Forum Post: In the age of post modern racism
Posted 6 years ago on July 5, 2018, 4:01 p.m. EST by elf3
(4203)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Can we discuss class yet? Or is this still taboo?
So I do believe in open discussion so here goes:
To my rich white friends even though I'm white I'm not wealthy. Please stop discussing minorities like you are saving a rare species from endangerment or puppies stuck in storm drains...and sounding so self-righteous as you all compare your white privledge assuming everyone white is part of it. Because I happen to know when I mention class issues...the room gets eerily silent and eyes look away like I just may as well have blurted out the phrase "hairy testicles" . Since I live in a minority community and grew up in one (granted far from being like em in em it wasn't Detroit)...I guess I don't think it's so amazing when people of other races succeed at something...I just think it is as normal as when you do. Fyi they don't produce rice krispy treats instead of poop from their ass either. Because people are the same...some suck, some dont, some are in the middle. And unless someone is visiting as an actual tourist please stop interviewing minorities about their interesting cultures...like are a new star trek character who just beamed in from planet Bongolo and you are their greeter or part of the peace corp my god it's annoying and frankly plain akward to watch. While this is happeningnyou seem to be ignoring that when people aren't jumping classes it doesn't always have to do just with race because there is a good majority of us who just aren't racist... a lot has to do with the systems and structures in place that keep people in their born caste. (Remember when Occupy marched side by side together to change that?) I do...I miss that.
So while I'm not against fighting against fighting racism ( oops wait one too many fightings -I mean im against racism). I hate that things have become so divisive and that the subject of class as well as the battle against wall street seems to have been largely forgotten.
And on that note to (some) of my ethnic commarades ( in spirit) please stop giving me dirty looks (because seriously) this is happening a lot lately in our new post modern racist society. I may look like a poster child for white privledge (Im super white... or sunburned) but I'm seriously not rich and hate Trump as much as you. My bank account is virtually non-existent. I voted for Obama! I swear i have no family money and no degree. I was born this way? It's weird frankly.... it's got to be said...and please don't say that somehow makes me racist? Because I know when I'm getting glared at like I just ate your baby's future. While this is happening you seem to be ignoring that when people aren't jumping classes it doesn't always have to do just with race because there is a good majority of us who just aren't racist... a lot has to do with the systems and structures in place that keep people in their born caste. (Remember when Occupy marched side by side together to change that?) I do...I miss that.
(And to everyone please get your sense of humour back because laughter really is the world's best medecine)
''Racism in the US had settled deeply into the economics, politics and culture of the US since its inception. It had adjusted itself to capitalism and vice-versa. Their interdependence or partnership was deeply structured. Thus, for example, US capitalism could use racism to solve the problems of two of its worst features: instability and inequality. The business cycles ever besetting capitalism threatened the entire working class with periodic unemployment, poverty, etc. That constant threat—as well as the recurring downturns themselves—risked provoking working class opposition to capitalism as a system. Racism facilitated offloading instability’s risks and costs onto the African-American community that was last hired, first fired. A large part of the white population could thus escape capitalism’s instability or suffer less from it. Racist arguments then blamed African-Americans for their unemployment and poverty by contrasting it with that of most whites. Racism and capitalism reinforced one another in this way.
''In parallel fashion, capitalism’s incessantly rising inequality threatens the entire working class with relative and often also absolute poverty. Racism assigns African-Americans to the bottom of the income and wealth distributions (via racist hiring, housing, schooling, public policies, and attitudes). Many whites feel less threatened by capitalism’s drive to ever greater inequality because a disproportionate share of that inequality is dumped onto the African-American community. Whites have a constant exhibit of “it could be worse” flowing from that community’s living conditions.
''A partnership between anti-capitalism and anti-racism within social movements and in public discourse could dissolve the mutual reinforcement between racism and capitalism and thereby advance progressive social change. Today’s capitalism includes contradictions pushing toward that dissolution. Long-term wage stagnation and profit-driven technical changes are subjecting more and more whites to conditions previously limited largely to African-Americans. Hence the household disintegrations, drug dependencies, etc. long afflicting African-Americans are increasingly suffered among whites as well.
