This article originally appeared on the online newspaper Examiner.com, which I wrote for from 2009-2014, when I was summarily dismissed by its Legal Department as not the "right fit." But since I believe almost all of my Examiner.com articles are still of timely interest, I am re-posting them on my "Politically Incorrect Leftist" blog--GF
I’m white and poor. If that makes me “privileged”…then my anus is green!
And like a lot of
poor whites I certainly feel insulted by being scolded that I’m “privileged,”
that I’m an automatic, congenital beneficiary of “white privilege”—especially
when so much of this scolding comes from far better off white people, people
immune from knowing hunger, unemployment, and fear of becoming homeless. Scolding from people who don’t have to worry
about being able to pay their bills.
Scolding from people who don’t have to worry about having food on the
table. People whose romanticizing of
African Americans lies in inverse ratio to their trashing of poor and
working-class whites as congenitally, incurably, “racist.”
I had hoped to go
back to work under restrictions accepted as “reasonable accommodation” under
the Americans with Disabilities Act, but that was denied by my employer. My forced “resignation” because of medical
reasons was demanded instead. Now, after
three weeks of unpaid sick leave, which followed on less than two weeks on the
job before I had to take the leave, which followed further on being unemployed
for nearly two months, I’m in the most unenviable situation of having to find
employment as soon as I can, and searching for such employment while under
medical restrictions on the work I can perform.
In a tight job market. When I’m
down to my last $22 until my Social Security comes in again on December 3,
which definitely isn’t going to get me through November. When, on top of all that, my five-year-old
glasses frames broke, so I’m doing a rock ‘n’ roll legend Roy Orbison (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Orbison) imitation by wearing my alternate pair,
prescription sunglasses. Something
likely not to be acceptable on a job, and hardly good to wear to a job
interview, but I can’t afford new frames, much less a new eye exam.
And if that weren’t
enough, there’s also being verbally assaulted as inevitably, inescapably, possessing
“white privilege” simply because of the color of my skin. (Judging someone by the color of one’s skin:
isn’t that a definition of—racism?!) This habitually asserted by African American
“black cultural nationalists” of my acquaintance, along with certain of their
white allies, even in face of my hurt, chagrin, and yes, humiliation due to the
above. (A little sensitivity here,
please!) The only good thing in all this
is at least my rent’s paid because of my Social Security received November 3,
and my heating gas is assured for the month, because I also paid that bill out
of Social Security. My Social
Security—the mere $839 a month that stands between me and homelessness, even
when I’m working, because I have to rely solely on temp agencies for poorly-paid
work. But, due to all the obligations
that have to come out of it, the Social Security only gets me through the first
few days of the month. And will not get
me through at all on the later-in-the-month electricity and phone/Internet
bills (but ever try to do a job search without Internet and a phone?). So, without work, my only option is to become
a cringing beggar boy and make desperate appeals to “friends;” “friends” who’ve
helped me in the past (because they condescend to Poor Demented Idiot Savant
George!), but whose help comes at the cost of psychological usury. See, I’d better bow and scrape like a
medieval peasant before the lord of the manor if I want even a dime!
And all that makes
me “privileged”! Gives me as much “white privilege” as it does the
Koch Brothers, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner!
Yeah, sure; now back
to the color of my anus!
But yes, while
whites often can be openly racist, and even virulently so, this is far from
giving them some special “privilege,” this is far from being a “benefit” to
them, is far from a “psychological bonus” they not only receive but profit
from. Rather, as far as I’m concerned,
white racism is a severe liability, a delusional sense of superiority, a pernicious
illusion that blinds them not only to the commonalities of oppression they
share with their brethren of color, but makes them dupes of Occupy’s 1% (really
0.01%). The 1% (or rather, 0.01%) who
comprise those corporate and financial elites and their satraps who manipulate
far too many ordinary white people as puppets, who set them against people of
color as (often eager) attack dogs, but
who are still tightly leashed by the 1%.
