11 May 2021
NOT THE BEE — So much privilege. So little time:
How do I know there are 97 items specifically?
Because I counted them five times and came up with 97 twice, so I’m going with that.
In case you’re wondering, this is not parody (check the name of the website you’re on). This is a real thing that grown adults did as a serious exercise for other grown adults to fill out.
I came across this checklist through the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo, who was using it as part of his expose on Disney. It is part of a YWCA “21-Day Racial Equity & Social Justice Challenge” for which Disney is a co-sponsor.
It is a national effort, with this particular list prepared by the Cleveland chapter.
Before we get started, I promise not to go through all 97 items and explicate on each at great length.
Well, “promise” is a strong word…
Anyway, we’ll start with a few of the biggies that we’ve all seen before:
- I am white.
- I am a man.
- I am heterosexual.
Those are spread out on the list, but everyone knows that those are the big three, the “gold-silver-bronze” of privilege. If you’ve got all three, you’ve got it made. […]
The YMCA can now change its name from the Young Men’s Christian Association to the Young Men’s Communist Association
Let me tell you about white privilege.
40 some odd years ago, when I taught a Sunday school class (I lived in an all white town) the kids were restless, couldn’t keep still and their minds wandered.
I finally asked them one day, why are you all so fidgety? Their reply was, I’m hungry. And they were. Most of them were rail thin.
I told my mom and grandma at the time. That next Sunday, I brought in some food my grandma made, biscuits and gravy, pigs in a blanket, macaroni salad, a pie. The food was gone in short order. Those little white kids gobbled up that food like it was their first and last meal. The only reason I didn’t bring fried chicken as Grandma didn’t have enough time to make some.
My mom told the pastor what was going on. He had no idea. The entire church, about 50 white families had potlucks every Sunday after that conversation for a while. Even if the parents of the kids in Sunday school weren’t attending church, they were still invited. Everyone brought extra food so those families could take food home. This was before food stamps.
I could tell more stories of poor white families, but I guess it’s all over the country.
I see in my rural community whites driving funker dunker cars, while the cucked whites who have good government jobs and their black co-workers are living high off the hog, driving their Escalades with their fat butts.
The next civil war will be the elites and their mercenaries vs. us.
IIRC, YWCA was taken over by radical leftist lesbians in the late 1960s. No doubt they’ve closely followed the latest leftist trends ever since.
I worked there for two years as an Americorps intern, 08-10. Mostly black women giving subsidized childcare to black kids cos we were in the hood. I taught STEAM afterschool; everyone in every department working directly with the community were disgustingly underpaid, ~twenty k a year with crappy healthcare and ten days off, entry level. Their motto is “eliminating racism, empowering women” but the pay and overwork proved that was bullshit. Lots of gossip and backbiting and spying on other departments, everyone who had worked there for a while was bitter, while the young employees were going to community college and getting out of there.
…you see I don’t do none of that computer stuff, I pattern my life after Queen Elizabeth when she learn how to type I am a learn how to type. (laughter, you know what I mean)
Queen Elizabeth, you see if I say something about white folks tonight, you can be guaranteed I am not talking about you. (laughter) Se what I mean about that white is not a color its a attitude and if you don’t have trillions of dollars in the bank that you don’t need, you can’t have the attitude. I am talking about Queen Elizabeth type whit folks and most of the black folks you all know we owe you all a serious apology cause we mad at the wrong white folks. White folks we mad at couldn’t help us if they liked us, matter a fact they’ll kill you on the way to get me, and I guess what I am trying to say is Queen Elizabeth make three hundred and sixty million dollars, every twenty-four hours, just interest on her money. Now them be white folks!
There not honest, there not ethical, their not spiritual, their Godly, but they don’t lie! See we’re going to war to protect our interests. And real white folks, the real white folks who run the planet ain’t never had a job (hmm), ain’t never had a job. And so its that whole piece of what we tolerate…”
Mr. Dick Gregory (begins at 15:07)
Okay WW, since we know who QE2 is, I would like to play a different game pertaining to WHITE SUPREMACY…its called spot the African American / black and / or brown person in the D&O category, at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Simple has ONE POINT, so far, with former Secretary of State Colin Powell. I would welcome ANYONE AND ALL COMERS to beat my score (please note that I did try Mr. Ralph Bunche and Ms. Condolezza Rice already — no luck)
https://www.cfr.org/historical-roster-directors-and-officers
True “white supremacy” may be found at the CFR and many of the other round table groups that conduct these viscous psyops, which attempt to put us all at each other’s throats. Please recall that the “water boy” FDR took his marching and provocation orders, regarding WWII from this council of his peers; THAT IS WHITE SUPREMACY.