''The resurgence of white-supremacy represents anxiety about descent into conditions that capitalism and racism had earlier let most whites escape. It is the other side of whites’ recognizing their basic employee position within capitalism as shared with African-Americans. Capitalism’s current development (the rush to privatize, cut taxes, export jobs, automate, etc.) drives conservatives (not just Trump) to cultivate white-supremacy against the growing working class solidarity the system itself generates. In the light of DuBois’s concept of capitalism’s “self-destruction,” might today’s polarizing politics (Trump), ideologies, culture and economy be its multiple signs?''
from ... ''The Capitalism / Racism Partnership'', by Prof. Richard D.Wolff:
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/07/18/capitalismracism-partnership
and/or http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49874.htm (an alt. link and font)
Please also NB: Lee Atwater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8E3ENrKrQ
Finally fyi: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/18/hard-right-left-centre-party-politics-blair-clinton by Owen Jones
veritas vos liberabit ...
Would you say that affirmative action hiring quotas and subsidies, anti redlining laws on lending, section 8 housing and welfare safety nets helped correct some of these imbalances or had no effect? We should not be saying oh it's good white people get to experience poverty too now ( which they have actually always done too) . But we should be saying why is there still so much poverty and now even more of it in a country full of such abundant wealth and resources. As well as why is it exactly we can't leave our doors unlocked anymore in this country? Things appear to be in general overall decline. The culture, our quality of life, kindness, honesty. Things are indeed changing. Wallstreet is creating a culture of survival of the fittest. Corporations have decimated the economic landscape, and now auction off the remains, and make us fight and blame eachother for the scraps. Why are we falling for it? Wallstreet is our enemy. They are happy if we pit the blame on the other and forget that it is WS holding the strings.
Totally agree that: ''We should not be saying oh it's good white people get to experience poverty too now (which they have actually always done too) .. but we should be saying why is there still so much poverty and now even more of it in a country full of such abundant wealth and resources.'' Thus fyi - consider ...
http://occupywallst.org/forum/rentier-parasitism-is-market-poison/#comment-1076042 and ...
"The War Against the Poor : Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Financial Morality" : http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29649.htm also consider:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/food-stamp-use-still-above-recession-era-despite-u-s-job-gains and further:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/19/work-less-get-more-new-zealand-firms-four-day-week-an-unmitigated-success
fiat justitia ruat caelum ...
And the important part is it can be changed. The people hold the power if we rise up and take it.
Boycott monopolies. Stop funding our enemy. Boycott and make it known. Boycott loud and proud. Start boycott pages get people on board. And yes nothing hard won is done without some element of sacrifice. Buy used goods. Cancel cable. Noone needs to be eating fast food ( it is death food poisonous and designed to sell pharmaceuticals pack a lunch people is it that hard?) Call Congress and call often. Where you have no choice to deal with them fight monopolies via small claims...fight for every penny they cheat you of...it matters. File consumer complaints. Collectively it will matter.
*Move to amend corporate personhood.
*Create laws to stop unlimited campaign donations and corporate lobbying.
*Disband the MNC and end corporate land ownership/ housing / developer big box compact overpriced housing nation. Ownership should begin with local residents. Period you must ocuppy your dwelling to qualify. Let's end this rental raqueteering shit. There is precedent as well in NYC landlords must pay corporate tax. It should be like this everywhere for non owner occupied dwellings.
*Enforce and strenghthen antitrust laws as well as make sure corporations pay taxes without loopholes.
Create more worker and consumer protections. Americans need time off to be able to create and make things happen in their lives. When they are stretched to the wall on time they are in fact indentured. *Time off equals upward mobility and room to innovate, get educated, and to create, to protest and be politically active, as well as to actually enjoy some of our lives because otherwise what the fuck is it all for? Not starving is not enough. Our lives deserve meaning and enjoyment. We are living breathing individual beings...not just cogs or means of production. Newsflash whatever problems we have in our lives...this problem is bigger it rests under the heart of every struggle we face. Illness, hardships, everything else we go through is even harder because of the conditions Wallstreet has created. And yes people with inherited wealth do have a loophole. They do have it easier because they don't have to adhere to or operate under Wallstreet rules.
*Move to local economies and pathways to individual entrepreneurship without fear of competition from mega chains and wallstreet. Create regulations to limit and push them out. This is fair. For too long now they have used their massive wealth to regulate and stack the deck against the individual. They have seized the entire economy and landscape for themselves. They have become feudalistic bullies bribing governments greasing pockets outbidding and even decimating mom and pops and even stealing our land and even our internet marketplace for themselves now via anti net neutrality. They take the money they make hide it offshore from the IRS use all our roads resources etc. massive energy waste air conditioning lighting litter traffic, piss on their employees with laughable wages and lack of benefits and then carry all our hard earned money back to their own gated mansions. They are parasitic on our local economies. It seems cheap and convenient but there is a far greater cost we fail to see: Our freedom, Our lives, Our independence, in exchange.
