Reply #108: No, I'm not [View All]

[MellowDem]

Are you? Guess who ran the country and made up Congress for the vast majority of US history. Rich, politically connected whites. Not any whites. You are simplifying a very complicated thing here. You are painting with a very broad brush. For a long time, we didn't have Catholics in much of our politics, despite there being very many white Catholics.

In many ways, "white privilege" is too general. For example, in the South during the days of slavery, most whites in the South were poor tenant farmers. Why was that? It was because of the privileges of the rich white land-owning class. After all, having slaves do all your work ensured that other, poorer whites had little opportunities for careers of their own, much less for having any power to organize or compete in terms of labor. And forget about good pay and labor conditions. Remember all those textile factories in the South filled with privileged whites? It's why the millions of white immigrants coming into the country at the time from Europe avoided the South like the plague. There were no opportunities there for them, despite being white and privileged supposedly, and in the South no less, where their race should have gotten them the farthest according to you. Hell, most southern whites would have been better off without slavery existing. Only the slave masters would have lost out on anything.

Race is a lazy and stupid classification of humanity, based on skin color. Assigning privilege by race does not work quite so well in the real world.