“White privilege” is thus an often-unacknowledged liability that
undermines the white working class every bit as much as it oppresses African
Americans.
Further, while white
people can be said to have a relative “advantage” in many (but not all) cases
vis-à-vis African Americans, this is far from an absolute “privilege” that
ensures whites always come out on top, are always psychologically satisfied,
materially sated, and economically secure, no matter what their socio-economic
status. (Here I want particularly to
thank fellow left-wing writer Barry F. for suggesting use of the relative
“advantage” in place of the absolute “privilege” as a much more accurate
delineation, especially since it accords to the actual dictionary definitions and
connotations of the words.) So, “white
privilege” is a misnomer, a badly-conceived term that overstates what is
actually a “white comparative advantage” in many, but not all cases, especially
as involves the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, where poor and
somewhat better-off working-class whites are pitted against poor and
working-class blacks and Hispanics for the measly (and diminishing) scraps thrown
at them by the Occupy 1%; and where racism ends up a divisive force that pits
natural allies against each other for who will get to eat these scraps. (And in this regard, we should also not
overlook black racial animus against Hispanics, or Hispanic racial animus
against blacks.) So I long to substitute
the invidious misnomer “white privilege” (which is bound to feel insulting to
people who barely have even a pot to pee in, or not even that) with the above
“white comparative advantage” as a more accurate description of the evils
stemming from “white racism” or “white chauvinism,” which the white poor and
working class “benefit” from only in a delusory psychological sense—which means
white people deluding themselves about their racial “superiority,” even as
their “comparative white advantage” may make them only one or two rungs above
blacks or Hispanics on the socio-economic ladder, but where they are still in
danger of falling off!
I also find “white
privilege” to be a racially-charged derogatory term often used by
economically-secure middle-class and upper-middle-class whites to deliberately
disparage those “fellow” whites who are below them on the socio-economic
ladder, and who are thus “ignorant,” “uncouth” and in some cases, “really not
much better than blacks themselves.”
This often presents itself in “left radical” guise arising historically
out of the New Left of the 1960s—which was an anomaly as far as left radical
social movements are concerned. An
anomaly because it was a rebellious movement primarily of middle-class and
upper-middle-class students and student hangers-on without any significant
movement among the working class, quite unlike the movements of the late 19th
and early 20th Century, or of the 1930s.
The working class
from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s (i.e., those who worked in blue-collar and
lower-level white-collar jobs), especially in the U.S., had been made quiescent—not
only by the abnormally-extensive prosperity of the post-World War II years
(itself an often-overlooked legacy of the ferment that led to the New Deal,
which considerably redistributed the social wealth from the upper classes,
where it traditionally lay, toward the middle and even somewhat toward the
lower classes), but also by the deliberate cowing of the labor movement and the
promotion of “patriotic,” fervently anti-Communist, nationalism by the Cold War. These were important underpinnings
needed for justifying the Cold War as necessary to defend the U.S. as a “bastion
of freedom” against “Soviet tyranny.”
Dissent, especially from the left, was quashed and conformity to the
“social norm” actively demanded, especially from the working class, concomitant
with the celebration of U.S. “democratic pluralism” which allegedly made “socialism”
and “class struggle” not only obsolete, but downright subversive.
This period, from
the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, was a period of “social peace” celebrated
under the hegemony of “liberal tolerance and welfare-state beneficence,” the
convergence of center-left “liberals” of the Democratic Party with center-right
“moderates” such as Eisenhower and the bulk of the Republican officeholders,
universally accepted and praised, except for the ever-now-and-then virulent
emergence of movements from the troglodytic right “who just didn’t get it.” Movements such as McCarthyism, the creation
and growth of the John Birch Society, and the 1964 Republican Presidential
campaign of Barry Goldwater.
