Hi Ron,

Thank you for this. I take a different route to a similar conclusion.

I start 400 years ago, with the birth of white privilege. Colonial and British aristocracies viewed all landless people as human trash, fit only for service, and expendible. European indentured servants and enslaved Africans worked and suffered side by side in the Jamestown plantations.

Bacon, an aristocrat disgruntled by not getting his share of the lucrative fur trade, raised a militia of Black and White enslaved, taking up arms against the arisocracy and the Native peoples. When the rebellion was put down, the race codes were enacted as a divide and conquer tactic. The first set of white priviledges included the white priviledge to keep one’s shirt on while being whipped.

From this perspective, it benefits the masters to have both disposessed Whites and disposessed Blacks at odds with each other.

Fast forward 400 years, the civil rights movement and all the movements extending rights to non dominant groups coincided with a decline in real wages in relation to productivity. Black and white were working harder and falling further behind. But programs like affirmative action could be demagogued as taking from white dominant culture and unfairly given to others without merit or justice.

I blame the Democratic party leadership, beginning with Bill Clinton for selling the party’s policies to wealthy donors, and making white grievance effectively true. If more wealth was going into fewer hands at the top, white and black were fighting over crumbs.

These aggreived whites were looking at a future they could no longer believe would be better for their children, as theirs had been better than their parents. They lost jobs, homes, pensions. And then we ask them to confess their privilege? Any wonder they are easy prey for Trump’s rejection of Political Correctness?

All of which is not to discount the awful reality of those who do not enjoy white privilege. I know that my own biography, which has me on the verge of a fully funded retirement, would have had multiple opportunities to turn tragic if I were not white. Even my wife who narrowly escaped being killed at Kent State 50 years ago, escape not having her trauma ignored like the students at Jackson State.

But the point is, we need to keep our eye on the prize, and get liberation from the Plantation political economy for all of us. It is understandable that the enslaved would identify the overseers as the problem, and not as themselves oppressed by the owners. But unless we can make common cause with those the owners have seduced with paltry priviledge, none of us can be free.

Does this resonate with you? Am I getting this wrong? Is it a consequence of my own privilege that I see things this way?

Ben