May the Lord bless us all and bring clarity to our hearts, as well as our minds.
THERE IS WHITE AND THERE ARE WHITE ANGLO SAXON PROTESTANTS.
NIGGERS & WHITE TRASH
YOU TUBE: The origin of ‘white trash,’ and why class is still an issue in the U.S.
•Aug 17, 2016
PBS NewsHour
In “White Trash,” Nancy Isenberg delves into the history of class in America, starting with British colonization. At that time, America was seen as a wasteland — a place to discard the idle poor. The agrarian communities they subsequently formed often remained poor due to a phenomenon Isenberg calls “horizontal mobility.” Jeffrey Brown speaks with the author about how we can evolve past class.
Category
News & Politics
THE LONG LEGACY OF WHITE TRASH
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)
Nancy Isenberg
EPILOGUE
America’s Strange Breed
Two persistent problems have rumbled through our “democratic” past. One we can trace back to Franklin and Jefferson and their longing to dismiss class by touting “exceptional” features of the American landscape, which are deemed productive of an exceptional society. The founders insisted that the majestic continent would magically solve the demographic dilemma by reducing overpopulation and flattening out the class structure.
In addition to this environmental solution, a larger, extremely useful myth arose: that America gave a voice to all of its people, that every citizen could exercise genuine influence over the government. (We should note that this myth was always qualified, because it was accepted that some citizens were more worthy than others—especially those whose stake in society came from property ownership.)
The British colonial imprint was never really erased either. The “yeoman” was a British class, reflecting the well-established English practice of equating moral worth to cultivation of the soil. For their part, nineteenth-century Americans did everything possible to replicate class station through marriage, kinship, pedigree, and lineage.
While the Confederacy was the high mark—the most overt manifestation—of rural aristocratic pretense (and an open embrace of society’s need to have an elite ruling over the lower classes), the next century ushered in the disturbing imperative of eugenics, availing itself of science to justify breeding a master class. Thus not only did Americans not abandon their desire for class distinctions, they repeatedly reinvented class distinctions. Once the government of the United States began portraying itself as “leader of the free world,” the longing for a more regal head of state was advanced. The Democrats swooned over Kennedy’s Camelot, and Republicans ennobled the Hollywood court of Reagan.
American democracy has never accorded all the people a meaningful voice. The masses have been given symbols instead, and they are often empty symbols. Nation-states traditionally rely on the fiction that a head of state can represent the body of the people and stand in as their proxy; in the American version, the president must appeal broadly to shared values that mask the existence of deep class divisions. Even when this strategy works, though, unity comes at the price of perpetuating ideological deception. George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt were called fathers of the country, and are now treated as the kindly patriarchs of yore; Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt descend to us as brash, tough-talking warriors. Cowboy symbols stand tall in the saddle and defend the national honor against an evil empire, as Reagan did so effectively; more recently, the American people were witness to a president dressed in a pilot jumpsuit who for dramatic effect landed on an aircraft carrier. That, of course, was George W. Bush, as he prematurely proclaimed an end to combat operations in Iraq.
Left out of our collective memory, meanwhile, are corporate puppet presidents such as William McKinley, who was in the pocket of Big Steel and a host of manufacturing interests. When presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 responded to a heckler with the line, “Corporations are people, my friend,” he inadvertently became the new McKinley. The “1%” were his constituency, and wearing blue jeans did little to loosen his buttoned-up image.
Power (whether social, economic, or merely symbolic) is rarely probed. Or if it is, it never becomes so urgent a national imperative as to require an across-the-board resolution, simultaneously satisfying a moral imperative and pursuing a practical cause. We know, for instance, that Americans have forcefully resisted extending the right to vote; those in power have disenfranchised blacks, women, and the poor in myriad ways. We know, too, that women historically have had fewer civil protections than corporations.
Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft: high-sounding rhetoric, magnified, and political leaders dressing down at barbecues or heading out to hunt game. They are seen wearing blue jeans, camouflage, cowboy hats, and Bubba caps, all in an effort to come across as ordinary people. But presidents and other national politicians are anything but ordinary people after they are elected. Disguising that fact is the real camouflage that distorts the actual class nature of state power.
The theatrical performances of politicians who profess to speak for an “American people” do nothing to highlight the history of poverty. The tenant farmer with his mule and plow is not a romantic image to retain in historic memory. But that individual is as much our history as any war that was fought and any election that was hotly contested. The tenant and his shack should remain with us as an enduring symbol of social stasis.
The underclass exists even when they don’t rise to the level of making trouble, fomenting rebellions, joining in riots, or fleeing the ranks of the Confederacy and hiding out in swamps, where they create an underground economy. Those who do not disappear into the wilderness are present in towns and cities and along paved and unpaved roads in every state. Seeing the poor, whether it is in the photographs of a Walker Evans or a Dorothea Lange, or in comical form on “reality TV,” we have to wonder how such people exist amid plenty.
As she cast her eyes upon southern trailer trash in the middle of World War II, the Washington Post columnist Agnes Meyer asked,
“Is this America?”
Yes, it is America.
It is an essential part of American history. So too is the backlash that occurs when attempts are made to improve the conditions of the poor. Whether it is New Deal polices or LBJ’s welfare programs or Obama-era health care reform, along with any effort to address inequality and poverty comes a harsh and seemingly inevitable reaction. Angry citizens lash out: they perceive government bending over backward to help the poor (implied or stated: undeserving) and they accuse bureaucrats of wasteful spending that steals from hardworking men and women. This was Nixon’s class-inflected appeal, which his campaign staff packaged for the “Silent Majority.” In the larger scheme of things, the modern complaint against state intervention echoes the old English fear of social leveling, which was said to encourage the unproductive. In its later incarnation, government assistance is said to undermine the American dream. Wait. Undermine whose American dream?
Class defines how real people live.
They don’t live the myth. They don’t live the dream. Politics is always about more than what is stated, or what looms before the eye. Even when it’s denied, politicians engage in class issues. The Civil War was a struggle to shore up both a racial and a class hierarchy. The Confederacy was afraid that poor whites would be drawn in by Union appeals and would vote to end slavery—because slavery was principally a reflection of the wealthy planters’ self-interest.
Today as well we have a large unbalanced electorate that is regularly convinced to vote against its collective self-interest. These people are told that East Coast college professors brainwash the young and that Hollywood liberals make fun of them and have nothing in common with them and hate America and wish to impose an abhorrent, godless lifestyle. The deceivers offer essentially the same fear-laden message that the majority of southern whites heard when secession was being weighed. Moved by the need for control, for an unchallenged top tier, the power elite in American history has thrived by placating the vulnerable and creating for them a false sense of identification—denying real class differences wherever possible.
The dangers inherent in that deception are many. The relative few who escape their lower-class roots are held up as models, as though everyone at the bottom has the same chance of succeeding through cleverness and hard work, through scrimping and saving. Can Franklin’s “nest egg” produce Franklin the self-made man? Hardly. Franklin himself needed patrons to rise in his colonial world, and the same rules of social networking persist. Personal connections, favoritism, and trading on class-based knowledge still grease the wheels that power social mobility in today’s professional and business worlds.
If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders’ ingenious plan, or that Jacksonian democracy was liberating, or that the Confederacy was about states’ rights rather than preserving class and racial distinctions.
Sometimes, all it took was a name: before becoming known as a Reconstruction-era southern white who identified with black uplift or Republican reforms, the scalawag was defined as an inferior breed of cattle.
The scalawag of today is the southern liberal who is painted by conservative ideologues as a traitor to the South for daring to say that poor whites and poor blacks possess similar economic interests.
They believe they are inferior.
Ignore them and let them scream into that echo chamber. They crave attention and validation that they are good, that is objectively impossible.