- Re: The working class is colour blind
Posted by Sinister Burt
on October 22, 2021, 12:51 pm, in reply to "Re: The working class is colour blind"
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The point i made is that rather than understanding why poor white kids aren't doing so great being based on the obvious socio-economic realities of being poor, they want to waffle on about leftie teachers saying the words white privilege being the actual cause of the poverty - this is just barking and shouldn't require a committment to 'identity politics' (whatever that means) for a socialist to oppose it. The idea that teachers (or uni lecturers for that matter) are hotbeds of radicalism is laughable - and the idea that they teach kids anything particularly controversial in schools similarly so - more than our job's worth as a rule. When we do teach these sort of topics, we have to do it with plenty of sources and show both sides of the arguments - most importantly we have to teach a bit of critical thinking methods so students can analyse stuff for themselves. It's teachers teaching kids the reality of socio-eonomic factors (along with how they intersect with ethinicity) that they really want to stop (they call such teaching 'marxism' and want to ban that too). If it's up to them they'd just be teaching us it's all about our personal responsibility, about the 'great people' in history and how empire was good actually. If we go along with their reactionary bullshit in this case (albeit for clever class-related reasons, or just to win votes from bigots) we'd be the fools imv - why let these kunts set our agenda? However much i agree with the primary importance of class/wealth in society, it's not a zero-sum game - we can walk and chew gum - we don't have to talk about these subjects in the same class-denying way as yer hilary clintons might, we fcuking wrest the topics back off these bastards and tell the complex messy truth of it. The idea that white privilege doesn't exist is ludicrous imv - eg as a poor white person i have the privilege of not being quite as likely to be pulled by the pigs as a black person of the same income. (i still get pulled because my scruffy clothes and vehicle, more than a richer white person, so rich person's privilege is a large factor but that doesn't cancel out the other one (unless you're proper rich)) Also, i'm just much more likely to be poor in the first place if i'm not white, so those disadvantages apply even more. Now i would argue probaly like you lot that these disadvantages ultimately derive from class relations and structures eg from slavery, but it's no comfort to a black person (i guess) that their disadvantage derived from the structures of society 200 years ago - the reality now is the reality now. Also it's not like all bigotry can be blamed on class. |