[Peace-discuss] The 'white working class' (WWC)

[C G Estabrook]

Paul Street is capable of missing the point … but when he’s accurate (as he was on Obama, early on), there are few better.

More importantly, he points up the difference between those who see that exploitation is the problem - especially after 40 years of growing and accelerating inequality - and "bourgeois identitarian anti-racists” like Coates, and many of our IP friends. 

—CGE


> On Oct 22, 2017, at 8:25 AM, David Johnson <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> This is excellent Carl !
>  
> David J.
>  
> From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net <mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net>] On Behalf Of C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss
> Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2017 8:45 AM
> To: Peace-discuss List
> Cc: prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net <mailto:prairiegreens at lists.chambana.net>
> Subject: [Peace-discuss] The 'white working class' (WWC)
>  
> The same is true in regard to reconstructing the anti-war movement:
>  
> 'This is what zero-sum bourgeois identitarian anti-racists like Ta-Nehesi Coates fail to understand. Shaming white Americans for their stupid whiteness and lecturing them on their need to pay reparations and drop their white skin privilege (good luck telling a former factory worker who is struggling with diabetes and three months behind on her trailer-park fees how “privileged” she is) won’t get us very far when it comes to re-enlisting the WWC in the struggle for a better world. The real point to make to white workers is that they are killing themselves by failing to join in common struggle (in the spirit of the old CIO packinghouse union slogan “Black and White, Unite and Fight”) with their fellow workers of color, without whom they can never hope to prevail. As Asad Haider recently noted in a brilliant critique of Coates, “for the white people who are not owners of capital, white privilege is a poisoned bait.” So are the intimately related problems of white racial ignorance and fear.’
>  
> Full article at  <https://www.truthdig.com/articles/19th-century-whaleship-can-save-white-working-class/ <https://www.truthdig.com/articles/19th-century-whaleship-can-save-white-working-class/>>. —CGE

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