One of the Best Explanations of White Privilege You Will Likely Ever Read

 by eodell on Tue Sep 30, 2014 at 08:23:19 AM PDT

"Regarding offended white people

I'm not sure who I'm addressing this to, since all of the black people here and a lot of the decent white people already know this, and the racist whites won't get it, but what the hell.

Dear white racists and your fragile fee-fees:

Relax, I'm white, too. Look, I can do the secret handshake and nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Lemme whitesplain something to you, fellow white men: no one buys your bullshit.

That's because your bullshit runs like this: For historically- and presently-oppressed black people to be treated decently, they must carefully avoid doing anything that could be remotely twisted into behaving like a white racist, even if you're squinting and looking at it from five hundred meters away in a thick fog. Because that would be racist, and therefore hypocritical, and if that's the case, they deserve to continue to be oppressed.

Here's the thing you thick-headed assholes totally fail to get: NO ONE DESERVES TO BE OPPRESSED, PERIOD. You can talk all you want about how it's okay for black people to be mistreated if--- but get this, there is no "if". It's not okay, ever. That's why we call it mistreatment. Your error is to think that it's ever justified, and your active misdeed is to constantly search for a justification. Black people, collectively, are not guilty of anything. In fact, a basic principle of civil society is that we reject the notion of collective guilt. Some individual black people, like individual white people, have done bad things, and in those cases, may deserve judicial punishments. But even those people don't deserve mistreatment from some random white guy on the street. And black people in general don't owe anyone anything as a prerequisite for being treated decently. No one does.

Now I know there are a bunch of you in the back of the room waving your hand and getting ready to launch the argument that it's racist to complain about white privilege. No, it is not. Complaining about white privilege is not the same as assigning collective guilt to white people. White privilege is a pervasive feature of our society and our legal system. It's hard to see if you're white (and you're not looking or actively trying not to look), but it is real, it is powerfully destructive, and if global warming had the kind of statistical support that evidence of white privilege has, Bill O'Reilly would be haranguing FOX News viewers to install solar panels.

And here's the subtle point that you folks either can't or won't grasp. White privilege is especially the responsibility of white people to fix, not because we're all racist schlubs like you are, but because white privilege itself means that we're the ones who have the power to change it. Black people don't have that power, again because of white privilege, and not because they aren't sufficiently careful in the way they phrase their complaints about being mistreated. It's our problem and our responsibility as white people to fix not because whites are collectively guilty, but because it is the responsibility of ALL PEOPLE to fight for decent treatment for ALL PEOPLE. It just happens that, because of our shithead ancestors and a helping handful of historical accident, we white people are the ones who can do something about it. When the finger on the trigger is white, it's pointless to ask a black guy to lower the gun.

And quite frankly, given all the shit that our black fellow citizens have put up with, and all the shit they have to deal with every. fucking. day., if some of them lose their tempers and say things that aren't carefully calibrated to kiss your privileged, hypersensitive asses, well, is that actually surprising? You lose your minds when black people just complain verbally about being kicked. Imagine how tough it would be for you to keep your cool if someone was actually doing something to you instead of just talking.

Finally, yes, I know this is pointless. You want to be offended to fluff your fragile egos, and you want black people to please shut the fuck up and stop harshing your mellow. I hate to break it to you, but as long as people are being murdered by the state, given draconian sentences for crimes that in many cases they haven't even committed, and being held in poverty and privation and a constant state of fear, those of us who actually give a shit about our fellow citizens are going, at the very least, to make some noise about it.

In the meantime, if you can't be bothered to do your duty as an American to protect your fellow Americans with the considerable power at your disposal, at least shut the fuck up and stop making an ass of yourself.

Regards,

Your fellow privileged white guy

And the bright side of the downward thermodynamic spiral is, um..."

"Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales."

Speech before the 1936 Democratic National Convention

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

June 27, 1936

A Rendezvous With Destiny

President Roosevelt:

"Senator Robinson, Members of the Democratic Convention, My Friends: Here, and in every community throughout the land, we are met at a time of great moment to the future of the nation. It is an occasion to be dedicated to the simple and sincere expression of an attitude toward problems, the determination of which will profoundly affect America.

I come not only as a leader of a party, not only as a candidate for high office, but as one upon whom many critical hours have imposed and still impose a grave responsibility.

