor as fuck and having a shit life and everyone keeps telling you how privileged you are, you stop believing those people and turn to alternative sources for information

seamyb88 6y ago
If you don't view BLM within the overarching framework of socialism, then you are susceptible to misinterpreting the movement, as I believe you have done. If you think BLM protesters aspire to white levels of wealth inequality then you are mistaken. This would imply that the many, many people on the streets are demanding that they let a selected proportion of black people through the glass ceiling, just enough so that wealth inequality is racially equal. We could combine the two phrases here: all black lives matter.
M2Ys4U 6y ago
It's an "all other things being equal" sort of thing, unless you're actually having a discussion that acknowledges intersectionality. To use your example, if you're poor as fuck, is it worse if you're white or if you're not? For many, it's worse if you're not white - and that's white privilege.
awb 6y ago
Agree that lumping people into buckets isn't helpful. But I think the idea behind privilege is that if you're poor and white you on average have a different experience than being poor and black (namely not having to deal with as much racism) even though you both still have to deal with poverty and other biases/stereotypes.
- ipnon 6y ago
  On some statistical measure, sure, but on an individual level it alienates everyone who clearly has an objectively awful or even subpar life despite being held responsible for privilege they clearly don't hold. Regardless of whether one judges this individual should be held responsible for this privilege or not, the alienation means that those who don't fit stereotypes are excluded.
  - awb 6y ago
    Colin Quinn had a bit about a poor white plumber literally eating shit while being told to "acknowledge your privelage". I agree that group categorizations aren't going to be universally relevant at the individual level. It is challenging to talk about larger trends without using group identities though unfortunately.
Spivak 6y ago
But they're not! At this point I think we should just scrap the word privilege and call it "shit I don't have to deal with because I'm X" since it's apparently too politically charged to have a discussion about it. Just one example. As a white person I have never in my life cared about getting a receipt from any store I shop at, have ever been accused of shoplifting, have never had the self-checkout person have even the slightest suspicion even when I was broke in college and ringing up way too many bananas, and when the sensor things beep the workers apologize and tell me to just go. This is not the experience of black Americans where children have to be taught to always get and keep their receipts because they get stopped so frequently.
- neutronicus 6y ago
  That particular thing is nothing a couple tats, a scruffy beard, and a move to West Virginia can't change for you
- belorn 6y ago
  You can fix that by going into stores dressed as a homeless person or any other out-group that contain white people that the store owner/employees in-group has likely an negative emotional response to. For maximal negative response, portrait yourself as a male with, low social economic status, different race, different biological markers, and signals of different cultural values. As per research this will likely result in activation of fear, disgust and low activation of empathy.
  - coryfklein 6y ago
    The OP's point holds true. Consider a clean and showered young male that is not dressed like a homeless person. This is generally quite achievable for most of the poor population. This individual will experience problems if his skin is black that he wouldn't experience if his skin is white.
    - baskire 6y ago
      Out of naivety, do you believe that a black person cleanly shaved wearing a button down and slacks would still have that experience? Do you think a white person dressed in gangster clothes would be unscathed? My current opinion is that the biggest factor is not race but likelihood of fitting a stereotype of "criminal" based on dress code
threatofrain 6y ago
> Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US... Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets vs comparable poor blacks, and they are more likely to capture gains from federal assistance programs. They are also far less likely to be imprisoned for drugs or other judicial hurts. When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still. Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  And wiser people would see the benefit of not pitting them against each other.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    Gotta keep everyone riled up and at each other's throats while we pilfer the country.
- philwelch 6y ago
  > Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets At the point you reach “poor”, the assets are gone, so this doesn’t work. > When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still. The opioid epidemic was never solved, let alone “urgently”. I remember it emerging as a campaign issue in 2016. 