White Trash Blues: Class Privilege v. White Privilege
by Jennifer Kesler
If you blog about white privilege, you’re probably sick to death of people playing the “white trash” card in your comments. Their argument usually goes something like this:
- “Being white didn’t give me all these privileges you’re talking about.”
- “I know plenty of [minority] people who are better off than I am.”
- And the advanced version, which I’m guilty of using myself: “It’s really more about class than it’s about race.”
I am “poor white trash”. I can relate to all of the statements above. I grew up looking the part of Average White Girl, but middle class white people always pegged me as “different”. This left me vulnerable to losing opportunities and even jobs to white people who “fit in” better. Also, after my family made its great escape from White Trash Hell into Middle Class Purgatory, I learned to my surprise that there were black kids in the world who’d grown up with more money than I ever had. And so on, and so forth.
Here’s where the confusion comes in. Yes, I have a legitimate grievance against the system. Yes, I’ve lost out on things because I didn’t have the $20 to invest or know the magic social password that would have marked me “normal” (read: “middle class, preferably white”). And yes, it hurts when you don’t fit in with your own race because of your class, and you don’t fit in with your class because of your race. It’s hard to see privilege around that stuff, but the examples are out there.
Wealth gets you a ticket, but it doesn’t guarantee you a seat
One of the black kids I went to school with whose family was richer than mine? We discovered we’d given identical answers on a test, and she’d gotten some of them marked wrong while I got 100%. When we examined her other papers, we realized the teacher had been doing this for some time: “giving” the black girl a lesser grade. And one of the Jewish girls I knew whose family was richer than mine? When she was absent for a Jewish holiday and missed a test, one of her teachers decided to teach her a lesson by refusing to let her make up that test anytime but on a Saturday – the Jewish sabbath. The teacher offered truly pathetic excuses why after school, during lunch and during the girl’s study period wouldn’t work. Sunday wouldn’t work because it was the teacher’s Christian sabbath! The girl’s mother had to call the principal and threaten to bring the ACLU into it before she got a proper time slot to retake the test.
I’ve never been pulled over for “looking like you’re out of your neighborhood” (unless you count the time I was lost in a snotty part of Beverly Hills in an American car, gasp!). I’m not nearly as likely to get pulled over for traffic violations as black or Latino people, even if they grew up with more money than I did. Taking things a step further, I’ve never felt pressured to join a gang just to survive. I’ve never worried I’m going to get shot in my own neighborhood (and I’ve lived in some neighborhoods the white middle class considers “bad”).
That white skin would get you a seat, if only you had a ticket
My approach is to look at all the types of privilege that affect an individual. Take me, for example. I have white privilege and heterosexual privilege and able-bodied privilege working for me; I have class privilege and male privilege working against me. In the case of poor whites, the class privilege often takes more from them than the white privilege gives them (i.e., the college admissions board prefer my skin color, but if I can’t somehow pay tuition, I’m not getting in). In my personal experience, white privilege may be a total bust, and I have the right to feel that way: I do not have the right to muddy a discussion of white privilege with all my anti-privileges. But before I learned to separate the types of privilege, I’m afraid I probably did that once or twice. Not in the “minorities have it so easy” tone that marks one type of troll; I just couldn’t figure out which part of this stuff I wasn’t getting.
Not a credit to our race
I will probably write a whole post on this someday, but I’ll leave you with one last point to consider. In my experience, poor whites are one group of people that even PC folks think it’s okay to take potshots at. Make a “dumb blonde” joke, and someone sooner or later will call you on your sexism; make a “you know you’re a redneck when…” joke, and chances are everyone will take it as good clean fun. This is something that makes me generally distrustful of the supposedly “progressive” thinkers out there, and I assume it affects other poor whites simiarly. See, we’re an embarrassment to the white race. We’re proof that whites are not invulnerable to the repressions they’ve visited on other races. So we’re taught to keep quiet. On one level, we know we shouldn’t take that crap. On the other hand, experience has taught us if we take a stand, we’ll stand alone. I don’t know how many times I’ve endured jokes about my homestate when a potential new friend asks me where I’m from. And if you know me, you know I’d never let an insult to my gender go by without comment.