For the sympathy, help and confidence with which Americans have sustained me in my task I am grateful. For their loyalty I salute the members of our great party, in and out of political life in every part of the Union. I salute those of other parties, especially those in the Congress of the United States who on so many occasions have put partisanship aside. I thank the governors of the several states, their legislatures, their state and local officials who participated unselfishly and regardless of party in our efforts to achieve recovery and destroy abuses. Above all I thank the millions of Americans who have borne disaster bravely and have dared to smile through the storm.

America will not forget these recent years, will not forget that the rescue was not a mere party task. It was the concern of all of us. In our strength we rose together, rallied our energies together, applied the old rules of common sense, and together survived.

In those days we feared fear. That was why we fought fear. And today, my friends, we have won against the most dangerous of our foes. We have conquered fear.

But I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance gather darkly in many places. In our own land we enjoy indeed a fullness of life greater than that of most nations. But the rush of modern civilization itself has raised for us new difficulties, new problems which must be solved if we are to preserve to the United States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson planned and fought.

Visit original posting http://www.austincc.edu/lpatrick/his2341/fdr36acceptancespeech.htm for remainder . . .

Fighting for Power or Building Bridges

 Posted on August 23, 2014 by theozarker

 

July 23, 2014

We can argue “’til the cows come home” about whether, percentage wise, per capita, blah, blah, blah more blacks than whites are on welfare, in prison, commit more crimes and so forth. Truth is, white power is the dominant (and pretty much only) power in the United States. And the wealthier the white, the more powerful the white. It is also true, that white power structure has worked mightily – from small town governments to the halls of Imperial power that rule us all – to keep it that way while maintaining an outward appearance of “striving for diversity”. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/opinion/in-ferguson-black-town-white-power.html

Not smart, folks. Not smart at all, because from what I read, twenty years from now – just about the time those full-on effects of Imperial decline really hit the fan – we white folks will be the newest minority in America. And if you are poor and white, (as a whole lot of us will be by then,) I can pretty much guarantee you that your percentage of white power will be equal in value to current black power in the eyes of a white, Imperial power structure intent on maintaining that power and its perks to the bitter end.

I had my first experiences with this when, as a single white parent working at a minimum wage job and trying to finish a bachelor’s degree, I moved into a house in a “white flight” black neighborhood because the white friend who owned the house (but had moved away during that white flight) let me rent it for the amount of the house payment.

Right off the bat, I was warned by horrified white co-workers to always lock my car door if I went anywhere, park under a light as close to the store as possible if I went shopping (even if I were just running in “for a minute”) and to always check the back seat before I locked myself into the car. These warnings were usually accompanied by lurid assurances that a cousin’s niece’s friend (white, always white) was raped by a black man hiding in the back seat of her car, which she had forgotten to lock, in that very neighborhood.

What I found was a pretty typical lower-middle-class and working-poor neighborhood made up of a few white holdouts and young families who had bought because the housing was cheap and a large number of somewhat wary, but basically friendly blacks – some with college educations, some on welfare – who, mainly through their children going to school with my son, introduced themselves, dropped by to visit, brought a dish by way of welcome or invited me over to their house to eat or visit. In other words, pretty normal activities in any Midwest neighborhood where someone new had just moved in.

My first real run-in with the “white power” experience came when I took one of my neighbors – a young, black single mother – to cash her paycheck at the neighborhood branch bank where my own account was.

When we pulled up to the drive-in window, I told the white cashier that I wanted to deposit my paycheck to my account and, pointing to my neighbor, who held up her paycheck, I asked if they could cash her paycheck, too.

The cashier looked at the check through the window and replied, “Sure.”

We signed our checks and I put them and my deposit slip into the pneumatic tube and sent them on their way. In a minute, the tube came back with an envelope containing my receipt and the small amount of cash I’d withheld from my paycheck. Thinking her cash would come next, we waited … and waited …

Finally the cashier looked up and said, “Was there something else?”

My neighbor leaned over and said, “You forgot to cash my check.”

“There was only one check in there,” the cashier insisted.

“No, that’s not right,” I said. “I put them both in there, myself.”

The cashier looked over as another (white) woman came over and asked, “Is there a problem?”

Pointing to my friend the cashier said, “She says she sent her paycheck to be cashed, but she didn’t.”

I tried to tell her what had happened, but she bent down to look at my friend and said, “I’m sorry. We don’t cash checks for people who don’t have an account with us.” Then she walked away.

And that was that. The cashier told us to please move the car, as we were blocking the window. My black friend gave me a resigned nod and we left. I offered her twenty dollars to tide her over until she could borrow money from family. After I knew the bills had been paid, I closed the account and opened one at a bank nearer work – back in White America.

But in forty years since, I’ve never forgotten the encounter with those two representatives of White Power or the realization that, to them, I was just another “black” whose word meant nothing.

