It’s a handy ideology. It allows Californians to feel super enlightened while having a ridiculous homeless population at the same time.

Precisely by making it a race issue instead of wealth distribution/class issue it becomes easier to shut people down who would support social programs, mostly by driving the well meaning masses into looking at it from the race perspective.

Keeping it as a race issue keeps the lower classes on eachothers throats. Heck I’ve seen arguments that Oprah, a billionare, is less privileged than a white hobo, because whiteness. And because it’s not about money but literally the amount of melanin in your skin there is no need to care about the money part.

Otherwise I wouldn’t care less what the yanks do but due to the large cultural dominance they have the issues spill to outside of US.

The most well known mind behind the modern form of that equation is that of Lee Atwater, one of the architects of the Republican "Southern Strategy" [1]. But using race to divide people who would otherwise be unacceptably likely to recognize and act on a common class interest is the oldest play in America, and it's always wild - by which I mean "unsurprising, but regrettable" - to see other white leftists in 2020 still falling for it.

Do better, y'all.

[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...

> Why is the emphasis on white people and not wealth?

Because of the amount of violence that has and is taking place entirely on the basis of race rather than wealth.

Wealth is certainly a thing. But those who talk about how all these problems are just about economic class are sweeping the thousands of race-based and racist policies and actions under the rug.

> Why is the emphasis on white people and not wealth?

Because that's who has wealth [1] and they have it because they stole it from other groups via forced labor and literal theft of land and other resources and then explicitly disadvantaged them in post facto competition.

[1]. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/03/politics/black-white-us-f...

The ruling class stole these, not "white people". Throughout the history and the world, all places and races had their own class of oppressors, surprise - usually from the same race as the oppressed, and of course from a very wide racial variety. That US were built first from white colonists, who set the precedent for that place, does not mean whites are any different that other races in oppression. The ruling class also stole their wealth from the working class, including the white people in it, and if your aim is to bring equal racial representation, or a change on the dominant race, in the ruling class, rather than the abolishment of the present social and economoc structure, you are just maintaining the current situation and playing the capitalists' game.

Well said and reasoned; however, not all oppression is class based. My claim is that racism is a secondary oppression upon the first that you describe which white people (or whoever in other places) benefit from and participate in maintaining. It is true the inequality between the classes is much greater than any other but that doesn't mean that the others don't exist. I agree especially with your last point though and didn't intend to communicate otherwise.