And if we have an accent of any sort – many of us do, since by definition it’s the higher classes who get the privilege of their accent being declared “no accent” – we’re supposed to put up with being made fun of and/or being fetishized. Or being expected to change it, if we’re “serious” about getting certain jobs or promotions. We’re vulnerable to class assumptions that we’re ill-educated, lazy, immoral or even criminally perverse (only in redneck jokes is incest somehow a topic for humor!).
While these points still aren’t germaine to a topic about white privilege, I’ve seen them get dismissed in discussions about privilege and bigotry in general, and in those cases they are relevant. Hopefully, something in this post will help someone weed out trolls and/or communicate more effectively with sincere poor whites who mistake a lack of class privilege for a lack of white privilege.
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Posted in Featured Articles, Race on March 27, 2007
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[...] by Jack Stephens on April 5th, 2007 BetaCandy blogs about growing up in poverty and yet still having privilege because of her white skin in her blog [...]
Wow that was deep,I am floored by that whole article. You have opened my eyes to a whole new way to observe race and class.
Thank You. Betacandy
Thank you so much for the kind words!
[...] Concept: Race is not the same as class. Possible linkey goodness: • “White Trash Blues: Class Privilege v. White Privilege” (again from Blind Privilege) • This thread of [...]
[...] White Trash Blues: Class Privilege v. White Privilege If you blog about white privilege, you’re probably sick to death of people playing the “white trash” card in your comments. Their argument usually goes something like this: [...]
BetaCandy, your blog on this topic is the most insightful I have ever seen! Thank you! Your eloquent blog has left me feeling vindicated, as well as comforted insofar as I am not alone.
Too often, those of us whites who had classism working against us are not seen as equally deserving of being helped or being recognized in any social justice agenda presented by the progressive liberals. It is as if somehow, the maladies of poverty are somehow less horrible for us than for poor non-whites.
In fact, I am writing a book about a death penalty case that occurred in my state where the theme of unearned social privilege where socioeconomic status is being introduced.
I am not merely introducing it, I am bringing it to the forefront because I, like yourself, came from a “poor white” background and I am sick and tired of the injustices meted out to poor whites being ignored or invalidated. I do not believe we need to invalidate or diminish the white privilege that has worked against non-whites, but I DO believe wholeheartedly that the problems endured by poor whites and our plight deserve some recognition and a seat at the great table of diversity and social justice. May I use part of this article in my book and, if it is all right with you, would you let me know how to properly cite this blog and credit you?
Best Regards,
Jacqueline S. Homan
[...] I found that culture to be rife with gender bias. But you know what? I am so bloody sick of how stereotyping Southern and poor whites is still widely accepted even in venues where stereotypes of virtually any other kind would not be [...]
There is much predjudice against non-wealthy whites.
Where I live in California, lower income whites were displaced by illegal immigrants who recieve many benefits, or at least have many programs the justification of which is to help them.
There’s no help for those displaced in housing or jobs by the influx of immigrants.
Living in a college town, I’ve heard the put-down “trash” by the politically correct elite on many occasions.
How are humans trash?
Jane, I’m aware of what you’re talking about. There is no political advantage for policy-makers and officials to help poor whites. Providing aid – or at least appearing to, I have some questions about some programs – to illegals is politically savvy.
It’s not that the people in charge give a shit about either group. If it becomes politically savvy to advocate deporting illegals, I suspect most of the people currently pushing to grant them access to services would do a 180 on that issue.
As for the “trash” put-down, I wonder if there is some unconscious assumption that if a white person has failed to achieve middle class, they must really be a lower life form who isn’t trying, what with all that privilege they have. The problem is, when the US was established, most “citizens” were white, and someone still had to be on the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid. Immigrants from Ireland and Scotland, for example were given the racist moniker “micks” to reflect their undesirability. They, among others, performed cheap labor, dangerous labor and factory labor and were despised for it.