It’s not that there were no problems, that everything was hunky-dory for the three or four years I lived there. There were the occasional hurt feelings, black and white. My house was broken into and my old 13 inch, black and white TV stolen – apparently by some black kids down the block according to a black neighbor who told me (accurately) that it would do no good to report the break-in because the police wouldn’t do anything about it. A neighbor – whose son had exchanged words with my son on a couple of occasions – ran over and killed my son’s dog. Whether it was deliberate or not, I still don’t know.

I do know that neighbors have spats, houses are broken into and neighbors do cruel and spiteful things in neighborhoods both black and white, rich and poor. But only in poor, black, or minority neighborhoods I’ve lived in have I seen the constant displays of white power (often including banks toward the white and minority small businesses there) that I’ve described above.

We’d like to think things have changed for blacks. Maybe they have, for a few. But, living in other black and mixed neighborhoods, now and over the years, it really hasn’t for far too many of the poor and working poor – especially minorities, especially blacks.

Over the last two weeks, trying to follow the stories out of Ferguson and the comments attached, I’ve seen the term, “black thugs” so frequently in comment after comment – often referring not just to those looting, but to all blacks – that I’ve frankly come to believe it’s just a newer, more sanitized, but no less hurtful or inaccurate white phrase for “niggers”.

So, as we whites move toward minority status in a country too many of us have always considered “ours”, it seems to me we have choices to make – especially those who understand the economic, geological, environmental and climatological perfect storm coming full bore toward us. We can isolate and arm ourselves against those “others” in a futile attempt to preserve whatever power we think we have against the power structure of a declining empire that will be only too eager to disabuse us of the idea. Or we can do a realistic assessment of our own fears about those others whose minority status we will soon join and begin to make friends with them, now.

There will be disagreements (a lot of them simply cultural differences) that will have to be overcome; there will be people you just don’t care for, for one reason or another; there will also be people who just don’t care for you for similar reasons. And there will be those you want to avoid – whether dangerous or just damned annoying – just like white people you know or run into.

But it has honestly been my experience, in every minority or mixed neighborhood I’ve lived in, that once you’ve made friends and built some trust, they will be as glad to point out the people who are truly dangerous (or truly annoying) as you would be, because they are as tired of being painted with the same broad brush as you also would be.

It’s going to be a scary place here in America as whites lose their majority status and an even scarier place as the One Percent try to maintain control of the declining Empire. Looking at the situation ahead, it’s usually a good idea to have your bridges in place before you get herded toward the edge of the cliff with nowhere else to go.

The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats

By NICK HANAUER

[Source: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#ixzz35r2xaXD3]

Memo: From Nick Hanauer
To: My Fellow Zillionaires

You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc. You know what I’m talking about. In 1992, I was selling pillows made by my family’s business, Pacific Coast Feather Co., to retail stores across the country, and the Internet was a clunky novelty to which one hooked up with a loud squawk at 300 baud. But I saw pretty quickly, even back then, that many of my customers, the big department store chains, were already doomed. I knew that as soon as the Internet became fast and trustworthy enough—and that time wasn’t far off—people were going to shop online like crazy. Goodbye, Caldor. And Filene’s. And Borders. And on and on.

Realizing that, seeing over the horizon a little faster than the next guy, was the strategic part of my success. The lucky part was that I had two friends, both immensely talented, who also saw a lot of potential in the web. One was a guy you’ve probably never heard of named Jeff Tauber, and the other was a fellow named Jeff Bezos. I was so excited by the potential of the web that I told both Jeffs that I wanted to invest in whatever they launched, big time. It just happened that the second Jeff—Bezos—called me back first to take up my investment offer. So I helped underwrite his tiny start-up bookseller. The other Jeff started a web department store called Cybershop, but at a time when trust in Internet sales was still low, it was too early for his high-end online idea; people just weren’t yet ready to buy expensive goods without personally checking them out (unlike a basic commodity like books, which don’t vary in quality—Bezos’ great insight). Cybershop didn’t make it, just another dot-com bust. Amazon did somewhat better. Now I own a very large yacht.

But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?

I see pitchforks.

At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.

But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.

And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Many of us think we’re special because “this is America.” We think we’re immune to the same forces that started the Arab Spring—or the French and Russian revolutions, for that matter. I know you fellow .01%ers tend to dismiss this kind of argument; I’ve had many of you tell me to my face I’m completely bonkers. And yes, I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction.

