zuky:
Dixon White has a message about privilege for white people: Stop being so defensive, take some responsibility, speak up – and don’t ever, ever, ever ignore racism.
(Full video here
I watched the full video. I’m reblogging, not because there’s anything particularly new or heroic about what he’s saying, but because it offers a nice contradiction to one of the most egregious, distracting, prevailing classist stereotypes about who are the white racists in US society. The stereotype, as we all know, is that poor and working class white people are the uneducated backwards hillbillies who blemish white US society with their uncouth racism. In fact, white conservatives and white liberals wearing nice suits in corporate and political offices are far more dangerous in their ability to implement racism than most poor white people driving pickup trucks.
No doubt, many working class rednecks are racist, but few of them have the power to deny mortgages and credit, deny housing and healthcare, overcharge for utilities and insurance, whitewash revisionist histories and school curriculums, redraw district maps and zoning laws to isolate and disempower communities of colour, harass and imprison (not to mention choke, taser, and shoot) random Black people, or generate an incessant all-engulfing flow of mass media which makes all of this seem normal and good. Most of that institutional racism, my friends, is perpetrated by well-dressed, well-spoken, college-educated white people with “liberal views on race” who smile and shake your hand in polite company.
I would argue that the self-proclaimed redneck above has a better grasp of white supremacism than the vast majority of white radicals and hipsters who think they support social justice and sustainable fair trade, than most white reporters in news media, than most white TV and movie writers, than most white members of the Democratic Party.
I’ve been reading quite a bit about this this week (Rednecks, Queers and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs) and basically the assumption that bigotry/social conservatism is A Rural/Poor Thing is a really powerful myth precisely because it lets urban middle class white liberals distance themselves– ‘it’s not people like me that are racist or homophobic, it’s those nasty poor people’.