There is no question, in the developed world in general, that men are better off than women; that whites are better off than people with melanin; and that straights are better off than non-straights. (Let alone the transgenders.) To give just one example, a black person will receive half the requests for interviews that a white person will with the exact same resume, and a white convict is more likely to be hired than a black non-convict.
I am unclear on how to deal with this type of discrimination at the current time. What I see is that we are rats, deliberately starved and set against each other. The plight of the female, non-CIS, non-white, non-standard-sexuality rats is worse (on average): But, we’re rats, and we have masters, and they have taken all the gains in productivity for 40 years now — and we’re fighting for scraps, because, goddamn it, we need them.
The reality for working class white males is that, while their lives are better than females/ethnics/etc., things have been getting worse for them since 1968 – 45 years now. That’s when their wages peaked. They are bitter and angry. Sure, things are worse for other people, but their pain is real, and being told that they are to blame does not fly with them, and it never, ever, will. You can scream until your faces are blue at them, and they will not believe they are to blame. (In the same way that most boomers will never admit they have any blame for how the US has turned out.)
If we have a tide that is raising all boats, these problems are easier to fix: the white CIS straight males get less of the increases, the more discriminated-against people get more of the increases — but everyone’s life is getting better. When it’s not a zero some game, when it’s a positive sum game, this problem becomes so much easier to fix.
When the rich are taking all of the economy’s winnings, and then some, we tear at each other like starved rats.
Agree that everyone will win (except the rich, who will lose), and that those who need more, who have suffered more, will get more.
Then turn our ire to the people who have taken everything they can.
Adam Eran
This is tricky. Prejudice is essential to the structure of human perception. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenomenology of Perception” … or Shankar Vedantam’s “The Hidden Brain”…
Only 10% of the nerves in your visual cortex come from the retinas of your eyes. The rest come from areas controlling language and memory. In other words, what you perceive, even visually, isn’t so much reality (visual data) as a story you’ve told yourself about it….which explains the extraordinary persistence of so much delusion (cf. Fox News). If a contradictory fact appears, it’s often dismissed if it’s at variance with the long-standing story.
The origins of prejudice may even be in survival. Vedantam notes toddlers have mastered the extraordinarily difficult computation of recognizing faces, but when shown unfamiliar faces they are suspicious. Faces unlike their family of origin are dismissed as “bad” even if teachers patiently explain how they’re good. These aren’t kids trained by the Klan; prejudice is a built-in feature of human perception.
This means the population has two types of people: those who are prejudiced and know it, and those who are prejudiced and don’t know it. Just as human reason is an extraordinary achievement, so is tolerance.
Pelham
“You can scream till your faces are blue at them [white, working-class males], and they will not believe they are to blame. (In the same way that most boomers will never admit they have any blame for how the US has turned out.)”
Well, there you go again.
So with the same highly selective but incongruously broad brush with which you damn boomers, are you now trying to condemn all working-class white males? If so, how so? How are they responsible?
Wouldn’t it be much simpler to examine the actual, centuries-long causes of these damnable forces that condemn the majority of working people to regular, periodic bouts of debt, penury and desperation as well as perpetual servitude rather than trying to pin any particular efflorescence of such to certain “generations”?
You tend this way in much of what you write but, darn it all, you seem to have painted yourself into a corner on this one silly point.
Ian Welsh
I already have, repeatedly. They also made choices.
BlizzardOfOz
How about we oppose the elites in their drive to devalue labor and install a new feudal order? That would probably help the “discriminated against”.
You know, I’ll bet south-east Asians face a lot of discrimination, but they seem to be doing pretty well. I wonder why that is? And what can we do to end the discrimination against whites in favor of Jews (because Jews are richer than other whites, and discrimination is the only possible explanation, right?) But oops, crimestop, we’re not allowed to think through any of the claims of the race baiters …
There’s always push-back, against good ideas about progress, from the “anti racist”/”feminist” crowd, but there’s no point in pandering to them. Their bullshit layered upon bullshit enriches a few elites, and impoverishes everyone else.
Jonathan
The problem with the idea of reparations, i.e. compensating people for past suffering, is that it legitimizes suffering as a cost of business and as a tradable good. The problem with the idea of “looking forward” is that it discourages us not only from looking at the past, but from looking at the present compared to the past.
The transition from the former to the latter comes with its own very difficult social/ideological obstacles. A working class that performs much psychological labor, and treats labor (such as it may be) as a key form of social participation and source of meaning, has many motivations to resist and prevent such a cultural shift. Those motivations may may be misinformed, short-sighted, misdirected, sadistic and/or self-serving, but if they’re strongly consistent with their ideology and their limited perspective of observation, there’s a tough cognitive nut to crack.
Pelham, dualism check! It is clear the Boomers are not blameless and it is clear they are not exclusively to blame. I don’t think Ian is proposing that their generation accept full blame for the state the world is in, but observing that they often treat their lack of 100% direct culpability as a reason to shirk a meaningful share in the cleanup work or returning the stolen property to the commons.
Cthebear
Great, truthful essay, as usual. For some (Boomers, Xers, Upper middle class whites), those truths are a bit much to bear. Just reading the few comments here has shown that already. I do have one small nit to pick though, and not out of disrespect, nor as an offended person (there was none, nor do I believe any was intended). The problem of discrimination also reaches into genetics and health.
The eugenics movement never really died, it just changed tactics. We face the same challenges as other groups, so we don’t have a tendency to consider other marginalized groups as out-groups. We were one of Hitler’s targets during the Final Solution, some of us were sterilized right up until the 70s based upon the theory of “good genes,” most of us continue to be placed in jobs well below our intellectual capabilities, and sent to schools where we can be treated as second or third class citizen. We’re also the first ones to go when starved rats attack.
What to do? And what do I do? This: “turn our ire to the people who have taken everything they can.” Your own words. Thank you.
I just thought it should be pointed out.
Mandos
Ian,
You probably won’t be surprised to hear that I agree with you that identity-privileged groups within economically less-privileged groups have partly made their own bed in this situation, particularly by believing the far-right when it places the blame on identity-outgroups for the problems.
However I would also say that the progressive left bears some blame for this situation, but not the sort of blame that many of your readers are all too happy to ascribe. The truth is that a lot of progressives still haven’t though seriously about why people vote for what they vote for and are therefore far behind on providing an alternative message. The “Reagan Democrats” find it difficult to “blame the rich” when the rich sometimes put on a show of looking like them—by “rich” I mean the “local notables” that are the backbone of e.g. the Tea Party today.