John Thornton wrote:
>
>
> If two equally qualified applicants apply for a job, one white and one
> black, even if they are actors trained to give the same nonverbal clues
> during the interview, the white applicant gets the job most of the time. Of
> course some on this list are arguing that racism does not actually benefit
> whites but it sure as hell benefits the ones looking for jobs.
>
You are operating from radically individualistic premises. Everyone knows this (or ought to), and of course even more egregious cases exist. But this tells us _nothing_ about what racism does to the working class _as a class_. It has been shown over and over again that the greater the spread in wages, socialservices, education, etc. between white and black workers, the worse off _both_ groups are in comparison with areas in which the spread is less.
The question of why a given individual white worker "profits" from racism and the question of why large numbers of white workers support racist policies have NO RELATION whatever to the quite separate question of whether white workers as a whole _objectively_ suffer from or profit from racism. It is pretty clear that white workers _as a whole_ suffer seriously from the effects of white supremacy and structural racism.
If there were fewer black men in prison there would almost certainly be fewer white men in prison.
If education for blacks improved education for whites would improve even more.
And so on.
And the problem of fighting the oppression of blacks is separate from (or rather prior to) changing the 'attitudes' of individual white workers.
"Backlash" is a misunderstood phenomenon. It does _not_ represent an increase in racism among white workers (or an increase in sexism among males); what it represents is a "coming out of the closet" of those whose racism had been temporarily "closeted" by black activism. (This is analogous to the "turning off" myth. When someone says "That turns me off" what they mean is that gives them the courage to express their vicious attitudes that were already there. Those who use that phrase are, about 99 times out of a hundred, liars. The hundredth case would have been "turned off" by anything else too.)
Carrol
> John Thornton
>
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