white privilege

White People Are Running Scared As Their Long Reign Crumbles

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Anti-racist blogger Shay Stewart-Bouley of Black Girl in Maine shared news of white backlash against Black History Month in the U.S. generally and targeting her specifically. She posted the above photo to social media platforms with her commentary and the predictable backlash from terrified, angry white people ensued. 

Her analysis of the “It’s OK to be White” message is worth a read.

Coincidentally, my weekend kicked off with my 6 year old grandson sharing that he had watched Portland City Councilor Victoria Pelletier read a nasty letter she received and decided to publicize on social media.

(Note: I greatly appreciate my grandchildren’s parents for their active anti-racist educational efforts in our mostly white family.)

My grandson remembered Councilor Pelletier from the community television show we do together as he and his mom had been in the studio audience last year. As a young constituent of Portland’s 2nd District, he was concerned that people were “being mean” to Councilor Pelletier. 

Yup, me too, and kudos to Pelletier for lifting the rock and showing us the ugly racism that she and other people of color face constantly when elected to public office.

All this on the weekend of the Chinese weather balloon theatrics.

White people locally, nationally, and internationally are expressing their perception of being backed into a corner where their power over others and control of common resources is eroding rapidly. 

NATO, a white supremacist military alliance, has bombed, occupied, and pillaged populations around the globe. Now that Ukraine is being used in a proxy war to weaken China’s strongest ally, Russia, the violence is targeting whites — as it did in air strikes on Yugoslavia in the 1990’s.

But NATO and its U.S. masters are watching their economic power slip away. 

This is what working class white people are experiencing domestically as well.

Arguments about fairness and equity fall on deaf ears. The fact that Black households in the U.S. have a mere 11% of the household wealth of white households doesn’t matter to these terrified white folks. They can’t afford enough food or heat and are panicking. Their healthcare options are pathetic, and access to luxuries like regular dental care are almost non-existent.

Media owned by billionaires have people in the U.S. trained to blame each other rather than the root of their common problems: corporate government that allows, even facilitates, profit from misery. 

Example of a false dichotomy narrative common in the U.S.

Big Pharma and weapons manufacturers spring to mind but there are many more.

The U.S. doing business as NATO is panicking, too. The Ukraine war sanctions on Russia harmed Europe’s economy, not Russia’s, and hastened the abandonment of the U.S. dollar as a currency for international trade. Billions of dollars and weapons later, Ukraine’s military cannot prevail, and it has already lost in the humanitarian sense with neo-Nazis steering the ship of state.

Enter the weather balloon and cue the China-bashing hysteria in the press.

Most likely the PR aspect of hyping this appearance of a hot air balloon (there have been many in the past, but did you ever hear about them?) was to create a pretext for U.S. Secretary of State Blinken to cancel his announced visit to Beijing to meet with President Xi. This small step toward peaceful relations with China had to be stopped by those who want war and are very rapidly arming up in the Pacific region.

White supremacy has had its day. 

Delaying tactics are in some cases hastening its demise. Decisions made from fear are often not logical or ultimately beneficial to those making them.

It’s logical to be fearful of losing the major privilege accorded those who appear white. Although they play the victim, white privilege is very much something they benefit from all the time. Enslaving labor plus other plunder of colonized populations and their resources has created an artificial standard of living for white people that could never have endured on a level playing field.

So, as loss of status plus economic disaster overtakes this group, they lash out in myriad ways to stave off the inevitable. 

From the micro level where leaders of color are insulted and threatened to the macro level where NATO moves nuclear weapons into place all over the globe and ramps up anti-China rhetoric, white people are running scared.

Divide & Conquer, Part 3: White v. Human

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Source: McGill University

The divide and conquer trope at the heart of the U.S. empire’s moral rot is race.

Race is the biologically imaginary distinction between humans based on melanin i.e. skin color.

The fact that white supremacy was first enforced against indigenous people in the Caribbean and North American continent gets muddied by the ideology of Christianity’s Doctrine of Discovery where not-white = heathen. 

It took 1619 and the enslavement of African people to start cementing in place a permanent underclass based on the skimpy ideology of skin color-hair texture.

White America has been sitting on a powder keg of race relations ever since, with discontent always brewing, and terrified owners desperate to keep their power over workers.

Enter white supremacy and its unearned benefit, white privilege.

When I was a young child my father pointed out that I was white but that fact didn’t make me better than anyone else, just luckier. “Many doors will be open to you that would not be if your skin were a different color,” he explained.

Some examples of what dad was talking about:

Dad used the GI bill to get a college education after discharge from the Army. Many Black GI’s did not receive this earned benefit. They also did not receive GI bill support for home ownership as millions of white veterans did.

This set up Black families in the U.S. for generational disparities in net worth. As reported by the Federal Reserve:

In the 2019 survey, White families have the highest level of both median and mean family wealth: $188,200 and $983,400, respectively. Black and Hispanic families have considerably less wealth than White families. Black families’ median and mean wealth is less than 15 percent that of White families, at $24,100 and $142,500, respectively. Hispanic families’ median and mean wealth is $36,100 and $165,500, respectively. 

The 1619 Project is a collection of research-based essays on how white supremacy warped not only our hearts and souls but the actual structures of government (think electoral college). It also argues that racism hurt labor organizing. What true strength in numbers can there be if white workers don’t stand shoulder to shoulder with workers of color? How will labor stand up to capital if solidarity is rotted from within by racism?

The Project’s authors also cite the dreadful state of public transportation in this country as an effect of racist public policies based on white flight from cities to suburbs. 

The horrifying state of policing likewise is a logical outgrowth of slave patrols and the notion that any white man with a gun is entitled to rob any person of color of their freedom. How many #sayhisnameDonovanLewis cases will there need to be before white people stop funding more and more violent police forces out of fear? 

Police gunning down unarmed, even sleeping, Black and brown people is part of the very fabric of the U.S. Now, with cell phone cameras and bodycams for police, even white people can see the problem.

And as Chris Hedges argued recently, a low-income white person without health care, living precariously as the U.S. empire declines, clings to gun ownership as the final bulwark against humiliation.

Black majority cities like Jackson, Mississippi and Flint, Michigan go without potable water for years.

Mortality and other indicators of health are significantly different by race, both pre and post Covid.

Source: Ben & Jerry’s

Mass incarceration for a myriad of victimless crimes (cannabis possession springs to mind) denies Black families of their parents, and Black communities of their voters. And keeps ex-cons in the prison labor force many compare to slavery, but out of the labor/ force where they would compete with white workers.

Jennifer Schulte aka “BBQ Becky” became famous for calling police in Oakland on Black men who were grilling with charcoal in an undesignated area of a public park.

White women have played an outsized role in demonizing Black people just for existing. Emmett Till was lynched at age 14 after white adult Carolyn Bryant Donham lied about him sexually harrassing her, but a grand jury in Mississippi still failed to indict Donham for her role in Till’s death.

Media has pushed the narrative of an alleged criminal class based on melanin so relentlessly that even Black and brown people are more likely to identify what a young man of color is holding as a gun when it’s actually a cell phone or a soda can.

Liberals like 3rd grade teacher Jane Elliott could easily demonstrate the educational impacts of separate, unequal treatment based on eye color, but that did nothing to change systemic racism.

Some believe, and I’m among them, that reparations is the only thing likely to effect real progress.

It would be hard to find a more divisive issue than reparations. Unless it is the first Black president of the U.S. — a neoliberal who did almost nothing to address economic disparities by race, but allowed a lot of white people to pretend that electing him had ushered in an era of post-racism. Uh huh.