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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMetzl: It's time to talk about the privilege being white in America
By Jonathan Metzl
Posted May 4, 2019 at 9:39 AM
Its time to talk about what it means to be white in the United States.
Thats what I was trying to do last weekend at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., when I was interrupted by a group of white nationalists. Ironically, the protesters chant This land is our land served only to reinforce my point.
For too long, many white Americans have avoided this conversation, and weve done so for a reason: We dont have to see the color white. Race scholars often argue white privilege broadly means not needing to reflect on whiteness. White is the default setting, the assumed norm. A white American does not have to think about being white when walking down the street while people marked as not-white are often noticed and surveilled. White people have the superpower of invisibility.
Yet with the rise of President Donald Trumps brand of resentment politics, American whiteness is increasingly hard to overlook. Trumpian rhetoric defines white identity not by shared values but by shared resentments. Whiteness, in this telling, is under siege. Walled behind Trumps claim that the country is full, and his equivocations on white extremism, lies the notion that immigrants and citizens of color are usurping the privileges of whiteness. This narrative is then amplified by increasingly emboldened white nationalists like the ones who sought to shout me down last weekend.
Trump did not invent insecure whiteness. He is only a skilled manipulator of the fears at its heart.
For the past eight years, Ive studied how these politics of racial resentment have profound negative consequences for working-class white communities. I traveled across Southern and Midwestern states to track the everyday effects of anti-government, anti-immigrant politics and policies. Time and again, I found that the material realities of working-class white lives are made worse not by immigrants and citizens of color but by GOP policies that promise greatness but deliver despair.
https://www.pjstar.com/opinion/20190504/metzl-its-time-to-talk-about-privilege-being-white-in-america
Posted May 4, 2019 at 9:39 AM
Its time to talk about what it means to be white in the United States.
Thats what I was trying to do last weekend at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., when I was interrupted by a group of white nationalists. Ironically, the protesters chant This land is our land served only to reinforce my point.
For too long, many white Americans have avoided this conversation, and weve done so for a reason: We dont have to see the color white. Race scholars often argue white privilege broadly means not needing to reflect on whiteness. White is the default setting, the assumed norm. A white American does not have to think about being white when walking down the street while people marked as not-white are often noticed and surveilled. White people have the superpower of invisibility.
Yet with the rise of President Donald Trumps brand of resentment politics, American whiteness is increasingly hard to overlook. Trumpian rhetoric defines white identity not by shared values but by shared resentments. Whiteness, in this telling, is under siege. Walled behind Trumps claim that the country is full, and his equivocations on white extremism, lies the notion that immigrants and citizens of color are usurping the privileges of whiteness. This narrative is then amplified by increasingly emboldened white nationalists like the ones who sought to shout me down last weekend.
Trump did not invent insecure whiteness. He is only a skilled manipulator of the fears at its heart.
For the past eight years, Ive studied how these politics of racial resentment have profound negative consequences for working-class white communities. I traveled across Southern and Midwestern states to track the everyday effects of anti-government, anti-immigrant politics and policies. Time and again, I found that the material realities of working-class white lives are made worse not by immigrants and citizens of color but by GOP policies that promise greatness but deliver despair.
https://www.pjstar.com/opinion/20190504/metzl-its-time-to-talk-about-privilege-being-white-in-america
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Metzl: It's time to talk about the privilege being white in America (Original Post)
MrScorpio
May 2019
OP
tblue37
(65,487 posts)1. K&R for visibility. nt
Solly Mack
(90,785 posts)2. K&R
whistler162
(11,155 posts)3. again!