yes. This reminds me of the way white collar unemployment and job insecurity was treated in the early-mid-90s. Factory workers had been treated to that kind of job insecurity for decades. all of a sudden when it was a group it wasn't supposed to happen to, it became an issue of concern. When it's a group that it's supposed to happen to -- the poor and working class because their culture made them the inept losers that they naturally are -- no one cares. we have cultural explanations to console ourselves that it is, ultimately, their fault that they are among the also-rans. As Barbara Ehrenreich explores it and as Katherine Newman explored it previously in Falling From Grace (and countless others had done before with those exposed to chronic plant shutdowns and deindustrialiation), because they have no other structural explanations through which to understand their fate, they fall prey to individualistic explanations in which they blame themselves and others for their "fall from grace."
The reason why I think it's important to examine race *as well* as other factors is because it's imperative to understand how economic oppression is intersected by other structural forms of oppression. Yes, your experience of oppression is different depending on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class location, educational status, and so forth.
As an example, Peggy MacIntosh, famouos for her article "White Privilege and Male Privilege" offers a checklist of ways in which whites experience white skim privilege on a daily basis. If you look at her examples, she is clearly speaking to upper-middle strata whites. Their outlook, what they see in this world and don't see, what they care about, what they think is "political" and what is not, etc. -- all of this is shaped by their race and their social class.
As a consequence, when white working class students read the article, it doesn't speak to their experience. They often don't experience the advantages that MacIntosh says all white people do.
The answer is not to say "whoops!" I guess it's all about class (or whatever) but to push the analysis forward. To keep locating differences and articulating them. For too long, people oppressed by gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality have been told that they must fit under one big identity umbrella, their voices and experiences shut down and marginalized, told that their differences are the problem, that they need to stop focuing on these differences and remember that we are all one exploited class. Do it for the sake of the revolution! We'll get to your issues later. It does no good to claim, as Reed does, that now the tables have turned and the anti-racists are in charge, that they promise that we'll get to class later. The answer -- and I think he wants to say this -- is to examine it all. There's no reason to sacrifice one analysis for another.
OTOH, one of the reasons that I read Janet Halley was to explore her position: it's time to take a break from this all-encompassing integrative approach. To step outside of a feminist politics for a while and become a white, upper middle class white straight man and think about the world from _his_ perspective to ask, "In what way does a feminist politics, particularly power feminism, harm straight white men?"
I'll take Halley any day over Reed or WBM on this topic. I highly recommend that anyone with any interest in such a position read her. It's one of the most cogent and utterly fair critiques of identity politics around. She dos not set up straw men to knock down, and she's honest about where her sympathies lie and why. Its focus is feminism, but the analysis can be applied elsewhere.
shag
shag
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