Here’s what I say to you: You’re living in a dream world. What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens. Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand. That’s the way it always happens. If inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible—for everybody. But especially for us.

***

The most ironic thing about rising inequality is how completely unnecessary and self-defeating it is. If we do something about it, if we adjust our policies in the way that, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression—so that we help the 99 percent and preempt the revolutionaries and crazies, the ones with the pitchforks—that will be the best thing possible for us rich folks, too. It’s not just that we’ll escape with our lives; it’s that we’ll most certainly get even richer.

Nick Hanauer is a Seattle-based entrepreneur.

Who's on First?

By The Ozarker

 [Reposted from The Conflicted Doomer] 

 

 June 21, 2014   

Okay, let me see if I can get this straight. The Saudis (our Sunni friends) trained ISIS (their Sunni terrorists) to fight in Syria (their Shia enemies) and we supported them because they were the “good” terrorists (therefore, friends of our friends) until they went rampaging through Iraq and threatened the (Shia) government (therefore, the Saudi’s enemy, and, if not our friend, at least originally our hand-picked puppets) and to protect that now re-elected Shia government in Iraq, but only if they play nicer with the Sunni and Kurd populations (not sure if they’re our friends, or just not our enemies, yet,) we’re thinking of working with the Shia Iranians (the Shia enemies of our Sunni friends, the Saudis,) who are friends of the Shia Iraqi government (and, therefore, are our enemies, but might become our friends if they cross their eyes and hold their tongues just right) but are enemies of  Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who don’t seem to want to be friends with anyone (except the neo-Nazis in Ukraine – enemies of our enemies, the Russians) and who want to send in the troops – again – and basically bomb, bomb, bomb the crap out of everybody …

So, who’s on First?

Reaping the Whirlwind

By The Ozarker

 [Reposted from The Conflicted Doomer]

May 10, 2014

This will be a short post this week as I have spent most of the day looking at videos and pictures from the terrible Trade Union Building fire that took so many lives in Odessa, Ukraine, over a week ago.

I do not know the people in those pictures and videos, but they are horrifying. There was video of people in a crowd in front of the burning building lobbing more fire bombs into the building, chanting and shouting over and over; video of a man coming to an upper window of the building, only to be shot or shot at by someone in that crowd; one of a man at a back or side door, hustling men armed with sticks and other weapons into the burning building.

There were still pictures of bodies – said to have been found inside the building after the fire. One was of a man on his back, hands curled in agony, with only his head and hands burned; another of a woman with that same pattern of burned head and hands, her skirt thrown up above her naked body and her legs spread as though she had been raped; a third was of a very pregnant woman – said to have been one of the workers in the building – bent backward over her desk with what looked to be a cord of some kind tightened around her neck. The text said she had been strangled to death.

I don’t know who did these things. I do know that when the victims of the fire were finally identified by local officials, they were not the “Russian operatives” some of our press reported, but were identified as local Odessians.

I also know, the Empire, along with the EU and NATO, has had its fingers in the pie, there in the Ukraine, for years.  Our Assistant Secretary of State for European affairs, our Ambassador to the Ukraine, at least one Senator, the Vice President and the Director of the CIA have all made trips to the Ukraine to support (or use) the Maidan uprising, make plans as to who we wanted for, or to stand with, our “hand picked” and unelected replacement of the democratically elected Prime Minister, (who we helped oust, in the usual name of “Peace and Democracy”™).

I am not saying we did this particular act. I am saying that everywhere the Empire plants its bloody boots in the name of “peace and democracy”, shit like this, or worse, happens – from the Eastern European countries, down through Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America and Asia. Everywhere we have sown to the wind, they have reaped a whirlwind of internal hatred and violence.

But Russia and China, against whom we have released these latest whirlwinds in our eagerness to “contain” them, control world resources and maintain our worldwide hegemony, are not small and helpless countries on the verge of bankruptcy. They have the power to hurt us back and our imperial allies; they have the power to release their own whirlwinds.

I can’t get those images from Odessa out of my mind; I don’t want to get them out of my mind. As much as I despise the Empire and its ruthlessness, I do love this country. I don’t ever want to see the kinds of pictures and videos that I saw from Odessa being released from some future United States on YouTube.

But unless we can look at those people around the world, that we’ve so arrogantly harmed, with the same horror and heartbreak that we would feel if they were our loved ones, they will be our loved ones one of these days.

No empire lasts forever. Neither will this one. Right now, the Empire is in grave danger of having taken a step to far, of sowing one too many seeds to the wind and unless we find the will to stop them, it will be our turn to reap the whirlwind, this time.