JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
>To me, unemployment is not an immutable burden to be fairly divided among all
>races; it should be abolished, illegal. I don't want just an end to housing
>discrimination, I want an end to landlordism; I don't just want an end to
>housing loan discrimination, I want an end to bank power. I would like to get
>there from here, and racism is standing in my way and in the way of not just
>people of color (of course) but also the large number of people, a majority in
>this country, who are told they've got it made cause their skin is the approved
>color or their language is the dominant language. (And jack, if you can't find
>a job, it's your personal fault.)
>
Yes exactly, and this is exactly what the "do whites benefit from
racism" question serves to conceal. It's kind of like asking "do house
n-words have it better than field n-words"? What you accept, when you
accept the validity/significance of that question is that there HAS to
be conflict; there HAS to be scarcity; there HAS to be winners and losers.
Some people don't get jobs because they're not attractive; some people don't get jobs because they're not tall enough; some, because they're disabled. The point is not to make it into a contest either for status, or money, or privilege, or what have you. We need to do a certain amount of work to live; an hour of my life is worth an hour of your life. End of story. Maybe we need to fiddle with that a bit, but it's a much better starting point than what we've got.
>
>I don't mean this abstractly, racism--racist ideas and racist actions--wreck
>solidarity, leave rifts that are exploited by the boss and his politicians,
>and are used in a million ways to block needed reforms and confuse white people
>out of taking radical action. I already gave some examples on healthcare. In
>Florida, racist policies were used to disenfranchise *every* Democratic
>voter, not just those who were illegally taken off the rolls or those who were
>legally excluded. What about the wars--the racist illusions of white people
>allowed this happen; a whole lot of those sent will come home destroyed by the
>experience. Some benefits.
>
Absofuckinglutely.
>
>Earlier I noted the seven year life expectancy difference between blacks and
>whites in the U.S. Me, I think it calls for UN intervention, but we're
>probably going to have to fight it ourselves. Should we fight it on a moral basis
>only, or also on the basis that racism--the racist illusions and accompanying
>actions of white people--is a scam that's allowing the rich to screw the vast
>majority of us, of all colors, out of our birthright of freedom and the fruit
>of our labor?
>
The old bearded one said that until USA solves the racial problem, it
will not be able to have a successful revolution. And, boy, was he right.
>
>There's an unfortunate side effect that I've seen in feminist organizing: men
>react to learning of the shitty position of women by deciding that they as
>men have nothing to complain about, and then they try to 'help' us from what
>they imagine to be their position of great power and privilege. Not only is this
>irritating and condescending, it's wrong. Most of these guys have no power
>and little privilege in reality--but somehow they get into this tortured guilt
>trip which is unhelpful, to say the least. They could help feminism most by
>helping get their class enemies off all of our necks, which is what we tell
>them. I think something similar sometimes happens with race. As Shirley
>Chisholm said to white women who asked how they could 'help' (paraphrase) 'first you
>must free yourself from the illusion that you are now free.'
>
>
>
That was great. Thanks,
Joanna