Quote (thundercock @ 23 Jan 2021 21:02)
I think he's wrong when it comes to the current state of race in this country but he's correct about the trends. White Trash such as Ghot are seeing their quality of life deteriorate and they almost have it as bad as negros in a lot of ways. They aren't there yet though and there is still a rough history that we're in the process of confronting. A lot of people are simply ignorant of the racial disparity in this country because they live in areas where they are shielded from it.
The problem with this is that there exists no Pareto improvement on race issues. Trump was panned a lot for his black and white, zero-sum worldview, which definitely is wrong in a lot of fields, like trade. But social status/rank is an intrinsically relative concept and indeed a zero-sum game. You cannot improve the relative status of black and brown people in America without decreasing the status of low-ranking whites (i.e. working-class and/or rural).
In the 50s, even the poorest, most uneducated white male nonetheless belonged to the top 40% of society because he automatically ranked above all the negros and above all but the patrician-born white women. Low education whites, and white males in particular, are the group which has seen the largest decline of its status due to increasing diversity and racial liberalism. It's the deeper reason why this segment of the electorate is particularly drawn toward chauvinism/nativism or anyone promising a return to the status quo ante, when a satisfactory social status was their birthright.
This creates a dilemma in the sense that the old status quo of racism is unacceptable, but clumsy attempts at shaking up the racial hierarchy of the country have really vicious political consequences which could go as far as civil war. In some sense, America had to go through four years of Trump because Hillary talked too much about immigration and gender during her campaign. The obvious solution is what the author proposes: replacing race and social issues as the main cleavage of American politics with class/economics. This approach he's proposing, the approach of improving the material conditions of all poor and lower middle class Americans, would automatically see racial inequality and division go down as well. This is basically the approach that Bernie's 2016 campaign pursued, and also the reason why he started sucking when his 2020 campaign succumbed to wokeism.
Now, this is obviously not gonna happen anytime soon since the powers that be have been pushing identity politics for decades specifically so that social/cultural issues (which dont hurt their bottom line) replace economic conflict as the central divide in politics. I dont have high hopes for the Biden presidency in this regard, "identity liberalism" has too much of a stranglehold on the Democratic party these days, and the GOP will be weakened for quite some time by the post-Trump woes.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 23 2021 02:49pm