2019 had a record high number of deaths by opioid overdose and it looks like things are going up as well. The US government reports that “fentanyl trafficking offenders have increased by 3,940.9% since fiscal year 2015.” ( https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/fentanyl-trafficking https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/fentanyl-trafficki... ) so it doesn’t seem like they’re taking a hands-off enforcement approach either. To some degree there is a difference, but that’s because we already tried the War on Drugs and learned from our mistakes. > Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people. Like everything, it’s more complicated than that. Here’s Mother Jones on “superpredators”: ( https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-history-super-predators/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-hi... ). The term refers to a criminological observation that many violent juvenile criminals fit a specific type that is particularly dangerous and untreatable. It turns out that the cause for this was childhood lead exposure and that the super predator theory was out of date already by the time it was developed. It also turns out that childhood lead exposure disproportionately affected black children. The Clinton-era crime bills that led to mass incarceration also had a fair amount of support among black leaders. One reason for this was that crime was much higher in the early 90’s, and black people were disproportionately the victims of that crime. Cracking down on crime (including drugs) was seen as a benefit to the black community rather than a detriment. ( https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/04/09/473648819/some-blacks-did-support-bill-clintons-crime-bill-heres-why https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/04/09/473648819... )
raxxorrax 6y ago
The problem is when a stupid college kid from an elite institution without significant life experience tells you about privilege and is trying to educate you. Even with mostly leftist views I would fully support the redneck uprising that comes after and you don't need to be a psychologist to understand the reaction. I doubt there is any deeper truth about racism to be learned here...
neutronicus 6y ago
Not "just as fucked," but, yes, very much fucked. I don't have a problem with the term itself. I do think that if you are white, college-educated, and urban you are an exceptionally poor candidate to discuss it or indeed use it with the rural white poor. There's a little bit too much just-world-fallacy subtext about why you, who are white, are doing so much better economically than they, who are also white, and why they ought to submit to your moral guidance. Honestly, trying to get the message out via local religious leadership is probably the best bet.
ghusbands 6y ago
There are plenty of kinds of privilege. Being white means that when you're pulled over (if you manage to afford a car), you know it's not because you're white. Being white means that when you turn on the TV, you mostly see folks of your race represented. Being white means being told that throughout history, your race is what made the modern world what it is. Being white means being able to always find the company of people of your race [1]. Being white means that when you write good school essays, you're not continually asked who wrote them for you. Being white means that BLM protests can be the first time you understand how Black people are treated. There are similarly privileges from being born in the US, from being straight, from being male, from being able-bodied and from being cis-gendered. Being poor doesn't eliminate those and is still disenfranchising, but not having the above privileges _and_ being poor is even worse. [1] https://nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/white-privilege-unpacking-the-invisible-knapsack https://nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/white-privile...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
djsumdog 6y ago
I believed this for years, and in spite of all the stuff going on now, I think it still holds true. And the trouble is, saying that "It's about class, not race" is considered problematic in recent books like White Fragility. So this opinion, which can be debated and talked about and discussed in debt, is now considered wrong, taboo and even a 'dog whistle' to say you're actually racist. And I want to acknowledge that there is a difference in lived experience. A poor white person may not get followed around in a store by security like a non-poor black person. There are some things we have difficulty understanding because we don't have the lived experience. But we're in danger of closing off the conversation before we even get to the topic of those lived experiences, and we're told that if we can't have those lived experiences, our opinions are also invalid.
- gjulianm 6y ago
  There are two issues. First, I don't think it's one or the other: race privilege exists, and class privilege exists too. Second there are actual dog-whistles disguised as reasonable viewpoints, and it's incredibly hard to distinguish them. Suppose you're talking to a random person, with no context on who they are, probably on a site where a comment took five minutes to write and doesn't fully develop the ideas. First time you find that, you might think it's just someone with a different opinion. But as time goes on and you notice that certain arguments are used not to promote debate but to derail conversations, you get suspicious and start seeing everything as dog-whistles. In other words, public debate is degraded by people that don't present arguments honestly and by people who are either way too worried or not worried at all about those dishonest people
  - santoshalper 6y ago