This isn't about race. None of the above. It is about the rise of the individual over the systems that rule us ALL. There is a solution. The solution doesn't lay in fixing bigotry, or anything else until we put out the whole house fire can we even begin to discuss where to put furniture. The solutions are very real. The longer we continue to delve into and examine ideology or whatever else instead of actually focusing on solutions...the longer we all suffer. 99 percent of us are living under Wallstreet's thumb/ boot. Newsflash Wallstreet doesn't discriminate - they will steal from any/ everyone black white brown man woman child ...WS is an equal opportunity thief. They are stealing our freedom our lives from us. Wherever politicians allow it, wherever people fail to take action and speak out Wallstreet is lurking.
Soooo Are we going to concentrate on dividing the SCRAPS...or are we gonna do something to actually put out the big fire first?
''Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, American legislatures are supposed to guarantee the right to vote for black people. But with the advent of political agency of black people in America came an equal and opposite reaction in the form of gerrymandering, which is the practice of drawing districts by political parties to favor voting outcomes or enforce segregation. Gerrymandering was coupled with institutional housing discrimination, implemented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was passed during the 1930s in reaction to the Great Depression (and also led to the maintenance of school segregation, which experts say still persists to this day).
''Another major whitelash that is well documented and of great public discussion is the War on Drugs and the prison industrial complex. The War on Drugs was infamously enacted by President Richard Nixon in 1971, and is now considered by many to have been created with malicious racial intent.
''Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow, retraces this history as one that rested upon coded rhetoric, a conflation of race and criminality, and discriminatory practices like disparities in drug sentencing, stop and frisk, and the “three-strikes” law. As we know, this war and subsequent mass incarceration continue to threaten and target the lives of poor, black, and brown people.
''Perhaps the most significant manifestation of a whitelash following Trump’s election came in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. Charlottesville turned into a local state of emergency when the Unite the Right rally of hundreds of white nationalists and white supremacists became incredibly violent, and one woman was killed when a car plowed into a group of protesters. Dozens more were severely injured and beaten. Demonstrators wielding tiki torches chanted, “You will not replace us” - revealing the fear of a changing country, and sent a violent message to non-white people.
''In order to become elected, Trump spoke to the underlying biases in America that instill fear and disdain of “otherness.” Racism lives in the structure of our America, not in the hearts and minds of a few bad apples. His election and rhetoric seem to be perfectly natural byproducts of a nation that insists upon color blindness and revisionary history. In reclaiming America, Trump, his administration, and his followers explicitly uttered what is implicitly understood and ingrained in American society: This is a country of “us” and “them.” As Toni Morrison once said, “In this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” The whitelash of Trump’s presidency shows that.'' - from ...
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-white-people-have-reacted-to-black-success-over-time-in-the-united-states by Kim Reynolds & FYI:
''The future of race in America: Michelle Alexander at TEDxColumbus'': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ6H-Mz6hgw
I respect what U say in your extensive comment above but I'm still minded that Racism is an active and abrasive element in American society .. which is used by The 1% OF The 1% to further divide and rule!
The White 99% are conditioned to hate PoC & conned to vote against their own best interests because the thought that PoC may also gain something too ... is too much for them! Watch the video too please.
fiat justitia ...
The left is currently about demonizing white people, it's not about raising African-American and other ethnicities people. You very rarely hear leftists planning activities for ethnicities, you hear them try to censor white activities, talk about white privilege and so on.
Trump is such a fucking stupid narcissistic divisive country wrecker...I hear people trying to disassociate from him as much as possible.
Well, I'm not surprised. Who would want to associate with the orange tinted half-mentally retarded Trump. He's destroying everything, the world, America, his own party, his family, etc...
Are you black?
Like most folk, I range from infra-red to ultra-violet but U have a rare ability to make me incandescent!
http://occupywallst.org/forum/micah-white-you-should-make-this-an-open-forum-for/#comment-1076023 - but more importantly to this thread and forum:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/21/end-of-the-american-dream-the-dark-history-of-america-first but of course U won't read or understand it.
verum ex absurdo!
Sounds like you have your white privilege and you're little safe space with this closed forum. You're afraid of having it opened because you'd lose that safe space.
