What's the Matter with White Folks?

[durutti]

This article first came out in March. More relevant now than ever...

http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featwise_whitefolks.htm

IT ALMOST GOES WITHOUT SAYING that most of the analysis offered up by mainstream commentators in the wake of the presidential election has been largely devoid of substance. For example, the persistent claim that President Bush’s re-election was the result of a “moral values” revolt by Christians has been seriously overblown. After all, Bush actually received more votes from those who said terrorism was the most important issue than he did from those who identified moral values as the key to their electoral behavior.

Likewise has been the quadrennial drivel spewing from the mouth of Al From and his cronies at the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), to the effect that if the Democrats would just move further to the right they would find themselves on the winning end of election night outcomes. After years of following this advice, the Democratic Party has lost ground in the Senate, the House and in states across the country. Indeed, most of the Democrats who have been ousted in the past decade have been precisely those, especially in the South, who never ran or governed as progressives but rather hewed most closely to the Republican line.

But what has been even more distressing than the predictably off-base analysis served up by the DLC and the chattering class on Sunday morning talk shows has been the equally simplistic diagnosis of the Democrats’ problems provided by the liberal-left and progressives.

Whether in the form of a Nation or American Prospect editorial, a Jim Hightower screed, or the writings of best-selling author Thomas Frank (What’s the Matter With Kansas?), the prescription is the same: All the Dems need to do is develop a good old-fashioned populist appeal, whereby they point out the economic self-interests of voters who have moderate incomes and yet vote for Republicans—candidateswhom they should, according to these pundits, view as their class enemies.

[Solly Mack]

1. I've been asking myself that for years

[recycledindi]

2. we can't dance?

[newyawker99]

10. Hi recycledindi!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[NVMojo]

3. screw them and the lying liberal horse they rode in on !!

[Javaman]

4. Actually, there's is alot wrong, but there is good, the issue is...

What that fuck is wrong with RICH white folks????

[laureloak]

6. That's what I keep saying - it's about CLASS.

[daleo]

5. That was a very interesting article.

His points seemed very cogent. I have always wondered if church membership didn't provide a socially approved way to avoid "the other".

[SmokingJacket]

7. White folks are scared of black folks.

I mean, that's a generalization.

But not without truth.

Goes back to slave times.

[alcibiades_mystery]

8. Terrific analysis: Smashes Tom Frank's theory to pieces

Great article. Thanks.

Money point here, too: As UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris puts it, whiteness is a form a property every bit as valuable to those who possess it as the material goods they might receive by voting for more progressive candidates. This is not false consciousness, in other words, but alternative consciousness: the prioritizing of non-fiscal interests by people who have been offered alternative benefits by a system of racial inequity.

Yup.

[Joanne98]

9. Fear! Because of media crime hype.

[burythehatchet]

11. white people are simply superior

and they're very good hearted. That's why they have worked tirelessly to bring their wisdom to indigenous populations all over the world for centuries. We inferior brown people sometimes don't show sufficient gratitude, but personally, I'll try harder.

[karlrschneider]

12. Didn't you forget the "Sir" at the end?

:eyes:

Just in case: :sarcasm:

[burythehatchet]

13. its just that sort of impertinence that prevents me from advancing

I humbly submit myself for a flogging:)

[StellaBlue]

14. Excellent

:rofl: ]


:yourock:

[beetbox]

15. The "anxious middle class"

From article:

Though Frank is loath to say it—and pretty much everyone else in the mainstream has ignored it as well—the answer is simple. The problem is white people, by and large: especially white folks in the “anxious middle class,” whose incomes are vulnerable though not terribly low (between $30,000 and $50,000 a year), but who are certainly closer to the working class than the wealthy whose candidate they tend to vote for. It is only these folks who seem to ignore their class interests and vote Republican.