    You are starting to get to the root of it. For years, people with liberal or progressive viewpoints tried to have good-faith discussions and debates with conservatives only to get back absolute garbage. Arguments like: "If you let gay people marry, what's next allowing adults to marry children?" or "You never complain when black people kill each other, so you are just pretending to care about police brutality" These are undeniably bad faith arguments - all strawmen, slippery slopes, and other ugly rhetorical devices. In most cases this was all you would get back in return for trying to have a good faith debate with conservatives. So yes, after a while, we started to assume that people who disagreed with us were acting in bad faith and were essentially trolls. This is extremely unfortunate. It is harmful to the discourse. It casts a wide net that catches the honestly curious or unorthodox thinkers (people that I may think are incorrect but arguing from a position of good faith). But, it has also been extremely effective. In one generation, the relatively brutal tactics have helped us make real progress on gay rights and drug-decriminalization in the United States. Cancellation tactics work as an effective tool for combating bad faith arguments and trolls, so until conservatives want to come to the table for real discussion and debate, that is how things will continue to be. I look forward to a time when this is not necessary. To be clear though, the well of intellectual discourse was poisoned long ago by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Sean Hannity, et al, and a million internet trolls. The only part of this they don't like is that now they are losing the horrible game they invented.
zemo 6y ago
"white privilege" does not mean "if you're white you have no problems", it means "you less frequently encounter obstacles that were erected because of the color of your skin".
- mc32 6y ago
  I think a problem with this line of thinking is if treats people like averages (stereotypical) -but people are not the average. People don’t see the nuance. So it’s kind of like the other side of the coin of traditional stereotyping. So on the one hand we’re saying let’s not stereotype people, but in the other hand let’s stereotype a subset of people.
  - zemo 6y ago
    Stereotyping is when you say that "people of a group all (do|are) X". The concept of "white privilege" is describing how society treats people; it's not describing how those people are. It's saying "people of a group all encounter X". That's a very different thing.
    - mc32 6y ago
      Except the “all” encounter is a stereotype. It’s just framing things differently to try to make it different. It’s like saying “well, we’re not targeting women, we’re only targeting people who visit gynecologists”.
      - zemo 6y ago
        again. Stereotyping is when you say this is how a person is. Describing white privilege is describing how a person is treated by society. They're different.
        mc32 6y ago
        Society isn’t homogeneous. How I’m treated in my neighborhood isn’t the same as another one or another country. Yes, on average, if you belong to certain group and display certain signifiers (positive or negative) those will elicit certain responses —but they’re not universal. If you’re a middle class kid (on average) and you go to an ethnic business (that’s outside your ethnicity) that hires people of lesser means and you apply for a job, you’re likely to lose out to someone of the same stratum as the rest of the employees (they may think you’re out of place, you wouldn’t take it serious, you’d want more money, who knows...)
paloaltokid 6y ago
Tell me you honestly believe this interaction would play out the same if the driver were white: https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/hrny1v/watch_the_show_folks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/hrny1v/watc...
hardwaregeek 6y ago
I agree that poor white people should not have their problems dismissed. However, there are some differences between poor white people and poor black people. For one, there's a lot more poor black people per population. The average black family has a tenth of the wealth of the average white family. Second, poor black people face large amounts of racism, both systematic and personal. They live in particularly poor neighborhoods due to redlining. They face significantly harder times getting hired for jobs. They encounter police brutality. Again, the solution is not to dismiss the problems of poor white people. However it's also important to acknowledge that at a macro level, poor black people need more help to counter systematic effects. Imagine we have two countries. Both have poor people, but one country has an average household wealth that is a tenth of the other country's. One country was brutally colonized, had its citizens enslaved for hundreds of years, faced segregation for a 100 years after that, and only passed significant civil rights legislature in the last 70 years. The other country had full rights for all men for 150 years, then full rights for all citizens for 100 years after that. The other country reaped the rewards of its colonized counterpart. It grew wealthy on it. Yes, there are poor people in the country, but its citizens have never been enslaved. They have never been made to be second class citizens. They have never lived under fear of lynching and false conviction. At a personal and present level, there is not a gigantic difference from a poor white family and a poor black family. But that ignores the larger context of history and of quantity.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> That's why I really don't like the "white privilege". Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US No, they aren't. Particularly, they aren't as fucked as equally poor members of a number of other races, for a whole variety of reasons (direct racism is one of them, but not the only one.) Conversely, even rich members of other races face disadvantages relative to rich Whites because of their race. It's true that wealth is itself a form of privilege, and poor whites, while they may participate in White privilege, don't participate in the privilege of wealth.

