AmeriKKKa

[Hermit]

White workers are not in cahoots with capitalists. They are hoodwinked.

[Sean Hayden]

That never gets old.

[Hermit]

That never gets old.

Meaning what?

[Sean Hayden]

It's funny every time.

[Hermit]

Not at all funny. It's an effective trick with tragic consequences. Brexit was just one of them.

[JimC]

I suspect that the original reason for using the term "privilege" in many leftist academic writings was to jar white males, even those who were "woke" (sarcasm intended) into understanding that their personal situations had freedoms and advantages compared to others they may not have fully processed.

Some aspects of its continued use have become divisive, derogatory and a way of keeping score in academic feuds...

[pErvinalia]

She's denying blacks get less because whites get more.

Which is a direct manifestation of white privilege.

The term “privileges” was used to describe measures, such as relatively decent schools and medical care, to which whites received greater access. The problem with this conception is that these measures, rather than representing undeserved “privileges”, were in fact reforms won by the working class through bitter struggle. These class gains represented the return of a small part of the great wealth held by capitalists that workers had produced. Privilege theory – on the basis of unequal access to these gains under racist American capitalism – converted hard-won class victories, reforms and rights into “undeserved” workers’ “privileges”.

This is just confused. The relevant part of the first sentence is "to which whites received greater access" (i.e. white privilege). But in the second sentence she moves the goalposts and links privilege to "decent schools and medical care". Yes, they were won by so called class struggle, but access to those is still unequal. I.e. white privilege still exists despite hard won gains by the union movement.

[pErvinalia]

Debating someone on Facebook and they made this claim:

Once the kkk 'formed' it was republicans who attempted to squash the movement..

Can I get a fact check on that?

[Svartalf]

You can at least get a fart check

[Brian Peacock]

Furthermore, the privilege theory of causation – Black workers get less because white workers get more, and its corollary – flies in the face of American reality. Historically, wages, benefits and working conditions have always been significantly lower for working-class whites in the non-unionised South than for Black (and white) workers in unionised areas of the North. The higher union standard of living results not from racial privilege, but from the unity and solidarity of both Black and white workers in class struggle.

This is weird cherry picking. Why is she not comparing the conditions of black workers in the south to white workers in the south, and black workers in the north to white workers in the north? She may as well compare white workers in Siberia to black workers in Manhattan to demonstrate that white privilege doesn't exist.

Perhaps because she is making a point about the unifying force of class struggle?

And she conveniently omits the fact that unionization is far more difficult in the south BECAUSE of white anti-black racism.

As the article you recently posted suggests, the legacy of the South's "oligarchs of the lash" was, and continues to be, detrimental to the welfare and well-being of poor whites and blacks alike. As an observer it strikes me that unionisation is currently difficult across America, but historically were white Southern workers granted rights to unionise that weren't offered to those whose labour was a function of being the legal property of someone else?

[Hermit]

Debating someone on Facebook and they made this claim:

Once the kkk 'formed' it was republicans who attempted to squash the movement..

Can I get a fact check on that?

S/he is right. The membership during the KKK's first period of prominence (approx. 1865-1872) consisted mostly of Democrat voters and its chief opponents were Republican voters, Republican governors and other Republican government figures. By the time the KKK came to its second period of prominence (approx. 1915-1926) its membership was an almost even mix of Democrats and Republicans. Woodrow Wilson, member of the Democratic Party and US president from 1913 to 1921, was an apologist for slavery and a supporter of racial segregation.

[BarnettNewman]

The switch from progressives to racists happened in the 60s. IOWs If you are a repub now you likely would have been a dem then and vice versa.

Video on this here:




Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Seabass]

Debating someone on Facebook and they made this claim:

Once the kkk 'formed' it was republicans who attempted to squash the movement..

Can I get a fact check on that?

100% true. Back then, the Democratic party was the party of the Confederacy, the South, the Klan, Jim Crow. Postbellum, when all these racist paramilitary groups like the Klan (and many others that never managed to attain the Klan's notoriety) started to wreak havoc in the South, Republican president Ulysses S. Grant (who defeated the Confederacy as Lincoln's general during the war) went after the Klan pretty hard.

In the 1900s, the racists kind of started to spread out more evenly between the parties, but in the '60s when it was the Dems who started passing civil rights bills, the racists all switched to the Republican party. When the Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson signed the '65 Civil Rights act into law, he famously said "We've lost the South for a generation". Turns out the Dems lost the South for a lot longer than that...