I think some alleged progressives ignorantly assume that torch has been passed to other races now, and the former cheap labor whites immediately somehow became desirable employees for better-paying jobs despite lacking education and nice clothes for the office. It’s not that simple. Yes, I grant that English-speaking white poor people will have an easier time escaping the poverty trap than people of color or people who have difficulty with English. But it’s still often a multi-generational effort, and the fact that we haven’t all escaped yet is no reflection on our quality as human beings.
If anything, surviving poverty (no matter your race) might make you stronger than people who have no idea what it’s like not to be certain you’ll have food next week.
Here’s a hint, after living with and helping a 22 year old mother of two with no high school education get her life on track, she’s now willingly and happily moving into Section 8 housing and taking her son (she lost the girl in custody) into poverty from age 9 months. She has other options and doesn’t want them, in fact, she WANTS to be in this position.
Sometimes, people are just at the bottom because they want to be there.
Well, that’s your assessment of her thinking.
Furthermore, you just described the precise behavior of several dozen trust fundies I know who could get out and work, but would rather settle for Mummy and Daddy’s welfare housing (the $800k condo in town) and let their kids go to whoever will take them while they go out and party.
So do you only pass judgment on this behavior when you see it in poor people?
@KC: I am not as close to the situation as you are, but I still rather doubt that the reason this young woman doesn’t take advantage of the options present to her is because she wants to “be
at the bottom.” There are plenty of imaginable reasons why she might not want to, say, work and go to school (is this one of the options?) when she has a young son. Those with a little money or with a little more money or a whole lot of money often don’t have to make choices between being out of the house 12 or more hours a day and staying home to take care of a kid; because they are not “on the bottom,” they are free to choose to stay home.
That’s just one scenario that seems plausible to me; I think, though, that a sober look at the “choices” being offered to her by a system in which she actually has no choice but either to sell her labor or live on welfare might reveal that her options are miserably few, and that the illusion that she is free to better her own situation is mostly an illusion.
I can state from my own example that if I had not started out from a privileged place in society, with a family that valued education enough that they were willing to finance my education so that I didn’t have to work while I was in school, and thus if I hadn’t have had the time during school to also teach myself some more marketable skills than those I was even learning at school, and if I hadn’t moved in circles where already highly paid entrepreneurs could take notice of me and the skills I had, that I would probably be headed for “the bottom” precisely because I cannot work 10, 12 hours a day. Because of my own psychological disabilities I can barely work five hours a day. The older I get, the worse it gets. But fortunately, because I was born into circumstances that have allowed me room to find other ways of making a living than the standard yet insane 60-hour week that is demanded of so many, I’ve found the kind of work that I can get by on working only part time in a controllable environment (home), and so, for the moment at least, I’m holding my own.
The point isn’t that the person you are talking about might also be “mentally ill,” as it is called where I live, and the point isn’t even that if she were, she would have to be functionally psychotic to even begin to get any kind of disability pay. The point is that there are countless personal, situational, cultural and social barriers to succeeding in our vehemently capitalist and individualistic economic system. I’m willing to bet that the options being offered to her are a very very narrow subset of the options available to the children of upper middle class families. She isn’t alone in this, of course, but different people confront narrowed possibilities with different reactions. I’d also be willing to bet that if you were willing to listen to the reasons why she won’t take one of the other options being extended to her, without judgment and without assuming the worst, that you might begin to suspect that she finds herself in a double-bind of some kind. What kind, I don’t know. But very few want to be dirt poor.
Some do want time to themselves. It’s unfortunate that the underclass of our society does not get this luxury without being labeled “lazy” or “ungrateful” or any of those sorts of things.
Very good points, Erik.
Perhaps this woman simply doesn’t want to completely miss out on her son’s formative years by being away from him so many hours a day. Perhaps she’s depressed because of losing her daughter – you might be surprised how much a simple depression clouds one’s thinking and judgment, one’s perception of one’s options.
Perhaps she even perceives an obstacle where there isn’t one, but she’ll never be enlightened to a solution by people who assume she’s just being an ass.