seamyb88 6y ago

If you don't view BLM within the overarching framework of socialism, then you are susceptible to misinterpreting the movement, as I believe you have done. If you think BLM protesters aspire to white levels of wealth inequality then you are mistaken. This would imply that the many, many people on the streets are demanding that they let a selected proportion of black people through the glass ceiling, just enough so that wealth inequality is racially equal. We could combine the two phrases here: all black lives matter.

M2Ys4U 6y ago

It's an "all other things being equal" sort of thing, unless you're actually having a discussion that acknowledges intersectionality. To use your example, if you're poor as fuck, is it worse if you're white or if you're not? For many, it's worse if you're not white - and that's white privilege.

awb 6y ago

Agree that lumping people into buckets isn't helpful. But I think the idea behind privilege is that if you're poor and white you on average have a different experience than being poor and black (namely not having to deal with as much racism) even though you both still have to deal with poverty and other biases/stereotypes.

ipnon 6y ago
On some statistical measure, sure, but on an individual level it alienates everyone who clearly has an objectively awful or even subpar life despite being held responsible for privilege they clearly don't hold. Regardless of whether one judges this individual should be held responsible for this privilege or not, the alienation means that those who don't fit stereotypes are excluded.
- awb 6y ago
  Colin Quinn had a bit about a poor white plumber literally eating shit while being told to "acknowledge your privelage". I agree that group categorizations aren't going to be universally relevant at the individual level. It is challenging to talk about larger trends without using group identities though unfortunately.

Spivak 6y ago

But they're not! At this point I think we should just scrap the word privilege and call it "shit I don't have to deal with because I'm X" since it's apparently too politically charged to have a discussion about it. Just one example. As a white person I have never in my life cared about getting a receipt from any store I shop at, have ever been accused of shoplifting, have never had the self-checkout person have even the slightest suspicion even when I was broke in college and ringing up way too many bananas, and when the sensor things beep the workers apologize and tell me to just go. This is not the experience of black Americans where children have to be taught to always get and keep their receipts because they get stopped so frequently.

neutronicus 6y ago
That particular thing is nothing a couple tats, a scruffy beard, and a move to West Virginia can't change for you
belorn 6y ago
You can fix that by going into stores dressed as a homeless person or any other out-group that contain white people that the store owner/employees in-group has likely an negative emotional response to. For maximal negative response, portrait yourself as a male with, low social economic status, different race, different biological markers, and signals of different cultural values. As per research this will likely result in activation of fear, disgust and low activation of empathy.
- coryfklein 6y ago
  The OP's point holds true. Consider a clean and showered young male that is not dressed like a homeless person. This is generally quite achievable for most of the poor population. This individual will experience problems if his skin is black that he wouldn't experience if his skin is white.
  - baskire 6y ago
    Out of naivety, do you believe that a black person cleanly shaved wearing a button down and slacks would still have that experience? Do you think a white person dressed in gangster clothes would be unscathed? My current opinion is that the biggest factor is not race but likelihood of fitting a stereotype of "criminal" based on dress code

threatofrain 6y ago

> Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US... Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets vs comparable poor blacks, and they are more likely to capture gains from federal assistance programs. They are also far less likely to be imprisoned for drugs or other judicial hurts. When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still. Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people.

raxxorrax 6y ago
And wiser people would see the benefit of not pitting them against each other.
- jacobush 6y ago
  Gotta keep everyone riled up and at each other's throats while we pilfer the country.
philwelch 6y ago
> Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets At the point you reach “poor”, the assets are gone, so this doesn’t work. > When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still. The opioid epidemic was never solved, let alone “urgently”. I remember it emerging as a campaign issue in 2016. 2019 had a record high number of deaths by opioid overdose and it looks like things are going up as well. The US government reports that “fentanyl trafficking offenders have increased by 3,940.9% since fiscal year 2015.” ( https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/fentanyl-trafficking https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/fentanyl-trafficki... ) so it doesn’t seem like they’re taking a hands-off enforcement approach either. To some degree there is a difference, but that’s because we already tried the War on Drugs and learned from our mistakes. > Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people. Like everything, it’s more complicated than that. Here’s Mother Jones on “superpredators”: ( https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-history-super-predators/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-hi... ). The term refers to a criminological observation that many violent juvenile criminals fit a specific type that is particularly dangerous and untreatable. It turns out that the cause for this was childhood lead exposure and that the super predator theory was out of date already by the time it was developed. It also turns out that childhood lead exposure disproportionately affected black children. The Clinton-era crime bills that led to mass incarceration also had a fair amount of support among black leaders. One reason for this was that crime was much higher in the early 90’s, and black people were disproportionately the victims of that crime. Cracking down on crime (including drugs) was seen as a benefit to the black community rather than a detriment. ( https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/04/09/473648819/some-blacks-did-support-bill-clintons-crime-bill-heres-why https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/04/09/473648819... )

