Liberals like to conveniently forget that being a white woman is also a very privileged position in our society.
Most White women want to maintain their privileged position too.
That assumes they recognize the class struggle.
The problem can be exceptionalism.
Where the person thinks they started from nothing no matter how elevated their position was.
This leads to the thought that anyone below them didn’t try as hard as they did and any attempts to uplift will belittle their accomplishments.
Messaging must maintain the uplifting of the entire working class. Then they will support you because the self interested have something to gain.
Where the person thinks they started from nothing no matter how elevated their position was.
In America, this is the internalized narrative that everyone has, it’s our national mythology.
I’ll do you one better. I am a working-class born American, who went to Harvard and became part of the upper-middle class. Many people I meet in my adult life, tell me I should have never been born because my parents were unable to provide me with college/grad school education out of their own money. They actively hate and resent the idea of people working their way up in life because it makes them feel bad about themselves. Sometimes I get told that my lack of wealth, makes me MORE privileged than them. Literally last month I was out with someone whose parents had PhDs, who started lecturing me no how ‘oppressed’ they were by having such successful parents, and my uneducated rural upbringing was ‘more privileged’ than theirs because ‘your starting point was so much lower and therefore it was easier for you to achieve things’. It was wild. But I encounter such attitudes very frequently. It’s basically the sentiment that affirmative action is cheating and allowing ‘unworthy’ minorities to attend schools and ‘displacing’ more deserving wealthier white/asian students.
The upper classes do not want anyone to achieve what they have, they want to horde it for themselves. In their own minds, they are the victims of an evil and undeserving working-class who wants to steal from them.
I’d be more interested to see how many more/less white/black women voted red/blue compared to previous years rather than the ratio of those who did.
That kind of contextual information is useful, but beware of anybody giving it to you without the bigger context of absolute numbers before and after. Liberal media loves using shifts like this to imply there’s a bunch of centrists who decided to change which way they’re leaning instead of “dems failed to improve the material conditions for their constituents, so fewer people voted dem. Meanwhile 12 black business owners voted republican instead of 6, an increase of 100%”
In 2016, CNN and MSNBC spent months using that type of framing to blame black people for Hillary’s loss, essentially calling them ungrateful, homophobic, sexist, conservatives.
a lot of black people are homophobic, sexist, and conservative. and racist.
both things can be true.
this idea that black people are all progressive liberals is just a projection from white progressive liberals complete lack of interaction with people outside their little enclaves. they aren’t.
black voters are largely democratic, yes, but they are typically not progressives on social issues.
What everyone forgot, esp on the Dem/liberal side, is you win by buying a coalition of voters around various issues on which they can find some mutual ground. Which is exactly what Trump did in '16 and '20 and the Democrats did with Obama in '08 and '12.
Trump focused on the border, economy, and other rhetoric around which a lot of people found common interest. And racism was one of those interests. Many Hispanic voters also wanted the border closed. My Asian friends parents were Trump supporters, because they were anti-immigration. They were first gen immigrant and they hate new Asian immigrants coming here.
Can we stop this “it actually goes back to” argument style.
Look I understand that racism is very entrenched in America from its very beginning, just like every other country on Earth. To frame an argument like that is to say through subtext that no act of reformation can ever be enough.
It reframes humans as inherently ignorant which I hope we all know isn’t the case, any of us who know better only do so because we were taught to think critically.
I understand it’s important to have historical context when defining issues of race and inequity but the issue comes from it being a way to sweep all talk of change under the rug.
It also gives current figures moral cover by saying that no one person is specifically responsible, letting any recent figures off the hook when they’re very culpable. It frames racism as an issue of human nature which it may be but it’s in tandem with ignorance, something only some of us were able to escape because of education.
It’s weaponizing historical context to take away our feeling of agency which is something that has been a tactic on the right and particularly in Russia for years.
Racist rhetoric didn’t begin with Trump but the scale, centrality, and normalization is like no other.
Deep roots should never be a way to absolve recent actors. So while I think historical framing is important, I think it’s also important that we’re mindful we don’t weaponize it to both belittle our progress and erase the possibility for change.
Of course the system has systemic inequality and racism, of course we should work to change that and we should use historical context to identify the disadvantages that have been given to people and how we can fix them. But in the meantime we can still hold the people here and now accountable for what they have done to accelerate the normalization of direct racist tones.
To spend your life tracing only original sin would be to miss the nuance of how it’s evolved.
To frame an argument like that is to say through subtext that no act of reformation can ever be enough.
That’s the point though. When you frame it that way you turn it into an extreme issue, to which you allowed an extreme reaction. You can never acknowledge progress or growth or change. It’s can therefore be perpetual ragebait. And Americans eat this up. They love it.
One of the key tenants of modern leftist ID politics is that racism is a form of original sin that can never be washed clean, and often ti goes so far to claim that being white is makes you irredeemable racist, thus you own an infinite debt to minorities. And you must spend your life perpetual seeking forgiveness for your racism and being forever vigilant at any possibly racist thoughts you or anyone you know has.
Racism in the United States is astonishing. As a non-American, until Obama’s time, I used to think that, there was just some institutional racism left over from past decades and a few extremists in the South—but not much else. After Obama, it’s incredible how most white people have become extremely right-wing extremists, all because of a single president of mixed descent. Now, the problem seems enormous, and a solution doesn’t appear to be anywhere in sight.