This, then, is a
thumbnail sketch of U.S. society on the eve of when “the lid blew off” in the early
1960s, corresponding with the emergence of the Civil Rights movement of African
Americans determined to finally eradicate segregation, racial discrimination
and Jim Crow once and for all; and with the Third World challenge to post-World
War II U.S. world dominance by rising anti-colonial nationalist and even
radical movements and the growing appeal of “neutralism” in the Cold War by
such forces—a period marked historically by the victory of the Communist
Party-led Chinese Revolution in 1949, India’s independence from British rule
under Gandhi and Nehru in 1948, the Bandung Conference of 1955 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandung_Conference), the victory of the Cuban Revolution by
Fidel Castro’s guerillas in 1959, and the former Western colonies’ coming
to independence across Asia and Africa in the
1960s.
The emergence of the
white student New Left in the early 1960s was also part of this new ferment,
and the freedom rides, sit-downs and nonviolent marches and demonstrations
undertaken by the Civil Rights movement drew a lot of support for their morally
just cause—which also drew a violent, virulent response from the die-hard
Southern segregationists, both politicians in office and ordinary white
Southerners, and an increasing white backlash against it in the North. The virulence of both these revealed not only
a deep fissure in U.S. society on racial issues; but also exposed the abject poverty
of millions of African Americans themselves, as well as their political
disenfranchisement. These the seamy
hidden underside of the “social peace” that had supposedly dominated, but which
had dominated at the social price of marginalization and invisibility of
millions, and the complacency, indifference and denial of the vast majority; a
complacency, indifference and denial that often moved to outright hostility
when so many were confronted on it by the Civil Rights movement, and which
found outlet through white backlash. The
spread of white backlash against Civil Rights was furthered even more by the
political savvy of Alabama’s segregationist Governor George Wallace, who found
a ready audience for his racial views when he couched them in “states rights”
and other non-racially-charged terms—thus giving respectability to the
resistance against black demands for equality and justice.
The New Left and the
Civil Rights movements grew and inspired more and more mass support, particularly
among college students due to the rapid growth of university enrollment. This
made the traditionally upper-class and upper-middle-class student bodies more
diverse as well as filled increasingly with students drawn from more properly
middle-class, lower-middle-class and working-class backgrounds. This happened because obtaining a college
education was relatively inexpensive compared to now, something which brought
in many such students who were the first ever in their families to go to
college, such as me. Many of these
students from more lowly backgrounds, if they were white, joined the
primarily-white New Left and anti-Vietnam War organizations; while many who
were black formed militant campus black student groups. The escalation of the Vietnam War moved many
campus and Civil Rights activists to become increasingly more “revolutionary,”
espouse more hyperbolic and inflammatory rhetoric, and organize more
confrontational protests. The Civil
Rights cause became the Black Power cause; the hippie counterculture arose,
along with its trappings of unconventional rock music and drug use; and
commonplace increasingly on the campus was the frequently florid and
uncompromising rhetoric which was so much part and parcel of “the way we all
talked in the 1960s,” despite what actual politics many of us had, or whether
we really had much of any coherent politics at all. (I myself, also part of the New Left, had this
inner confusion, even as I fancied myself a knowledgeable, yet uncompromising, “communist
revolutionary.”)
Albert
Fried, editor of the 1970 documentary history,
Socialism in America: From the Shakers to the
Third International, described the New Left of then as “only a mood” that
favored “forms of Socialism that are at once extremely libertarian and
extremely authoritarian,” (p. 15) which is pretty much correct. But despite this lack of clarity, the leading
organization of the New Left, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society] and
the anti-Vietnam War movement became battlegrounds and recruiting arenas for
the also-newly-emerging (as well as older), far more rigidly-organized,
ideologically-coherent-and-inflexible Marxist-Leninist (primarily Maoist) and
Leninist-Trotskyist groups, who vied with New Leftists for power, influence and
dominance; and were alternately poles of attraction and repulsion.