To be clear, open or closed we've had the measure of your mendacious, manipulative, mean minded b-s since the inception of OWS and this forum. I dealt with U when the forum was open & more active & rest ass-U-R-ed troll-boy, I can deal with your RW horseshit now. I did not need a "safe space'' then & I don't need one now! I, with the ~20 forum members who still post here with varying frequency ... will keep this place going because our first and last allegiance is to The 99% - wherever they may be. U - being a sick arrogant, human hating, pompous psychopath - have NO fkn idea what I'm talking about but YOUR (sic) desire to kill this forum is clear for all to see! I despise U & everything about U & those U serve. 4more...
http://occupywallst.org/forum/poll-should-this-google-owned-site-be-shut-down/#comment-1075996
and furthermore, FYI - #35 here: https://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Society/Activism
U want to take me on?! So join Twitter & come find me & then I'll be happy to show U a "safe space", lol! As bw's Alexa link & other site use stats sites show, somehow or other, we have been keeping this place going. No thanx to c*nts like U, who've 0 to bring but bombast, braggadocio & RW b-s! U can Ef-off now!
anguis in herba - temet nosce!
(snake in the grass - know yourself!)
You have no allegiance to the 99%. Your allegiance was always with Jart, a six figure earning 1%er.
Re. your lies, be assURed - no one here has believed a word U say for the past 6+ years! Can U cite just one single Pro-1%er forum-post or comment to evidence your ass-ertions?!! It is U who was & is infatuated with jart .. U scummy li'l RW ''Concern Troll'' fkwit!!!
Re.this Still Standing (no thanx 2U!) OWS forum, to quote bw,
from ... http://occupywallst.org/forum/jart-lets-shut-this-forum-down/#comment-1076073 ...
''Because of people like you .. it would take a lot of money and labor to keep this site running. Trolling and hacking from people like you is why it is the way it is. (So) Quit pretending that you care about anything other than causing disruption on this forum.''
Have U got ANYTHING serious or even vaguely relevant to say about ANYTHING at all? Eg.re.OP:
doofus maximus .. nosce te ipsum!
I remember you defending Jart, as if you were her boyfriend and savior.
Have you dated jart?
No matter how much U project your infatuation with jart, U can not deflect from your innate nasty nature. Everyone U ever met in your sad life - eventually concluded this .. even the li'l wifelet U conned, so as to avoid paying US/Canadian taxes. Are U still confused about who U really prefer, btw? Arthur or Martha?
http://occupywallst.org/article/lehman-brothers/#comment-1076101 & per OP
see: https://truthout.org/articles/reading-against-fascism/ by Henry A. Giroux
multum in parvo ...
We are entering a hyper-racist time in which both the right and the left and race-obsessed. It's almost impossible to hear a right winger or a left winger talk about politics without mentioning race. Everything you do is judged by your race. You can't say or write certain things because of cultural appropriation. While the right wants a white controlled land, the left is censoring what you do depending on your race.
So, elf3, you better check your privilege boy!
Ws created the race war to divide Occupy and distract from the real class war Wallstreet and Congress and Supreme Court waged against the 99.
That's actually a very good insight I had not thought about. Occupy should have been about the 99% vs the 1%, and you're right, it became about white vs color, trans versus cisgender, etc...
It's all the Corporate media discusses. I'm not saying racism or gender issues aren't important...but since when has the big media ever cared so much about it? There was a media blackout of Occupy Wall Street, merely a mention of bailouts, in 2008 when both my husband and I lost our jobs and sent out hundreds of resumes without reply I didn't even know there was a recession I thought we were alone: there was literally no mention of the ripples pouring out in fact all I heard was the economy was good and filled with opportunity and I was an avid news junkie and I was desperately looking for answers as I had to audition for bottom feeder ridiculously low paying jobs like a circus animal in strange group interviews reminiscent of The Bachelor. It just shows how much control they have over media and information...it gave them time to sell off bad investments before the public could themselves react or protect themselves by pulling their 401k s off the market or selling property before they got underwater.
Then to my extreme relief Occupy exploded and the truth of why people (myself included) were suffering was finally out there...WS struggled to put it back in the box blacked it out of the media, downplayed it, turned us into anarchists pooping on cars and threatening public safety...then when that didnt work and discussion of Banksters and Bail outs couldnt be stifled ...the tea party arose and were discussing banker bonuses ....and started to agree with Occupy. Michael Moore even made a film about loving good old Capitalism tea party style...
