I have. Mostly college kids in private colleges; they're in a bubble and only exposed to other well-off kids, which means that none of them have experience with classism and therefore they can dismiss it, whereas racism is a problem for rich POC and therefore, because it can affect their classmates, it's a huge issue (just like homophobia, transphobia, and sexism).
But it happens outside of that as well. One example is the framing of what happened in Flint as a solely racial issue, when the city is poor as hell (I made 28k and I believe I was in the top 20% of household income for the city) and about half its residents are white. The people making those arguments had never been to Flint and wouldn't have cared about the white students I saw who were so poor they only had a single set of clothes. Flint wouldn't have happened to a city of rich black people. (Of course, the fact that the city proper has more POC is partially due to the impacts of racism so the disproportionate impact is caused by racism and I wouldn't deny that).
Like how I see racism mostly dismissed from people who live in poor, white majority areas: It's really hard to understand the pervasiveness of racism if you're in that situation. (And from racists, of course, just like classists dismiss classism.)
I wouldn't say they're most of the people against racism (particularly when it comes to criminal justice and incarceration issues), but they do have an outsized media presence precisely due to their privilege.
These topics are so filter bubbled I don't have a good sense of which, if either, of the two dismissals is objectively more common.
They are tiny minority with a disproportionately loud voice. They are also probably the group where the people with the loudest voices in society tend to be drawn from.
Anyway, this is really a small part of my entire comment.
I'm a nerd about the subjectivity of the modern internet experience.
Bizarre statement since no such thing exists. Previous attempts at creating a rich black city were met with violent white supremacy. The possibility a black community could be rich enough to buy influence to prevent its municipal water from being switched to a source that corrodes its water mains is so far removed from reality, it hardly seems useful to speculate on.
> the fact that the city proper has more POC is partially due to the impacts of racism
No, it’s entirely due to racism through explicit public policies such as redlining.
I'm also going to assume you're not from here/have never lived in the region. Flint's decline took place mostly AFTER the Fair Housing Act was put into place, and the reason there were so many black people in Flint to begin with is that (like Lansing and Detroit), the auto industry actually treated black people relatively decently. Unlike in Detroit, the white flight from Flint didn't result in the outer areas developing instead: The area just lost half its population because there were no more auto jobs.
It wasn't explicit public policies that made black people in Flint less able to leave, for the most part. Implicit and private racism played big parts, as does generational poverty and the latter generational affects of slavery (e.g. since most of Flint's Black people moved there in the 20s-40s and the city crashed in the 60s-70s, they didn't really have time to build the communities needed to do things like help them leave a newly dead Rust Belt city).
Flint in particular is a giant clusterfuck of interconnected issues of class, race, etc., which is why it was my example. (And also because I used to live there).
One problem I have with modern racial discourse is the insistence on flattening all history into one singular (usually American centric) model. Local history and context matters.
Housing discrimination didn't start with the FHA. It didn't even start with the New Deal-era Home Owners Loan Act. Those laws merely encoded the racial policies that created the segregation already in place. Sorry if I'm arguing a different point that what you're making here. I don't see how any of what you said comes from "class etc." when the reason why they were poor and separated from communities of support is because of race.
Local context matters, but I've lived in a few big cities and I think it's pretty tall order to show that your local racists are significantly different than the Median National Racist.
I don't think racists in general are less racist to African/Caribbean immigrants, I think that the racism would be expressed differently. My point is that if you're a racist, you don't bomb things unless you're very sure you're going to get away with it, and upper-class immigrants are more likely (in general) to be well-connected and have the resources to fight back. Since overt racism is riskier, there are more microaggressions, 'I can't prove this is because I was Black but we all know, don't we?' type situations, etc.
You mentioned Flint's water crisis as being solely due to 'explicit public policies'; my point was by the time Flint started its decline that the racism had moved to being pushed through IMPLICIT means and by private companies. It matters because the mechanisms behind how racism acts determine where and how we should try to intervene.
Class enters the Flint situation in particular because:
- The entire city is poor as hell. Like REALLY poor. Like makes Cleveland look like it's doing well poor. It was routine for cars to die in the middle of the road and be left there because people couldn't afford to move them. Unfortunately, this means that homes are neglected and the city has no money. Which made the whole 'replacing or coating the pipes' question a clusterfuck, because in half the houses the pipes weren't in great shape to begin with, which makes it even more expensive to fix. The limbo of the city going so long without safe water was directly related to 'who should pay for it?' and if the residents or city had funds, it wouldn't have been such an issue.
- Some of the failure to address the situation came from false promises and utter failure on the part of the well off, including POC. Obama's visit and promises amounting to nothing, donations and invitations from celebrities not coming through, a ton of people involved in the cover up (especially in local government) were Black...etc. Hard to say it's 100% racism when the people hanging you out to dry are also Black.
I don't think there is such a thing as a Median National Racist, because racial history and relations vary so much throughout the country. Not that I'm making any claim about BETTER or WORSE: Just that the racism is different and I don't think there is a descriptive median.
Might be in a decade or so though, as the media defines one for us.
¿Por qué no los dos? "Race" is merely a social construct, and subcultural differences are a big part of what defines that construct in the first place. And the whole point of referencing 'class' is that social and economic differences can in turn feed back on culture.
