Crossposted w/GD: You can't untangle race from class in America

[gollygee]

http://www.thestranger.com/books/2016/11/29/24716347/you-cant-untangle-race-from-class-in-america

Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won this year's National Book Award for nonfiction, is an altogether remarkable thesis on history, but, in ways that are both moving and immediately painful, it also reverberates with the post-election autopsy we're all conducting right now. Kendi is reading Thursday, December 1, at University Book Store.

Donald Trump just hired a neo-Nazi, Jim Crow Paleo-conservative as his right-hand man, and he's stuffing his staff with a slew of violent nativists. Meanwhile, countless numbers of white liberals are venting their spleen with theories that the left will gain traction when all the outsiders pipe down about "identity politics" (I'm looking at you, Mark Lilla) and plead their humanity, pre-civil-rights style, to the masses who elected a monster (I'm looking at you, Jonathan Pie).

Now when I come across a breathless sentence from a populist liberal arguing that the fearful masses voted for the most frightening tyrant this nation has ever seen because a handful of students and activists on social media hurt their feelings, this quote from Stamped from the Beginning comes to my head:

"Uplift suasion [Kendi's term for respectability politics] is not only racist but impossible for Blacks to execute. Free Blacks were unable to always display positive characteristics for the same reasons poor immigrants and rich planters were unable to do so: Free blacks were human and humanly flawed. Uplift suasion assumed, moreover, that racist ideas were sensible and could be undone by appealing to sensibilities. But the common desire to justify racial inequities produced racist ideas, not logic."

[heaven05]

1. important component of the

truth of this racist society that has produced different classes of americans. Some rich, some poor...one class struggle, poor whites, all PoC, another class/race struggle, men against the aspirations of all women, another class struggle, white racists against all immigrants, latinos(unless they have LOTS of money and influence and who voted for the new fuhrer anyway)and NOW all PoC (except the bootlickers), another class/race struggle.

[forjusticethunders]

2. If racism is ever overcome

The capitalist class will shake in terror. It is ONLY the division of the proletariat effected through racism that keeps this situation going. It would take about 10-15% of whites switching allegiances to make us Canada. 25% makes us Sweden. 50% makes us Star Trek.