I have yet to see a latino or asian begging.
Of course, poverty is much bigger than the beggars.
I think I mostly agree with Freddy. There's something exotic about the poverty of POC; and something mildly shameful about the poverty of whites....in the general consciousness.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- (Posting is not necessarily agreeing. Personally, I'd go a bit further than deBoer does here and say that a lot of white middle-class leftist contempt for "rednecks," "white trash," etc. is itself a form of racism. Or, perhaps, that much of what passes for racism is in fact classism. But they're too similar to be wholly different creatures. And I certainly don't think the young white leftist approach to white poverty he critiques here can be reduced to simple disregard.)
"Left-wing thought has become utterly dominated by intersectionality. (Or, really, a vague and loose concept that has taken the name of the more rigorous and specific theory of intersectionality.) Marxist and socialist journals publish tons and tons of work on race and gender, far more than they do on class as an overarching phenomenon. Left-wing publishing, for good and bad, is defined in large measure by a particular social and cultural group. And that group has little use for issues of class that aren’t ancillary to issues of race and gender. Just check the publishing records of the popular left. Find how many of them concern, say, the destitute white underclass of the Appalachian mountains. You won’t find many!
"There are many reasons for why discussions of race and gender move the needle with the young left in a way that class analysis doesn’t. Obviously, a genuine desire to address racial and gender injustice is a very large part. But less helpfully, there’s a powerful lack of familiarity with poor white people among many young leftists. Many or most of them grew up in economic security or affluence and went to elite colleges. In such environments, they had little or no opportunity to experience white poverty as a lived phenomenon. In contrast, their experiences of black and Hispanic people stem largely from media portrayals of such people as poor, criminal, and generally dysfunctional. White poverty plays outside of the narrative that they have developed from this limited perspective. Another major reason is implicit racism. They talk endlessly about their high regard for 'POC.' But their tendency to see poverty and hopelessness as inherently associated with people of color ultimately reveals a condescension, a quiet belief that black and Hispanic people can’t help but be poor. Though they direct apathy at best towards the white poor and concern for poor people of color, ultimately they belittle both, in that their lack of concern for white poverty implies that they think white people deserve it while black and Hispanic people can’t be expected to do better. It’s the soft bigotry of low expectations for people of color and high expectations for white people. The truth is that in both cases, there are systemic inequalities that contribute to the immisseration of both groups, though surely they are different for each."
http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/06/26/i-dont-recognize-the-world-peter-frase-is-critiquing
-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."
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