I’m a white American from the northeast and I felt the same way. When trump won the first time, it felt like I’d just discovered that the floor underneath my bed was rotting away.
I was blind to it because I didn’t need to see it, but it was always there. My relative privilege insulated me and ensured that I contributed to the problem
I am from Boston, northeast has always been super racist and still is.
We just hide our racism by using different words, like ‘those people’. Go to any town/city meeting and you will see 50% of the people going up to talk about their ‘concerns’ using phrases like that. It’s all very veiled and vague, for sure, but it’s incredibly obvious what they mean. Being racist here is 100% cool as long as you are not doing it directly.
And hell, most of my white progressive anti-racists friends, are very very uncomfortable around non-white people. I had the ‘privileged’ of growing up a lower-income mixed race community, but most of my peers have zero experience with non-white people.
I don’t know about “most” white people, but other than that, yeah
Most people are racist. Some of the biggest racists I ever knew were Asian and Hispanic.
It’s just white racism is considered wrong and bad, and the other kind of racisms are not, because the white media industry is obsessed with self-flagellating itself over white on black racism as begin the only legitimate racism.
There is also a massive issue with asian on black, and black on asian, racism. But White people don’t know about it or talk about it, because white people are mostly obsessed with racism in terms of their own guilt, rather than understanding how it operates systematically across various groups. A lot of Trumps minority supports were for him because he’s racist and they agree with him.
US feminism is mostly centering on the issues of white, middle-class women, failing to fully integrate the needs of women of color, marginalized, or lower-income women. This lack of a unified approach leads to fragmented advocacy and fragmented outcomes, rather than a broad movement.
Also 53% of white women vote for trump compared to 7% of black women who voted for trump. This showed that they gave more priority to racial identify over collective welfare of all women in usa .
White feminist often ignore or won’t acknowledge that in usa —specifically land ownership and early capital accumulation were built upon the exploitation of Native American and African people.
The systematic removal of Native Americans from their land provided massive amounts of property that was subsequently passed down through generations of white families, serving as a primary source of generational wealth which black women or native American women doesn’t have.
The wealth generated by the labor of enslaved African people in agriculture and other industries directly enriched white slaveholders and, by extension, their present generation . Jim crows law curbed wealth generation for black women compared to white women
Wealth disparity between Black and white women in the USA is severe, with white households holding nearly 10 times the median net worth of Black households, or approximately 15 cents for every dollar. Black women face lower income, less intergenerational wealth, lower homeownership rates, and higher debt, often keeping them in lower-wage service jobs without benefits.
white feminists often ignore these issues Best example would be :-1)DEI
Despite DEI mostly benefitted white women , most of the white feminist organisation ignored whether black women benefitted or not .they doesn’t cared about native American or black women . They often fail to view things from racial angle by focusing just on gender angle
2)Most of the educational scholarships are benefitted by white women over native American ,black women
Unlike Scandinavian countries where feminists became inclusive that they heavily prioritised welfare and empowerment of minority women belonging to Sami tribe community Whereas in United States , everything is just in words not in action.
US feminism is mostly centering on the issues of white, middle-class women, failing to fully integrate the needs of women of color, marginalized, or lower-income women.
Literally the only feminism I’ve heard about for the past 10 years is intersectional feminism.
Also 53% of white women vote for trump compared to 7% of black women who voted for trump. This showed that they gave more priority to racial identify over collective welfare of all women in usa .
Very much a just-so story. Imo, a far more reasonable interpretation breaks voting patterns along tribal identity, while most women voting care about more things than the very amorphous “collective welfare of all women”. Interesting to note that 38% of latina voters voted for Trump, a statistic strangely absent from your argument…
White feminist often ignore or won’t acknowledge that in usa —specifically land ownership and early capital accumulation were built upon the exploitation of Native American and African people.
I have never met a single self-identifying feminist who would not agree with this to some extent.
The wealth generated by the labor of enslaved African people in agriculture and other industries directly enriched white slaveholders and, by extension, their present generation .
I think Adam Smith would have a lot to say about this. Specifically, he would probably point out that the slave states really had an awfully small economy compared to the free states, and that most of the wealth generation which occurred in the US occurred due to productivity gains driven by technological innovations which were most aggressively exploited in the north. In the long run, few people could claim to have really benefitted noticeably from american slavery - it was just a shitty thing to do for no reason.
Despite DEI mostly benefitted white women
I mean, from the pro-DEI arguments I keep hearing on lemmy, DEI seems to mostly involve removing names from resumes before they are rejected by AI or something. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this critique had merit - most people who benefit from adding footholds inside the system are people who know how to work the system.
2)Most of the educational scholarships are benefitted by white women over native American ,black women
I really don’t have anything to say to this, because it feels like you kind of just shut down in the middle of a rant. Are you okay? Did you have a stroke?
it’s a convoluted rant blaming white women for trumps win, or something. because if only they were the right kind of feminist they’d have seen the light! or something
I particularly enjoyed the random injection of NA land issues, as if that’s somehow the fault of white middle-class feminism?
Wild stuff. But your typical leftist lemmy rant that is completely out of touch and incoherent and blames other people for being ignorant fools for not being their particular flavor of leftism. Because if only everyone believed what they did, we’d live in a socialist utopia where injustice would not exist and butterflies would fly out of everyone’s assholes when they farted.