The political
quiescence of the working class then, with the AFL-CIO leadership’s automatic
subordination to an increasingly-compromised Democratic Party due to President
Johnson’s role in escalating the massively unpopular Vietnam War, as well as
the massive inroads the white backlash had made among white workers, made many
student radicals write off the working class as hopelessly “bourgeoisified” by
prosperity and inherently racist in itself, especially in its white
sector. Since much of the radical
student milieu (the New Left as well as devotees of the counterculture) came
from upper-class and upper-middle-class families that had traditionally
disdained workers as “uncouth,” as well as with many middle-class,
lower-middle-class and working-class young rebels themselves engaged in
generational conflicts with parental and other authority figures, the notion of
“white privilege,” i.e., white workers themselves gaining materially as well as
psychologically from perpetuating racism and black inequality, came about
naturally, even if accidentally.
It came about as a
means for the leadership of SDS to counterpoise itself ideologically against
its rival within SDS for power, the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PL) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Labor_Party_(United_States)]. PL denounced
Black Nationalism, to which young white radicals were predisposed, because its position
was “All nationalism is reactionary,” a position PL used to oppose particularly
the Black Panther Party (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party), a group especially popular among the white
radicals of SDS. “White privilege” was
given ideological coherence by two older radicals, Noel Ignatin (who later
changed his name back to its original Ignatiev) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Ignatiev] and Ted Allen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_W._Allen), in a polemical pamphlet against PL’s
position, “White Blindspot,” published circa. 1969, and eagerly adopted by the
SDS leadership in its fight against PL.
(“White Blindspot” is contained in an anthology of SDS writings edited
by former SDS leader Carl Davidson, Revolutionary
Youth & the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority
Statement, the RYM II Documents and Other Lost Writings of SDS. For a favorable yet critical review of Revolutionary Youth & the New Working
Class see George Fish’s review in Socialism
and Democracy 61 (March 2013), http://sdonline.org/61/carl-davidson-ed-revolutionary-youth-the-new-working-class-the-praxis-papers-the-port-authority-statement-the-rym-documents-and-other-lost-writings-of-sds-pittsburgh-changemaker-publications/. As
this review points out, SDS could produce some compelling, cogent political
documents as well as others not nearly so compelling and cogent.)
The concept of
“white privilege” was later revived in a different fashion in the 1990s by
various left academics, notably by Peggy McIntosh’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_McIntosh) article in Yes! Magazine, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,”
http://www.nymbp.org/reference/WhitePrivilege.pdf. In
this new incarnation “white privilege” quickly became used as a “checklist” to
determine just how much an individual was infested with “white privilege,”
thereby doing much to foster guilt-tripping on the one hand, and resentment on
the other.
So enters here into
the fray I myself, a veteran of SDS of lower-middle-class background who’s now
become a rather disenchanted member of the of the current left—seeing
derivative, uncritically-adopted dogma from the New Left past become
undeservedly dominant in the highly marginalized and decidedly uninfluential
left of today, seeing in this uncritically-adopted dogma a major contributor
precisely to this marginalization and lack of influence. Among these stands the notion of “white
privilege,” which actually masks, rather than exposes, the continuing, quite
messy, interplay of racism and socio-economic class in U.S. society today for all
those reasons I give above. This is
especially driven home for me by what I see as an unholy alliance between
upper-middle-class white radicals and certain strains of Black Nationalism. This is something I wrote about in my
previous article for examiner.com, “A bad forum advocating a really horrible
idea,” which will be re-posted on this blog, as explained above. Both
groups uncritically see all whites, even the white poor and just-getting-by white
working class, as hopelessly contaminated by “privilege” achieved through racial
“benefit.” Automatically by dint of
“white skin privilege,” and unlike African Americans, all whites, even the poor
and the just-getting-by, are allegedly living the life of Riley, which Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary
defines as “a carefree comfortable way of living.”
