levon wrote:On point #1, the majority of people voting (if you believe in voting as an honest signifier) for the policies I'm referencing are white men, usually uneducated. I misspoke as often happens when trying to qualify stats. It's the case that of the people that vote for such policies the plurality (biggest segment) are white, white men, and white uneducated men as you drill down further. That last segment is especially pertinent because it highlights that it's precisely this segment of the powerless that fervently prop up the powerful, evidently on the basis of race (again, if you believe voting has explanatory weight or impact in our society).
The reason for that is simple, most uneducated white men work blue collar jobs, and the political party that defends blue collar jobs is not the party that promotes black progressivism, and you can only vote for a party, not a specific policy. At the end of the day the average person will want to uplift someone in need, but when it comes at an expense to them and they have to worry about feeding the family, they'll naturally put economics before ideology. But it does not mean that these white men are voting specifically
against black interests.
levon wrote:On point #2, sure, it doesn't have to be the biggest issue, but we have only have a limited amount of energy and time. As for if it's possible to be racist against white people, the answer is yes -- we've had ample evidence of it in the past, predominantly from other white people. It's perplexing until you realize that whiteness is just a manufactured label, manufactured by white people. Others have been racialized, and to be white is to essentially be of the unracialized group in your society. There are plenty of other societies where a certain segment is afforded outsized power and influence, but their genetic makeup has no relation to Germanic peoples or whatever is the tenuous ethnic origin of American whiteness in 2023. Whiteness is not just a western concept or new concept. But if you prefer to argue that prejudice, wishing harm unto other people, causing violence based on the color of skin falls under the word "racism", I'm not going to disagree with you. It's where people start to equate that-version-of-racism against white people to racism against others. You're going to have to upgrade the latter definition of racism into some other word then or qualify it somehow, because they are not equal, nor have they ever been.
It takes 0 added effort to not treat someone differently based on their race. It just takes being conscious about if or when you do do it and then trying to change that behavior. "Whiteness" is definitely a thing, it doesn't matter if 100 years ago Irish people or Slavs were not considered white, today in 2023 everyone knows what a "white" person is. You're taking a very American-centric viewpoint about racism, there are other countries in the world. Is it not as bad to be racist to white people in China or India where white people hold no institutional power?
levon wrote:The economy, and terrible people poisoning our information space both domestically and internationally. Identity-based conflicts decline when people are able to equitably participate in the wealth of their society. If it's failing people across the board, the temperature goes up. Point being, you should levy this same criticism of "we should all be working together to stick it to the powerful" to the powerless white people as well who are playing a disproportionate role in either propping up the old guard, or ushering in deleterious far-right actors.
Identity-based politics was invented by powerful people to divide and conquer, nothing more. When a policy does not stand up to scrutiny, it's used as a moral wedge to nudge people into voting the way you want them to. There is a reason these multi-billion dollar media conglomerates which are owned by rich white people are pushing these ideas, and it's not because these rich white men want to racially cuck themselves.
But with all that said, this discussion has gone off on a tangent. I'm here to talk about Perkins, we may have differing views on what racism is and that's ok. But I don't want this thread getting derailed and inevitably locked so I'll just talk about Perkins from here on out.
