As if conservative white folks aren’t aggravating enough, here comes liberal whites and their pleas for thinking of the white working class.
Kali Holloway of Alternet via Raw Story vents about how people should feel empathy for the white working class, the section of America where most of its people don’t give a damn about black people’s plight:
The only surprise to come out of this election is how many, and how quickly, white people want us to empathize with the people who voted against our humanity, our right to exist in this place. Even before the election, the Washington Post actually had the audacity to berate us for not crying for the white working class. In the days since Trump won, the number of articles urging everybody to be cool to Trump’s America, to understand what they are facing, to hear their grievances, has added insult to injury. Bernie Sanders issued a statement saying Trump “tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media.” I read it at least three times and couldn’t find the words “white supremacy” anywhere in it.
I want to add another article to the mix.
This comes from the Advocate. The writer, Elizabeth Daley, doesn’t want us to blame white women for Trump’s ascension. Instead, we should blame internalized misogyny. While she has a point that it played a major role in the last election, that doesn’t negate the fact that many white women voted for a misogynist due to their unwavering allegiance to whiteness. And people of color, especially women of color, are sick of white women fucking things up and are told not to cast blame:
…While it might be tempting to blame white women for the outcome of this election, let’s not. Doing so reinforces the idea that women have to be twice as responsible as men, not just 10 percent more. Furthermore, the cultural impulse to blame women is tragically aligned with the impulse that we as women have to blame ourselves.
Except women aren’t the primary problem here. It’s white women’s whiteness that’s the issue.
White privilege means never to be demonized or pathologized for the bullshit you or your people do no matter how catastrophic it is. We are told to empathize, chill and feel sorry for them for they know not what they do. In short, never blame white people.
Incidently, another article from New Republic suggests not to blame working-class whites. It’s these college educated yuppies who partook in the fuckery. Now, even though it still blames a population of whites, it dares not blame white people as a whole the way society holds nonwhite groups liable for its problems.
No. Instead, let’s blame and punish black people and their culture for all the crime in this country. Let’s blame and punish Latino immigrants for taking all of the jobs. Let’s blame and punish Asians for getting into great schools. And let’s blame and punish Muslims for all the terrorism they’ve caused. But please, please go easy on white people for EVERY LAST SCREW-UP THEY DID.
Like Comedian Samantha Bee said, “…Don’t try to distance yourself (white folks) from the bad apples and say, It’s not my fault, I didn’t vote for him, hashtag not all white people. Shush. If Muslims have to take responsibility for every member of their community, so do we.”
Holloway continues:
Please miss me with all this nonsense. I’m not even going to get into how this is based on an easily refutable economic lie, especially since others have already spent precious time they’ll never get back breaking this down. But even if it was true—and I am well aware of what’s plaguing the white working class, from substance abuse to suicide to a loss of manufacturing jobs—I refuse to take part in the endless privileging of white pain above all others. (Martin Gilens, who has studied this stuff going way back, notes that when the media face of poverty is white, this country suddenly gets a lot more compassionate.) Latinos and African Americans remain worse off than the white working class—which is still the “largest demographic bloc in the workforce”—by pretty much every measurable outcome, from home ownership to life expectancy. Where are these appeals for us when we protest or riot against the systemic inequality we live with? Where are all the calls to recognize and understand our anger?
As some of you know, I’ve had trolls come here refuting the problems that black people are facing. They especially don’t believe that racism is a major issue. Lincoln freed us from slavery. We had the Civil Rights Act passed. We’re on welfare. It’s all good. We shouldn’t complain about anything.
But white people are still dominant in every institution in this country. The government. The corporations. The courts. The education system. The media. Everything. And, when members of their race suffer, the world must stop and feel while they shit all over the world.
Holloway quotes Audre Lorde:
Audre Lorde said (I wonder if that woman ever got sick of being right), “Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.” For a people who have shamed black folks for supposedly always wanting a hand out, for being a problem of the entitlement state, I have never seen people who so firmly believe they are owed something.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is how privileged assholery operates. and I say, FUCK THAT EMPATHY BULLSHIT!
Why the flaming hell should we feel for them, consider their feelings and be civil to a population who’s legacy has been about the religion of white supremacy? Why should we be cool to a group of homo sapiens who would angrily plunge the nation – no, the world into ruins to make sure whiteness stays on top of everything? Why should we always be the better person to a group of people who don’t consider me a person?
I say it again. FUCK THAT! We’re tired of always being the better person. Thoughout history, the white race plundered, enslaved, raped and polluted the world to build their global empire of white supremacy, displaced, dehumanized and destroyed people and their lands to this day in order to keep it going and punished them for having the balls to fight back.
So, why can’t these bumbling, sociopathic, racist assholes be better people?