And again, she’s doing nothing that isn’t also done by the majority of the Bush family offspring. It’s just there’s a different set of rules for people like her when she does it, and you’re reinforcing that.
[...] men of color have male privilege even though it doesn’t do much for them, just like poor white people still have white privilege even though it doesn’t do much for them. No matter what race a man is, when he assumes the system that works for the gander must also work [...]
So do you only pass judgement on this behavior when you see it in poor people?
Prolly so? Then again this poster ain’t alone. Psst, I see too many people do it.
Exactly, ABW.
It’s an astonishingly blatant double standard once you think past all the rhetoric we grow up hearing and realize we’re treating certain life choices as appalling for poor people and merely misguided (or even acceptable) for the rich.
Just navigated here from ABW’s “Required Reading” links, and I’m glad I did. I’ve enjoyed reading your writing at Hathor Legacy for a while, but didn’t realize that you blog here as well. *adds to RSS feed…*
Thanks, Jennifer!
Affirmative Action relates here. I worked full time and eventually put myself through college and law school. I left home at age 18. While in law school I gained access to school records and discovered, for one example among many, that
the black students were allowed to retake tests; many of them came from wealthy professional families. I sank or swam with every test I was only allowed to take once.
Growing up in South Chicago I did have to join a gang to survive.
And you’ve never known white, privileged kids who got to re-take tests until they passed? You don’t even need access to records to see this going on all the time! C’mon!
The simple answer, BetaCandy, is: No
There’s a distinction between looking at actual records and guessing.
If you have had personal experience with white, privileged kids getting to re-take tests while others did not
have that option, I agree that’s unfair, and I am totally against such a policy. I am totally against legacy privilege. I never voted for Bush, a prime example of an under-achiever given
legacy breaks if there ever was one.
I fail to see why the child of a black professional class family
should get to take a test over while the child of a white factory-working family cannot.
All affirmative action should be means-tested. I agree with Obama there.
The simple answer, BetaCandy, is: No
Then you’re not paying attention. You can’t get the full truth out of a filing cabinet. White men have TOLD me how many times they had to re-take a test before they got it right (usually because they were still drunk from the night before when they took, and how their daddies called up so-and-so with a bullshit story to make it happen. They think it’s something to brag about, how well connected they are.
Did you even look to see if white kids were re-taking tests? For comparison? Did you check all the working class white kids’ records to make sure none of them had 8-10 dead grandparents whose unfortunate passings distracted them during tests? Did you conduct interviews to see if anyone else was being allowed to re-take, with or without proper records being kept, as so often conveniently happens for certain people?
I agree that people shouldn’t be getting privileges because of their skin color. But white got skin-color based privileges for centuries before Affirmative Action reversed the process.
I did pay attention to the test records. Every single student who took the test more than once was documented, including the results of all tests done by every student.
That was just one example in my personal experience.
I have no reason to doubt your personal experiences.
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
PS: I was the only white working class student in my law school class.
PS: I was the only white working class student in my law school class.
And this is what I want to make clear: the reason why you were the only one is entirely the fault of people who are rich and mostly white:
–Affluent liberals who feel good about making charitable donations that help those poor brown people over there, but have no interest in fixing problems that are more universal than that (poverty can affect all races, as can poor schools in poor areas, etc.) and, truth be told, would probably run screaming if they ever came across a brown person in a nice restaurant. Hypocrites.
–Government leaders who know there are small towns where kids haven’t a hope in hell of attending college because they start working to help the family when they’re 14, or have an ill parent who can’t get insurance and can’t work consistently, etc. They know these problems exist and they know solutions are available, but they are only interested in chasing affluent liberal dollars, which are only interested in the causes of people who look entirely unlike themselves – I think it’s just too easy to think “There but for the grace of God go I” when you’re an affluent white who meets and intelligent but uneducated white person who’s not struggling through life because of where and to whom she was born.
I think my tone was more hostile than it needed to be earlier and I apologize. I’ve just had one too many debates in which AffAct framed as “Look what the so-and-sos are stealing from us” when in fact it’s the existing (mostly white) power structure that’s jerking everyone around, and I assumed the former position was where you were going.