This rankles me
personally, as I’ve been poor, and my now receiving a small Social Security
payment only makes me just getting by. Therefore,
this alleged living the life of Riley due to “white privilege” is something
neither I nor most of my white friends here in Indianapolis possess. For they, like me, are uniformly college graduates
over the age of fifty, many of them people laid off permanently from their
previous good employment who now are stuck making a precarious living from
various temp jobs for low wages, often unable to find work for significant
periods of time between jobs. No, contrary to what one of these well-off
radicals once asserted to me, “I wish I had your time for reading,” an
involuntary layoff is decidedly not a
vacation, and while there may be some extra time to catch up on reading, there
is also, unfortunately, ample time as well to worry where the next badly-needed
job is going to come from, as well as the anxiety ever-present of “Just how am
I going to pay my bills?”
Further, these
upper-middle-class radicals, whether they recognize it or not, are just
expressing their hoary social-class animus toward lower-class whites, and
remind me very much of that historical disdain Old Money had for the nouveau riche, upstarts without breeding
or culture for whom money is a corruption, not a blessing—as it is instead for
those who have already gotten it and had it for a long, long time!
There’s also a deliberate
racial and ethnic bias reflected in those terms especially reserved for
lower-class whites: “white trash,” “trailer
trash,” “peckerwood,” to name but a few; plus ethnic slurs such as “Mick,”
“Hunky,” “Polack,” “Kraut,” “greaseball,” “Dago,” “Wop,” “hymie,” “sheeny,” “frog,”
to pejoratively denote anyone not of pedigreed Anglo-Saxon ancestry!
And so they of the upper
classes who consider themselves noblesse
oblige social reformers and radical restructurers of society latch onto
African Americans the way Rousseau latched onto the Noble Savage, the pure,
unalloyed soul saved from corruption precisely because of their social
exclusion from ordinary society.
As for certain black
nationalists of my acquaintance, just as they can argue appropriately that
there exists among many whites a “white blindspot” that makes them unaware, or inadequately
aware, of non-white cultures, societies and social strata, so do I argue that
there exists among them a “black blindspot” that makes them unaware also of
white people in the U.S. in all their messiness, differentiation, and
caste-like strata; that makes many a black nationalist see white people as this
undifferentiated monolith, this massive, uniform white glacier moving
inexorably to crush them.
But yes, as the KI
panelist Khalil, mentioned in my previous examiner.com post, admonished, I should know more about important black
figures such as Marcus Garvey and Denmark Vesey (although I’m far from ignorant
of either); bur he should also know more about important white figures such as
Eugene Debs, H.L. Mencken and Clarence Darrow.
And as far as “Eurocentric history” is concerned, I pointedly note that
recorded history is usually the history of victors; and while it is important
for whites to know more about the many slave revolts throughout early 19th
Century U.S. history, the truth is, all these revolts ended in defeat for their
participants. Yes, more that is
“underground” history should be brought above ground; but it’s still going to
be “Eurocentric” in the sense that it can only be a chronicle of unfortunate
defeats as much as it can be a history of admirable resistance.
It is indeed time to
move beyond both “white blindspots” and “black blindspots,” although perhaps a
little more important for whites at this time to move beyond their “white
blindspots.” (However, African Americans
working diligently to overcome their “black blindspots” would be a real boost
in enabling whites to rectify their “white blindspots.”) Something driven very much home for me by my
reading of two classic accounts of the contemporary white working class by
authors attuned to this white working class: Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with
Kansas? and the late Joe Bageant’s Deer
Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s
Class War, in which both authors lament that, due to their addled concepts
of “values,” among them racial values, millions of white workers, i.e.,
ordinary people, act and vote against their own economic self-interest. They
lament further, and most telling, that large numbers of those of the left who
could bring white workers to understand where their real interests lie don’t
know how to reach them. Ensconced in
their “politically correct” cocoons, they don’t know honestly how to talk to such people, but can only lecture at them. That is, when they bother with them
at all. But these are precisely the people I work
alongside of as a blue-collar worker! These
very people who, same as me, justifiably rankle at being called
“privileged.”
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