Again, SO WHAT?
Poor doesn’t care what color you are.
There are plenty of white people on welfare. There are white kids going to bed hungry.
My dad’s father was a sharecropper. Wearing patched clothes. My dad’s diet resulted in rickets. It’s on his Navy records. Grandad’s farm produced a lot of food. They sold most of it and lived on whatever was left.
Don’t whine to me about white privilege. We’ve suffered too. All my family worked hard for everything we ever had. My other grandfather worked in the oil fields. Coming home filthy. I have pictures of him working on the dereks. No harness, no safety gear except his steel hat.
White privilege is bs.
Rich privilege? Yeah that exists.
And we say, so what? We can point to racism, and far more of it, against blacks, on white supremacist web sites. There’s evil out there of every conceivable stripe and variety.
Show me ONE example where a white police officer has walked out of his own house to assist police outside and been shot by one of his fellow officers.
Show me examples where white men have been shot by police because the police were “frightened for their lives” by the mere smell of marijuana.
You’re still not following. It was in response to another posters incorrect posit. Two actually that ‘white people are not being attacked in the name of white privilege’
I never said there wasn’t evil. This is a weird ass hill to be fighting on Trinopus. That I can’t refute an incorrect point because, “So what”?
And ‘we’?? Should I be bowing and kissing the hem of your royal cape? I kid of course.
I’m not going to get into it on little pissy points especially with posters I respect.
I’ve said (or meant to before i got distracted), that what I’ve taken away from this thread is that it’s a complicated subject. I don’t at present think it’s as black and white as I did yesterday, and as I said the point that gave me the most thought was "There are definitely positive bonuses to being white, as opposed to negative bonuses like “Wasn’t shot for smoking pot”.
I will say I don’t think this
or this is an optimal vote winning strategy. But that’s a different subject.
Do you think the lives of your grandfathers would have been the same had they been black? Isn’t it likely, considering our history, that they would have had it even tougher had they been black?
I don’t really know. People with almost nothing are pretty much the same.
It was an odd time. Segregation existed. But both my grandparents had black neighbors. They often worked together in the fields. Helped each other when possible.
It was in town and at the schools where segregation became evident.
Not really. Here’s another significant difference. And, additionally, even if poor didn’t care, your odds of getting out and staying out of poverty while black are a lot worse than your odds while white.
You can be totally right about how hard you worked, how hard you suffered, how rotten your luck was, and you know what? If everything else was the same and you changed just the color of your skin, you would be worse off, because you and your family would have to deal with systemic racism pushing you back down. You are far less likely to face extreme injustice from the criminal justice system than the average black man. Your father never had to live in fear that he would get lynched. Your grandfather wasn’t enslaved. That is white privilege.
In the game of life, you have multiple difficulty sliders. Starting wealth is probably the most important one. But skin color is one as well, and the “easy” end of that slider is “white”.
Please forgive me for my original sin of having white skin. I am so ashamed. I hate myself for being white. I am evil by virtue of being white.
I’d bet their black neighbors may have had a different opinion.
This shows a prevalent misunderstanding (whether or not this misunderstanding is intentional is another matter) of what we’re talking about here. The oft-used response to the idea that black people in the U.S. face systematic oppression is “White people can be just as miserable!” Um, ok but that’s not really the point. Yes, obviously poverty can be felt by anyone. The idea, patiently explained by BPC, is that black people face an additional burden that white people do not. It is not trivializing or ignoring the struggles of non-black people just because it’s highlighting the unique struggles of black people in the U.S. By saying “anyone can be poor, not just black people”, you are the one doing the trivializing and ignoring. #alllivesmatter :rolleyes:
If you think that, decades ago, it was just as difficult to be poor and white as to be poor and black, then I think you’re pretty ignorant of American history.
Oh lay off the hyperbole.
So…What is the solution to “white privilege”? Just whites hating themselves and feeling ashamed every day? What is the solution? Taxing people for other’s sins? What is the solution? Mandatory redistribution of property from whites to everyone else? ‘White laws’ which govern what specifically whites can and cannot do, say, think, feel or express? What is the solution my beloved, dear comrades who hate me so?
None of these straw man solutions, certainly.
When someone starts talking like this, it’s time to shut the discussion down. You aren’t interested in a genuine conversation.
What is the solution then? Just shout “check your privilege” every day?
And what happens when whites are no longer the majority - will we still have privilege?
Not with people who despise me because I happen to lack melanin, no. Why would I want a genuine conversation with those who view me as society’s villain, the root of all ills?
Again with the hyperbole.