NOW suddenly the media shifted toward racism and actually made their cause about it and at the time there were even paid Astroturfers holding racist signs corrupting the tea party cause and those weirdos showing up protesting at soldiers funerals and on and on ( and you know all of a sudden it became the only issue the media ever discussed) This was very much strategized because when people realized they weren't alone and what was going on in WS they were pissed they were seeing banksters and billionaires contrasted against their struggles and they wanted something done. But sadly largely this race strategy worked. The working class suddenly became two opposing forces divided up on skin color. Trump and Sanders were the two politicians discussing the working class. ( Trump was lying we now know) but i think at the time people's interest in him had little to do with race in fact he was very outspoken about working class at times almost more than Sanders he was hardcore about bitchslapping WS and slave labor outsourcing... so much so he perked up many ears on the left including my own and I thought he was a disgusting mysogynist but for a second even I was like hmm am i willing to put the dignity of my breasts to the side so I can possibly get some upward mobility and justice for the working class?... Everyone wanted jobs and stability. But flip on a news station...were they or are they now discussing the economy???. Do they discuss working class issues...stagflation, outsourcing, bail outs, jobs, net neutrality? No they discuss racism. It is absolutely a strategy.
Wallstreet wants to stay in power at all costs. Divide and conquer...age old tactic. As well as Trump shifted his own views about WS completely and then actually made his own presidency all about race once in office to further provoke and divide the working class. He is a manchurian candidate for WS. And apparently willing to sacrifice his own reputation word and dignity to their cause which is actually and apparently, always was, his cause.I think people overlooked his crass loud bigotted mouth in the hopes someone crazy and tough enough would take on Wall Street (not so their secret wishes of white dominance could prevail). Would Obama have won if that was the case? But the media would have us all think that. Film a few more white nazi rallies make it look like it is the norm. It is not a trend, it is far from the norm. But the left play right in show up to counter protest as if it's in danger of prevailing. Newsflash: if a white supremecist rally falls in the forest and noone shows up to hear it...the media can't film it and then trickle it down to every local station and make it look like it is some kind of trend taking off. It isn't. All youre doing is providing the fringe nazi assholes the appearance they are important or relevant and giving them something to push against as well as playing right into WS's strategy. If we don't get wise to this...we are all in grave trouble. The common man and woman are losing. We need to unite together against the real threat against us ( it isn't eachother)...it is Wall Street. Next up... predatory car loan fall out ( because really who can afford a car outright anymore especially at these inflated prices) compared to our crap salaries and ...Bail ins: Yes that is right folks legislation has been passed and sits waiting to allow wallstreet to close their gates and prevent withdrawals of what you have in the bank next time there is another stock market crash...fyi they get to keep it. Bye bye retirement and savings.
I'm not convinced it was 100% planned by the media. That sounds like a conspiracy theory. I think it came from young people themselves. It's 3rd wave feminism. Occupy themselves pushed the idea of safe spaces, or white privilege, etc... etc... The media group that create this website with Jart and Zoe was reserved for trans people.
How is it conspiracy that the media is a one percent propaganda funnel coming direct from the boardroom of the very consolidated wealthy ws ownership? It is just logic and actually easy to see. We no longer have a free press we have a wallstreet commercial disguised as news. I think Occupy was getting sidetracked by the word salad arguments being thrown at them from every direction by the elites seeking to tear it down. They took up arms on every distraction / issue and debated themselves into exhaustion. Again it is the furniture analogy all of those issues were important but they needed to stay focused on the fact that ws was burning the whole house down before getting to the rest. We still do.
First, there isn't just one media outlet even though you might not know others. There are tons of different media representing different political positions. The idea that 'the media' is one entity controlled by the 1% is conspiracy theory talk. The world is always much more complex that what conspiracy theorists believe.
Second, I'm saying this talk of safe spaces, white privilege, micro-aggressions, non-binary, transgenders, etc... etc... identity politics was not something that was imagined and setup by the media to destroy occupy.
You didn't participate in occupy, so you wouldn't know. However, these elements of the protest were brought on by occupiers. The media group that made this site and posters and controlled all internal media for occupy was a trans-gendered group. Safe-spaces were a concept talked about and voted for in general assemblies. OWS had talks on white privilege.
Now, all these issues are important, it's just that occupy became more about that than about economics.
What the left is fighting for now is all about identity politics. We seldom hear the left talk about economic issues anymore. No more fight against wall street. The left talks about the stuff I mentioned two paragraphs ago - white privilege, etc... That's not the fault of the media.