[Sean Hayden]

White in all the wrong places: white rural poverty in the postbellum US South

Many analyses of whiteness assume a priori that a white identity intimates unproblematic claims to white privilege. As Henry Giroux has noted, however, the reduction of whiteness ‘exclusively to forms of exploitation and domination’ fails ‘to capture the complexity that marks ‘whiteness’ as a form of identity and cultural practice’. While connections between whiteness and domination can certainly be powerful, simply being white does not automatically bring social, economic or any other form of privilege, as whiteness never functions in solitude.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.119 ... 003eu266oa

--it's interesting to see what money thought of poor whites at the time (and still does )

If you say that half the men and nearly all the women are very pale, you strike at the matter, but
fail to fairly hit it . . . Unquestionably soap and water and crash towels would improve the
appearance, but I doubt if they would give any bloom to the cheek. The skin seems utterly
without vitality, and beyond the action of any restorative stimulants: it has a pitiful and repulsive
death-in-life appearance . . . The whole economy of life seems radically wrong, and there is no
inherent energy which promises reformation.

Although ‘[t]ime and effort will lead the negro up to intelligent
manhood’, he doubted ‘if they will be able to lead this ‘white trash’ even up to
respectability’. African Americans, for Andrews and others, had the potential to rise to
‘intelligent manhood’. White trash, conversely, was forever stuck somewhere beneath
respectability.

[Seabass]

Furthermore, the privilege theory of causation – Black workers get less because white workers get more, and its corollary – flies in the face of American reality. Historically, wages, benefits and working conditions have always been significantly lower for working-class whites in the non-unionised South than for Black (and white) workers in unionised areas of the North. The higher union standard of living results not from racial privilege, but from the unity and solidarity of both Black and white workers in class struggle.

This is weird cherry picking. Why is she not comparing the conditions of black workers in the south to white workers in the south, and black workers in the north to white workers in the north? She may as well compare white workers in Siberia to black workers in Manhattan to demonstrate that white privilege doesn't exist.

Perhaps because she is making a point about the unifying force of class struggle?

If so, she's not doing a very good job of it. The fact that she says the notion of white privilege flies in the face of American reality suggest to me that she is just downplaying the effects of racism.

And she conveniently omits the fact that unionization is far more difficult in the south BECAUSE of white anti-black racism.

As the article you recently posted suggests, the legacy of the South's "oligarchs of the lash" was, and continues to be, detrimental to the welfare and well-being of poor whites and blacks alike. As an observer it strikes me that unionisation is currently difficult across America,

True now, but this was not always the case. Union membership peaked around 35% at one point, but now it's down to around 10% I think. "Right to work" laws and racism (conservatives turning unionization into something that lazy blacks and browns do) have really done a number on the unions.

but historically were white Southern workers granted rights to unionise that weren't offered to those whose labour was a function of being the legal property of someone else?

There was some unionization in the South, but it never took off like it did elsewhere. WEB Du Bois explains why in Black Reconstruction in America

The political success of the doctrine of racial separation, which overthrew reconstruction by uniting the planter and the poor white, was far exceeded by its astonishing economic results. The theory of laboring class unity rests upon the assumption that laborers, despite internal jealousies, will unite because of their opposition to exploitation by the capitalists. According to this, even after a part of the poor, white laboring class became identified with the planters, and eventually displaced them, their interests would be diametrically opposed to those of the mass of white labor, and of course, to those of black laborers. This would throw white and black labor into one class and precipitate a united fight for higher wage and better working conditions. Most persons do not realize how far this failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there are probably not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently, and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their votes selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites, and almost utterly ignored the negro except in crime and ridicule. On the other hand, in the same way, the negro was subject to public insult, was afraid of mobs, was liable to the jibes of children, and the unreasoning fears of white women, and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority. The result of both of this was that the wages of both classes could be kept low—the whites fearing to be supplanted by negro labor, the negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor. Mob violence and lynching were the inevitable result of the attitude of these two classes, and for a time were a sort of permissible Roman holiday for the entertainment of vicious whites. One can see for these reasons why labor organizers and labor agitators made such small headway in the South. They were for the most part appealing to laborers who would rather have low wages upon which they could eke out an existence, than see colored labor with a decent wage. White labor saw in every advance of negroes a threat to their racial prerogatives, so that in many districts, negroes were afraid to build decent homes, or dress well, or own carriages, bicycles, or automobiles because of possible retaliation on the part of the whites. Thus every problem of labor advance in the South was skillfully turned by demagogues into a matter of interacial jealousy.