There ARE legitimate problems with Affirmative Action… but the one I keep coming back to is that no one seemed to have a better solution. You can’t correct a couple centuries of slavery by emancipating people into poverty and then, eventually, having a few decades where employers et al are forced resentfully to take them on. Ditto on the situation women face, having been the property of men. We have to work on a more subtle level than just fixing the law: we have been training people to see women this way and people of color that way and gays this other way and so on… we can start training people not to make those unwarranted delineations. The delineations we should be making are people who make an effort versus those who don’t; people who are selfish versus those who aren’t; etc. The important things have nothing to do with color, gender, etc.
BetaCandy, I agree with you.
I’ve always made your recommended delineations in my personal life. I was a teen age soldier. I was in a labor battalion in the US Army. My company had a white officer in charge, the usual preppie type. All his sergeants were black.
The makeup of the trooper-laborers (Combat Engineers, function officially described as Peons) were Blacks, Hispanics, and White Trash.
When we erected Bailey Bridges (Giant erector sets) or timber-trestle bridges, or cleaned mine fields or blew up stuff,
I always noted how some little guys gave all they had, while others, often big guys, pretended to hold up their part of the operation–only when being gazed upon by a higher echelon type.
What aveneue do you suggest for getting beyond this side of
a good portion of human nature?
Bill Clinton came from a “white trash” background and still did not have to defend his race or class like Obama does, on a daily bases….White Privilege @ work.
They never said, “can white trash be elected as President of the United States?”
@ Seriously?, that’s another good point.
@ CK, the avenue I suggest is and always has been: opening minds, first and foremost. Then holding people responsible for their choices and stop making excuses for some while vilifying others for exactly the same bad choices. (I.E., poor people who abuse drugs are ruining the world, while rich people who abuse them only hurt themselves. Yeah… don’t think so!)
All good points.
I guess we don’t disagree after all.
CK, we agree that everything should be fair, but your focus still seems to be on how you, the poor white, got shafted. The entire point of my post was that yes, we do get shafted, but not on the basis of our skin tone. If we can get into the middle class, we get all the privileges of the white middle class. For people of color, it doesn’t matter what class they make it into economically: they are still likely to be watched warily by store cops, asked to leave neighborhood they “don’t belong in”, ticketed more often, etc.
They are still likely to be presumed to have come from impoverished, likely criminal, backgrounds. You will never be suspected of that solely on the basis of your skin tone.
Hey. This blog entry appeared on a list of readings for white educators working with/for people of color.
In your last paragraph you mention how it’s important to examine other strata of oppression in addition to the stratum of race. I agree—I’ve been burned badly and seen others get burned in conversations where people insisted that the focus be on race and race alone.
Conversely, some people will sidestep being confronted with their own skin privilege by waving their own oppression about. Then a conversation about race suddenly get diverted by one or more white people talking about how hard life is for them because they are female and/or single parents and/or disabled and/or transgendered etc. All important things to discuss, but it’s important to know the time/place/context to discuss these things.
Dialoguing about oppression is a process about building trust and relationships over time. I commend you for your words and keeping the forum open here. It is, of course, a beginning. There is no end, only continuous work in the world in which we live.
Please factor in the impact on white skin privilege of Affirmative Action policy as it has been implemented for decades now.
I did. Affirmative Action hasn’t changed everyone’s perception of women or people of color. Early bosses intentionally employed “quota people” of the lowest quality they could find to reinforce in people’s heads the idea that “[group name here] are lazy/stupid/untrustworthy.” They lumped more work on them or sabotaged them so they would fail. Just by being female, I’ve seen a lot of this first and second hand.
Long after Affirmative Action put women in the workplace, sexual harassment remained tacitly tolerated. It still is in film, and I’m sure that’s not the only industry where women know “If you speak up, there are a hundred applicants ready to take your place.”
