Tim Wise: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Glenn Beck?

[CBR]

Racism and White Privilege on the Liberal-Left

Excellent article (hat tip to Aspen Rose on DU: Editorials)

http://www.timwise.org/2010/08/with-friends-like-these-who-needs-glenn-beck-racism-and-white-privilege-on-the-liberal-left/

"Other examples of liberal-left marginalizing of folks of colors’ concerns — and thus, people of color themselves — include the way many progressives seek to consciously downplay the role of race and racism in particular political struggles, even when such matters are central to the issue at hand.... The same problem emerged in the mid-to-late 90s in California and Washington State, when white-dominated liberal activists and campaigners were trying to save affirmative action from ballot initiatives that sought to eliminate it. In both cases, despite the obvious centrality of white racial resentment to the issue, organizers avoided discussing racism, either as a motivator for the anti-affirmative action movement, or even as a reason for why affirmative action was still needed and should be defended. Rather, they chose to focus on the impact to women as women (and especially white women) if affirmative action were ended."

"Perhaps the most common way in which folks on the left sometimes perpetuate racism is by a vulgar form of class reductionism, in which they advance the notion that racism is a secondary issue to the class system, and that what leftists and radicals should be doing is spending more time focusing on the fight for dramatic and transformative economic change (whether reformist or revolutionary), rather than engaging in what they derisively term “identity politics.” The problem, say these voices, are corporations, the rich, the elite, etc., and to get sidetracked into a discussion of white supremacy is to ignore this fact and weaken the movement for radical change."


"As such, the way in which that part of the movement framed issues, and made their case to an oftentimes hostile public, reflected first and foremost the concerns of white (and, it should be noted, middle-class) women. Thus, to frame the fight for women’s liberation as a fight for the right to a career and to break free from the chains of domesticity (as was so central to the early feminist writings of women like Betty Friedan), presupposed that women were not currently working outside the home. But of course, most women of color in the United States had always worked outside the home (as well as in it) and so the struggle as articulated in books like The Feminine Mystique was implicitly white, and of little value to women of color whose lived realities were different."

[Uzybone]

1. Thanks for posting. Tim Wise is a treasure.

[Cha]

2. Thank you, CBR, for posting this

in the BOG. For those who don't know who Tim Wise is..

<snip>

"Tim Wise (born October 4, 1968) is an American anti-racist activist and writer. He has lectured since 1995 at over 500 college campuses across the US. He has trained teachers, corporate employees, non-profit organizations and law enforcement officers in methods for addressing and dismantling racism in their institutions."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wise

[Number23]

3. The lovely AspenRose has posted this in Editorials

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x554444

It's a hell of a read. Tim Wise nails it -- AGAIN.

Edit: This part needs to be stickied to the front page of DU for the next 40 years:

And fourth, left activists often marginalize people of color by operating from a framework of extreme class reductionism, which holds that the “real” issue is class, not race, that “the only color that matters is green,” and that issues like racism are mere “identity politics,” which should take a back seat to promoting class-based universalism and programs to help working people. This reductionism, by ignoring the way that even middle class and affluent people of color face racism and color-based discrimination (and by presuming that low income folks of color and low income whites are equally oppressed, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary) reinforces white denial, privileges white perspectivism and dismisses the lived reality of people of color.