raxxorrax 6y ago

The problem is when a stupid college kid from an elite institution without significant life experience tells you about privilege and is trying to educate you. Even with mostly leftist views I would fully support the redneck uprising that comes after and you don't need to be a psychologist to understand the reaction. I doubt there is any deeper truth about racism to be learned here...

neutronicus 6y ago

Not "just as fucked," but, yes, very much fucked. I don't have a problem with the term itself. I do think that if you are white, college-educated, and urban you are an exceptionally poor candidate to discuss it or indeed use it with the rural white poor. There's a little bit too much just-world-fallacy subtext about why you, who are white, are doing so much better economically than they, who are also white, and why they ought to submit to your moral guidance. Honestly, trying to get the message out via local religious leadership is probably the best bet.

ghusbands 6y ago

There are plenty of kinds of privilege. Being white means that when you're pulled over (if you manage to afford a car), you know it's not because you're white. Being white means that when you turn on the TV, you mostly see folks of your race represented. Being white means being told that throughout history, your race is what made the modern world what it is. Being white means being able to always find the company of people of your race [1]. Being white means that when you write good school essays, you're not continually asked who wrote them for you. Being white means that BLM protests can be the first time you understand how Black people are treated. There are similarly privileges from being born in the US, from being straight, from being male, from being able-bodied and from being cis-gendered. Being poor doesn't eliminate those and is still disenfranchising, but not having the above privileges _and_ being poor is even worse. [1] https://nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/white-privilege-unpacking-the-invisible-knapsack https://nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/white-privile...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

djsumdog 6y ago

I believed this for years, and in spite of all the stuff going on now, I think it still holds true. And the trouble is, saying that "It's about class, not race" is considered problematic in recent books like White Fragility. So this opinion, which can be debated and talked about and discussed in debt, is now considered wrong, taboo and even a 'dog whistle' to say you're actually racist. And I want to acknowledge that there is a difference in lived experience. A poor white person may not get followed around in a store by security like a non-poor black person. There are some things we have difficulty understanding because we don't have the lived experience. But we're in danger of closing off the conversation before we even get to the topic of those lived experiences, and we're told that if we can't have those lived experiences, our opinions are also invalid.

gjulianm 6y ago
There are two issues. First, I don't think it's one or the other: race privilege exists, and class privilege exists too. Second there are actual dog-whistles disguised as reasonable viewpoints, and it's incredibly hard to distinguish them. Suppose you're talking to a random person, with no context on who they are, probably on a site where a comment took five minutes to write and doesn't fully develop the ideas. First time you find that, you might think it's just someone with a different opinion. But as time goes on and you notice that certain arguments are used not to promote debate but to derail conversations, you get suspicious and start seeing everything as dog-whistles. In other words, public debate is degraded by people that don't present arguments honestly and by people who are either way too worried or not worried at all about those dishonest people
- santoshalper 6y ago
  You are starting to get to the root of it. For years, people with liberal or progressive viewpoints tried to have good-faith discussions and debates with conservatives only to get back absolute garbage. Arguments like: "If you let gay people marry, what's next allowing adults to marry children?" or "You never complain when black people kill each other, so you are just pretending to care about police brutality" These are undeniably bad faith arguments - all strawmen, slippery slopes, and other ugly rhetorical devices. In most cases this was all you would get back in return for trying to have a good faith debate with conservatives. So yes, after a while, we started to assume that people who disagreed with us were acting in bad faith and were essentially trolls. This is extremely unfortunate. It is harmful to the discourse. It casts a wide net that catches the honestly curious or unorthodox thinkers (people that I may think are incorrect but arguing from a position of good faith). But, it has also been extremely effective. In one generation, the relatively brutal tactics have helped us make real progress on gay rights and drug-decriminalization in the United States. Cancellation tactics work as an effective tool for combating bad faith arguments and trolls, so until conservatives want to come to the table for real discussion and debate, that is how things will continue to be. I look forward to a time when this is not necessary. To be clear though, the well of intellectual discourse was poisoned long ago by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Sean Hannity, et al, and a million internet trolls. The only part of this they don't like is that now they are losing the horrible game they invented.