Women are still expected to conform to the template of helpmate – we’re still frequently expected to tolerate more crap and stroke egos rather than issue commands. If we behave exactly like white men, we are “bitches.” Not being of color I can’t say for sure if people of color feel this strain, too, but I am aware that a lot of women of color have to deal not infrequently with the stereotypes that black women are “scary bitches” and hispanic women are “street” and Asian women are a walking sex fetish. No men of color have discussed this with me, but from what I’ve observed from white men behind their backs, white men still largely think any man of color in a position of power got there mainly from AffAct – if he’s any good, they’re speak of it in surprised tones. If he screws up in precisely the same way they all do from time to time, there’s a tone of “Well, what did you expect?” Even *I* don’t go through that crap here in L.A., though I certainly did in the Southeast when men were floored over and over by my intelligence and complimented me to no end – which sounds flattering and probably looks it to an outsider like you, but the next comments were always either “for a woman” or a comparison of my intelligence with that of their moms or wives, as if their moms and wives had the same education and training I had and therefore were comparable. No, they thought a double-digit IQ came with the vagina, and considered themselves super-enlightened to recognize those triple digit IQs in a member of the subspecies.
So, you are saying the policy of Affirmative Action as it has actually been implemented for decades now has discriminated against nobody due simply to the accident of their birth gender and/or color of skin?
My.
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
To supplement your personal experience, I suggest you go to a law library on a visitor’s pass and spend a few weeks reading the relevant cases. The law librarian will gladly give you some relevant search terms and key words (for the books). And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
I agree with all you say to a point. Even though a lot of my personal experiences run exactly counter. I also happily concede the brutal past of while male power.
But your insistence nothing has changed over the last forty years, and your wilfull ignorance of official victim policy at the expense of the majority of white males born into the lower echelons of the nation is astounding.
You just don’t get that your estimation of the “expense of the majority of white males” is entirely derived from the sense of entitlement you (and all of us) are taught to accord white males in this lopsided culture.
The things you think are being taken away from white men are things us “minorities” never enjoyed.
I’m sure you understand that for things to become equal, white males are going to lose some privileges they didn’t realize were unearned privileges, and for the first generations, it’s going to feel like they’ve gotten ripped off. Like if you stop giving a kid an allowance they did nothing to earn, but have come to expect.
What you’re not understanding is that it’s white, wealthy men who are using minority issues to hurt other white, less affluent men. And I’ve already said all this above about liberals who want to feel good by playing their own twisted version of Robin Hood, who ignore the plight of certain whites or may even be in denial about it because it makes them uncomfortable. We’re just going in circles here.
What you’re not understanding is many white males who have grown up over the last nearly half a century have never known white skin and gender preference, but rather, the reverse. As official government policy.
You live in a time warp, an arrestment of time.
You can’t right all the wrongs of the aged past by committing new wrongs, and calling it humane/ a higher vision. It’s like asking the Palestinians to suck it up because of the Holocaust that happened in Europe.
Your personal experiences and pre-Civil Rights Era history
are not current reality on the ground.
Okay, that’s it. You are just a narcissist if you think white men haven’t had privilege in the past few decades.
You clearly have no idea what white women have been through and still go through because of white male privilege during all this time and the present. And that’s not even touching on people of color.
Your comments are no longer welcome, as obviously your whole concern here was indeed just to dismantle the notion that anyone’s problems could be as important as what the impoverished white man is going through.
The thing I don’t always get is why we should be striving so hard to move up the class ranks? Why do we feel the need to move out of the lower class?
My bio is that I was born into a upper-middle class family with all the good thangs that entails – education and dental care, etc… – and ended up living on the poverty line through a series of colorful events and personal choices.
Reasonably looking ahead, I will probably always live on the poverty line from now on. It’s only scary if you think to much on it. *lol* In reality, as long as I’m very savvy about what I do with what I have, we will never starve or be without basic needs. I moved to a white trash area, put my car up on blocks (couldn’t afford petrol), stopped eating mostly commercial food and moved to home-grown/slaughtered, disconnected some utilities, take charity freely, etc…because I value my time and freedom and the experience of my family more then I value working more for more money. What’s worse (for whatever your value of worse is) I dragged my daughter along with me.
