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I offer this only because it is timely in light of what I shared some 15 hours ago and, in a narrow sense, a "counterpoint." I place it squarely in the category of "White Wing Propaganda" but will leave it to you all to draw your own conclusions.
The ‘1619 Project’ Gets Schooled - WSJ
“The interests of a black worker on the line in an auto plant and a white worker,” he says, “are fundamentally the same, and a million miles from the interests of an Oprah Winfrey or a Hillary Clinton.” He rejects the “pseudo-left politics” of identity, which “fight out conflicts within the top 10% or so over access to positions of power and privilege” through diversity programs, then “denounce white workers for being supposedly privileged even as they suffer from a decline in life expectancy and horrific social conditions.”Quote:
Originally Posted by HorsCat
Great opinion piece, thanks for posting it. I couldn't agree more with the above paragraph. And all this from the far, far, left. Very interesting.
Elliot Kaufman is an op-ed writer for the WSJ, an editorial intern at National Review, and a regular writer for the Washington Examiner. His politics fall somewhere between "right wing" and "extreme right wing." IMO, he has an axe to grind.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dallas Tex
The person quoted in my post above and most of the folks quoted in the piece are far left.Quote:
Originally Posted by HorsCat
The quote that I took from it and posted was from Joseph Kishore a national official with the Socialist Equality Party.
Thanks for posting the piece. It’s too seldom that folks give any attention to other points of view.
The rhetorical move in which an author claims the elite, "denounce white workers for being supposedly privileged even as they suffer from a decline in life expectancy and horrific social conditions" is a load of horseshit.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dallas Tex
Spend 30-60 minutes at The Opportunity Atlas to see how different racial groups fare in this country. White folks do better than persons of color.
More importantly, recognize that trying to squash race as a construct used to oppress millions in this country is a racist move. White folks get to say, "forget about race" as a means of shutting down that line of thinking. It's like me telling a woman who works for me, "it's not about gender". I don't get to shut down conversations that threaten the identities I hold which align with hegemonic norms.
Fair enough. It wasn't clear to me and I assumed you were talking about the author of the op-ed. I encourage you to read the 1619 Project essays if you haven't already.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dallas Tex
i could not agree with it. but there is no surprise here. yup, white outcomes are getting worse now, thanks to a shitty social setup, the top earners keeping things, and no real wage growth to speak of. but to even try and compare that to the life of a minority or more specifically an African American is foolish and unfair. Take Mr white Appalachia, often the population cited when discussing white folks on the decline. his decline is often a product of choice and poor education, not a systemic effort to create an unfair playing field. Mr white on the decline makes his choice primarily for himself, there are no systems setup in bad faith keeping that person down. Meanwhile our society/government has made many a choice for African Americans to their detriment. to agree with the above without caveat seems to me to admit a lack of understanding of reality, of other, of the way Everyone lives and experiences this life. Are there parallels? certainly, as there are between any humans, but its a shame more folk are not paying more attention to what others experience in life with sympathy and understanding rather than bias and comparison to "self".Quote:
Originally Posted by Dallas Tex
carry on
it also goes to show that constructs are simply constructs, and calling something "far left" or "far right" is nonsense and fails to communicate an idea or concept properly. Ideas are not of a party, they are of themselves. So a white guy in a Socialist whatever party of no import doesn't understand the reality of the past or present and his idea therefore is leftist? can the idea not be its own thing, separate from the man while you label the guy whatever you need to label him? the idea doesn't vote, its simply there for rational people to think on. if at any point you thought about helping someone, did you slap your own wrist for that being a lefty idea? or did you just allow the idea to be, and act upon it according to however a human may act on an idea?
Whether from the right or the left, a refusal to acknowledge the deep and continuing role that race has played in our country is a dismissal of both history and betraying an ignorance (willful or not) of the social and political forces still very much at play today. And that has very real economic impact, despite what Joseph Kishore has to claim about the situation. But I get it, he's busy railing against the bourgeois in an argument as old as Marx. Couple notes missing from the tune for an American audience though.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dallas Tex
To your point, here's some damning perspective from Ta Nehisi Coates landmark piece on reparations and how the economic plight of white and black wealth (and by extension work) is very, very different:
The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates - The AtlanticQuote:
The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation of whites only signs are gone. Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows—and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.
This is not surprising. Black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes—a medical emergency, divorce, job loss—the fall is precipitous.
And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. “Blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods,” Sharkey writes, “that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children.”
The implications are chilling. As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.
Interesting comments all. But my life experience tells me that Joseph Kishore is more right than wrong.
The 'interest' of the two autoworkers working side by side are far more similar than you'd like to believe.
I don't disagree, but he blithely disregards the notion that one worker has an entire political system that supported him and gave him and his ancestors both economic opportunities and voice that were actively supressed for the other. And a modern political system that seeks to continue to use race as a wedge issue for one party in particular -- the Southern Strategy, Lee Atwater, Welfare Queens, Willie Horton, et al. It's a frighteningly effective issue for, say, dividing labor in a way that gives capital the advantage in broad discussions about the role of organized unions in society, painting one worker as lazy and unworthy because of skin color. Solidarity is a helluva lot easier when everyone looks the same and way harder when you start to factionalize.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dallas Tex
So yes, superficially, Kinshore is not wrong. His analysis is just sitting firmly in the wading end of the pool.
If the preceding 399 years of occupation on these shores had been a paragon of racial harmony Kishore's premise would be fine. But the immense violence and inequity that exist to this very day render it somewhere between hugely naive and a dog whistle...
I’m not exactly sure he’s headed in that direction, but I may be wrong.Quote:
Originally Posted by theflashunc
I believe 99.9% of folks would agree that it’s simply more difficult to be black in our society. My go to example is always a job interview. In my experience, that would put one a distinct disadvantage in most circumstances. Just my opinion.
The drastic differences in opinion occurs in the effectiveness of prescribed remedies.
The end of the auto businesses of Willets Point in Queens NY. Nice photos. Tough situation. The environmental status of the area is contentious. There has been some effort to Superfund the site, but the city wants environmental cleanup to be done by the developers as part of the "package". They argue that is a less expensive way for the city and faster for development completion. Superfund just freezes the area and slows everything way down. On the other hand, Superfund cleanups have more rigorous standards and supervision. The last businesses that moved out got promised an auto-mall development for relocation, and then as soon as the last business signed on, the auto-mall deal disappeared.
How the Immigrant Dream Died in an Automotive Shantytown - The New York Times
On the other hand, this is NYC. Those businesses could be there until the next time the Mets win the World Series.
Sure, and what he's gravely discounting is the solution he recommends -- ignore racial divisions and unite as labor against capital -- waves away the fact that racial division is actively stoked by capital to keep labor from getting their act together.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dallas Tex
More on "fingerprinting" and other approaches to following you around by your phone in your pocket, this article backed up with some scary data dumped into the NYTimes' lap.
Opinion | Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy - The New York Times
Curious I think that it is published in an opinion piece, but I guess the opinion part is that NYTimes thinks this is bad and should be regulated directly by the government. Of course, the government would love to get their hands on this sort of data. But maybe they already have it.
ive been reading edward snowden's book. of course they already have it, its there, so they have it. i dont like any of this, but its capitalism and jobs and kinda scary. i am certainly no longer sharing my location with all of these apps, and my personalized adds are off.Quote:
Originally Posted by j44ke
the interesting thing about marketing is we dont know how it affects us if its done this well. its meant to slip into our subconscious and create desire where there should be none. its also symbolic of the contrast of power between the actual rich and powerful, and people who post on bike forums.