White privilege 101: Here’s the basic lesson Paul Ryan, Tal Fortgang and Donald Sterling need

[ismnotwasm]

Last edited Mon May 12, 2014, 10:03 PM - Edit history (1)

And all the DUers that don't understand what the fuck White privilege is. While this article is somewhat intellectual in tone, I'm sure all the ones who are defining their arguments against white male privilege will have no problems understanding it.

And yet, Katie McDonough correctly argued, his denial of racism and his own privileged position represents a new majority view among whites, who think they’re more discriminated against than blacks, despite all manner of evidence to the contrary (more on that below). And this is where the danger and the challenge to progressives lies — as well as the challenge to the Democratic Party. If—as recent research suggests — whites grow increasingly conservative as perceived minority voting power grows, then the “Rising American electorate” argument itself is in danger. It could be every bit as much a fantasy, in its own, much more sophisticated way, as the Tea Party fantasy that the GOP can just double down on where it is, and get by on better messaging and a sprinkling of more diverse spokes/front people.

There is a way to fight back against this very real, and so far unrecognized, threat. And that is for white people — especially white men — to step up and push back (lovingly or forcefully, as the situation dictates) against this sort of polarizing rhetoric and the thinking and feeling that’s connected to it. It’s not just a matter of paternalistically “helping out” women and minorities when they’re attacked. The fortunes of white working-class men have plummeted since the early ’70s — not because women and minorities have stolen their cheese, but because they’re snookered into thinking like that, making themselves easy marks for far more sophisticated actors to take advantage of. And what’s long been true for working-class white men will increasingly become true of white men with college degrees as well. One of Thomas Piketty’s central points is that any sort of labor, however skilled it may be, is going to lose out to inherited capital in the long run, if the basic structures of today’s capitalist economy aren’t changed.

So how do white men fight back, not just for the sake of others, or society as a whole, but for themselves, as well? There are lots of ways they can do this, but here I’d like to focus on just one: by gaining a much a more solid, objective understanding of what minorities (especially blacks) and women already largely understand as a basic fact of life — how racial and gender privilege work, with white male ignorance as a key component. It’s only by unifying against an already unified economic elite that Americans of all races and ethnicities can keep hope alive for a more prosperous future.

Before going any further, I just want to quote from McDonough’s article, where she references a sampling of the information already out there:

It’s likely that Fortgang will have the opportunity at Princeton to learn about the racial wealth gap, the legacy of red-lining, the unemployment rate among college educated men of color versus their white counterparts, the convergence of racism and sexism that leaves women of color disproportionately impacted by domestic violence, the gender pay gap experienced by black women, the deadly violence faced by black children and the myriad other manifestations of racism in the United States. Basically all of the things that he will never have to experience as an extraordinarily privileged white man.

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/09/white_privilege_101_heres_the_basic_lesson_paul_ryan_tal_fortgang_and_donald_sterling/