I’m not scrambling to get back up that class ladder again any time soon. Frankly I don’t see the point. And maybe that’s because of the privilege of having been there, done that. I don’t need or want for my daughter to have to do that either – I don’t need for her to go to university or have a 5 or 6 figure salary or own a home – I just need for her to be happy with herself.
Having said all that I do (some) work for pay, and have an equity scholarship, equity re-furbished computer and am in last year of a post-graduate degree – because I knew they existed and how to apply for grants, etc…again, because I’ve been in that position of privilage previously I knew such things *must* exist. I wouldn’t want my daughter to grow up to be ignorant of those oppourtunties. Then again, I wouldn’t be upset if she chose not to take them. Education doesn’t necessarily bring fulfillment and joy to me. It’s handy, and makes me better at my job, but I could live without it if that too was beyond my reach. The irony of education of course, is that you get a glimpse of all the things that *are* possible and you’re left feeling guilty because you don’t want anything more then you have.
Obviously I’m conflicted.
*white, female, single-mother – if it makes a difference
I think it’s a good idea to really think about where you want to be. Having grown up poor, I actually need a certain financial cushion to feel secure and not lay awake at night. But I never wanted to be particularly rich. My solution, which I’m working toward, is developing an online business that will provide enough living for me to move somewhere relatively inexpensive and live frugally (including growing my own food). That way, I don’t need much money to be free of relying on the good will of employers and landlords – which is where a lot of my former-poor-girl stress comes from.
Not that I begrudge anyone who really just wants to be stinkin’ rich. In fact, lately I’ve been thinking of what I would do with billions – I would still live frugally, but damn, I would fund some stuff that would shake up the world and kick some ass.
But yeah, we’re all taught that being richer or living like The Joneses will make us happier, and it’s not that simple. For some people that really might be the answer, but for others it’s not.
[...] White Trash Blues: Class Privilege v. White Privilege [...]
[...] White Trash Blues: Class Privilege v. White Privilege (tags: privilege race class) [...]
I GREW UP POOR WHITETRASH. MY FRIENDS WERE POOR WHITETRASH I NEVER MINDED IT
Jen,
Very good blog. I agree with you whole-heartedly. I am African American, but I grew up in a white community. Actually, I started out in a poor black community, then my family moved to a white community…the poor area. As a teenager, I was totally shocked that there were poor white people. They were just as poor as I was. I was amazed! We had trailers in the innercity…but not like this! Whole communities of trailers! This was a real cultural moment of cognitive dissonance…what I saw flew in the face of what I believed. My image of whites came from T.V. The Brady Bunch, Leave It To Beaver, Partich Family. Andy Griffen. etc. It changed my perspective and outlook on the world. I made many friends and grew up listening to rock, country music as well as rap and R&B. I also wondered about the white priviledge fallacy. I saw no white priviledge among the whites where I lived. The community was just as poor and run-down as the one we had left…just absent the “drive-bys”. Fathers struggled to find work. Deadbeat dads didn’t pay childsupport. Women were beat by men. Teen pregnancies. Teenagers roamed the streets…nothing to do in small-town America. Alchohol, sex, and pot were the past-times. (not mine of course) All the issues were the same.
My point is this: there is no such thing as white privilege. There is class privilege, racism, and discrimination. The poor whites I grew up with did not enjoy any privileges because of their pigmentation. If White Privilege was true that would leave poor whites with no excuse for being poor. White privilege says that whites enjoy the jobs, housing, and education opportunities because they are white. The fact that there are poor whites negates this point. It’s all a lie. I have refused to buy into it. It excuses poverty for minorities but condemnes whites for being poor. I had friends that applied to the same college i did, but were not accepted. Why? Well, I have to admit…my GPA was better than theirs. According to white privilege, I should have been rejected and they should have been accepted…because they are white.
Chesslaw, that’s an interesting way to look at it. My viewpoint is that there IS such a thing as white privilege, but it’s mutable by other privileges. I don’t see any privilege as absolute, or else rich people would never be convicted of crimes.