zemo 6y ago

"white privilege" does not mean "if you're white you have no problems", it means "you less frequently encounter obstacles that were erected because of the color of your skin".

mc32 6y ago
I think a problem with this line of thinking is if treats people like averages (stereotypical) -but people are not the average. People don’t see the nuance. So it’s kind of like the other side of the coin of traditional stereotyping. So on the one hand we’re saying let’s not stereotype people, but in the other hand let’s stereotype a subset of people.
- zemo 6y ago
  Stereotyping is when you say that "people of a group all (do|are) X". The concept of "white privilege" is describing how society treats people; it's not describing how those people are. It's saying "people of a group all encounter X". That's a very different thing.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Except the “all” encounter is a stereotype. It’s just framing things differently to try to make it different. It’s like saying “well, we’re not targeting women, we’re only targeting people who visit gynecologists”.
    - zemo 6y ago
      again. Stereotyping is when you say this is how a person is. Describing white privilege is describing how a person is treated by society. They're different.
      - mc32 6y ago
        Society isn’t homogeneous. How I’m treated in my neighborhood isn’t the same as another one or another country. Yes, on average, if you belong to certain group and display certain signifiers (positive or negative) those will elicit certain responses —but they’re not universal. If you’re a middle class kid (on average) and you go to an ethnic business (that’s outside your ethnicity) that hires people of lesser means and you apply for a job, you’re likely to lose out to someone of the same stratum as the rest of the employees (they may think you’re out of place, you wouldn’t take it serious, you’d want more money, who knows...)

paloaltokid 6y ago

Tell me you honestly believe this interaction would play out the same if the driver were white: https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/hrny1v/watch_the_show_folks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/hrny1v/watc...

hardwaregeek 6y ago

I agree that poor white people should not have their problems dismissed. However, there are some differences between poor white people and poor black people. For one, there's a lot more poor black people per population. The average black family has a tenth of the wealth of the average white family. Second, poor black people face large amounts of racism, both systematic and personal. They live in particularly poor neighborhoods due to redlining. They face significantly harder times getting hired for jobs. They encounter police brutality. Again, the solution is not to dismiss the problems of poor white people. However it's also important to acknowledge that at a macro level, poor black people need more help to counter systematic effects. Imagine we have two countries. Both have poor people, but one country has an average household wealth that is a tenth of the other country's. One country was brutally colonized, had its citizens enslaved for hundreds of years, faced segregation for a 100 years after that, and only passed significant civil rights legislature in the last 70 years. The other country had full rights for all men for 150 years, then full rights for all citizens for 100 years after that. The other country reaped the rewards of its colonized counterpart. It grew wealthy on it. Yes, there are poor people in the country, but its citizens have never been enslaved. They have never been made to be second class citizens. They have never lived under fear of lynching and false conviction. At a personal and present level, there is not a gigantic difference from a poor white family and a poor black family. But that ignores the larger context of history and of quantity.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> That's why I really don't like the "white privilege". Poor white people are just as fucked as any other minority in the US No, they aren't. Particularly, they aren't as fucked as equally poor members of a number of other races, for a whole variety of reasons (direct racism is one of them, but not the only one.) Conversely, even rich members of other races face disadvantages relative to rich Whites because of their race. It's true that wealth is itself a form of privilege, and poor whites, while they may participate in White privilege, don't participate in the privilege of wealth.