You should have read my entire comment before you replied.
What are we supposed to garner from looking at the parent companies of media assets? Time Warner owns CNN, Comcast owns nbc, etc… so what?
Much simpler explanation is that “Critical race theory” and similar veins of thought which view issues in terms of race at the expense of class were not born out of the media but from academia. Most journalists are highly educated and thus often have an academic viewpoint.
Anecdotal, but just from journalists I know, they are universally idealists, and I suspect that is common for journalists. The idea that they’re publishing narratives for the super rich seems far fetched.
How does reframing class issues as race issues disrupt collective action? Race issues lead to protests like Black Lives Matter, for example.
I really doubt that the pro-life movement was deliberately orchestrated by a Republican-party conspiracy, as you seem to imply. Though I wouldn't be surprised if the Republicans identified a developing organic movement as political opportunity, which they then seized upon.
But it was not a conspiracy. It was just a plan. Conspiracy is collusion to commit a crime. Cynical politics is not a crime.
That begs the question. Beware of trying to fit and squeeze every phenomenon in the world into your own prejudices.
My experience with the pro-life crowd is that they really consider abortion on par with murder and that is what motivates them to fight on. Even in a country like mine, where abortion is widely accepted and pro-life positions won't help you electorally or socially at all.
So, no: their politics are very, very far from consistent.
For me, the lesson is that if you value your integrity, you shouldn't join a political tribe. ANY of them. Green, red, blue, yellow, these are all a loyalty-first, thought-maybe-later groups.
Yes, definitely. Do you a very homogeneous social group or something? The alternative would be that all pro-lifers are conniving bad faith actors. I shouldn’t have to say more for that to seem very suspicious and certainly incorrect.
Pro-choice and pro-life positions are both quite logically consistent, internally. Try and reckon with that.
I'm pro-choice, but this side of the debate is easily tempted to oversimplify and assume pro-lifers are evil idiots.
Harming another living person purely for your assumptions (religious beliefs) qualifies as evil intent. This is a highly complex topic that is between highly educated doctors who would know what the consequences are and the women to those consequences are happening.
You are framing the issue with the pre-supposition that you are correct, and the arguments of the other side do not exist and they are just acting out of pure malice.
> No one was going around terminating 36 week fetuses for the fun of it.
I've personally witnessed calls to "celebrate your abortion". While I understand that it may be a rhetorical device, to a person for whom "fetus" is a little human being, there's not much daylight between that and "for the fun of it".
> Harming another living person purely for your assumptions (religious beliefs) qualifies as evil intent
Again, you are arguing as if other side's argument does not exist. That what "over simplifying" is - you assume the other side has no argument and just are pure evil, and then make a conclusion that they have no argument and just are pure evil. Easy victory, but a hollow one.
> This is a highly complex topic
And yet, you declare that on a highly complex topic having position different from yours is "evil" and has no argument worth considering. Maybe it's more complex than you think?
> that is between highly educated doctors
Nope, we can't have political and moral question be decided by a narrow class of credentialed ivory tower dwellers. At least not while having a democracy, that's just not how a democracy can function. You can have a monarchy or oligarchy work this way, but that's not what we have in the US, and anyway, why do you think the God Emperor (or the High Council of Benevolent Oligarchs) would necessarily belong to your tribe? What is built by power, would be destroyed by power. The only way to avoid it is to build consensus. But you can't build consensus if you don't recognize the other side exists.
You seem to be assuming that your perspective on the issue is the only correct one, and therefore no one can legitimately think differently. In cases like this, that's only tenable by straw-manning or totally ignoring alternate perspectives.
Someone can start with different basic assumptions, and proceed to arrive at a totally different yet self-consistent perspective than yours. With the abortion debate, one important different assumption is if fetuses humanized or dehumanized.
I think I pretty frequently see errors in understanding that result from people taking their side's assumptions, and then trying to derive the other side's positions from that false starting point.
But I do not see why I should care. If someone’s assumptions lead to harm for my non fetus daughter, wife, sister, or any woman, then that is all that is needed to for me to write off their point of view.
You also denied that they were self-consistent, which is what I (and possibly the others) were responding to. And even if you know what their different assumptions are, you don't seem to actually be doing anything with that information, which isn't that different from not knowing in the first place.
You're simply assuming the conclusion - that the fetus/baby isn't a child in the normal sense the way a born baby is a child.
The rest of your arguments flow from the notion of how ridiculous it is to make a woman sacrifice to save a non-child fetus. And from your premises, you are correct.
But that's missing the point entirely.
Pro-lifers don't think it's a non-child fetus. They think it's a child. For them, it's the same as sacrificing to save the life of a born baby.
The point isn’t that you’re wrong. It’s that they aren’t thinking what you’re projecting them to think.
The unfortunate consequence is developing political policy solutions that do not solve the underlying problems, which create additional problems. This seems ideal for vieux riche, who are insulated from the problems. Not to mention, that you generally require significant amounts of money to successfully run for public office. The rich are the gatekeepers of American society and want to maintain it that way, even if it causes chaos for people lower on the social hierarchy.