Chesslaw: You make all valid points. Most African Americans did not see that side of “the Other America” that you have – and the inconvenient truth about it that you recognize.
Poor whites are the last group it is openly legal and acceptable to diminish and marginalize. Example: the American eugenics movement (from which Hitler learned so well) which was aimed at wiping out poor whites for being an embarrassing stain on the greed and imperialism of a privileged class. Research the case known as Buck vs. Bell sometime and you’ll see who the elitist eugenicists tried to purge from American society by extermination and forced sterilizations.
“Poor white trash” were (and still are) an uncomfortable reminder to the privileged classes that RICH white males sought to secure for themselves that which they’ve systemically denied everyone else, including white women and including poor whites: unfair social advantage, political power, economic prosperity, freedom from debt peonage, etc. And let’s face it, most members of white middle class American society don’t want to admit that they’ve benefited at the expense of others through unfair advantage gained through unearned social class privilege.
Even though the issue of classism is beginning to gain some recognition, liberals from America’s comfortable classes fail to check their classism at the door when they rail against the sexual orientation bias affecting the gay community. They labeled the poor of rural northwestern PA and much of the Rust Belt as being racists who would never vote for Obama because he’s a black man. But if you look at the results, Obama won the presidency by a landslide. Evidently, poor whites aren’t the bigots everyone else thinks we are – we have more faith in Obama’s promise of change that would give ALL of us a better stakehold in society than an administration run by some rich white male (or female). Compare that to the fact that Hillary Clinton was not well received in many poor white circles because she’s perceived as petty, as being an arrogant elitist.
I recently read a well-written blog criticizing the rich, white born-again Christian singer Pat Boone for his screed in World Net Daily in which he compares gays to jihad terrorists that besieged Mumbai.
The problem with the blog which justly criticized Boone was the title: “When Hillbillies Attack”. I have difficulty reconciling her “open-minded” liberal views regarding concern for gay rights with her classism, her stereotyping poor rural whites.
According to middle and upper class “liberals”, poor whites are uneducated, stupid, disposable people who don’t count. I believe it is that type of arrogance which makes alot of poor whites resentful of the progresssives, and not receptive to progressive ideals. It also foments resentment against minorities, too. Poor whites feel like, “hey,what about us too”?
Jennifer: “…or else rich people would never get convicted of crimes.”
One caveat here. Rich people are RARELY convicted of crimes. And when they are, the consequences are not what they would be for a felon from the lower social classes (like Richard Laird and Frank Chester, for example).
Case #1 in point: Former Pennsylvania Asst Attorney General, Rick Guida. Guida violated due process and corrupted his office by running a cocaine ring out of his office. Now, a poor inner-city petty dope dealer, or a poor rural meth dealer would have done serious hard time in the state prison system and been subject to mandatory minimum sentencing. Not so for a well-off district attorney (who illegally engineered the outcome of a death penalty case in Philadelphia – the Susan Reinert murder – resulting in an innocent man, Dr. Jay C. Smith, being sent to death row).
Case #2 in point: Don Blankenship of Massey Energy, and the contamination of the soil, air, and well water of the poor living in West Virginia’s McDowell, Logan, Boone, and Mingo Counties. Moreover, Blankenship almost singelhandedly bought the entire WV legislature and state supreme court, patently disadvantaging plaintiffs with a suit pending against the coal baron for destruction to their homes, health, and water supply.
One caveat here. Rich people are RARELY convicted of crimes.
Chesslaw was saying white privilege doesn’t exist, whereas I’m arguing that it exists but doesn’t always work as advertised. My analogy was to argue that even thought rich people sometimes go to jail, that doesn’t mean wealth privilege doesn’t exist. It just means it doesn’t work as advertised 100% of the time. Which is my argument re: white privilege: whether you perceive it as getting trumped by other anti-privileges, occasionally malfunctioning, or just not existing, the point where I think we’re all three agreeing is that it is NOT an all-powerful totem that protects you from poverty and various other difficult situations.
I grew up in a middle class community but attended a poor school. Where i went African-American got to retake the test til they passed, got out trouble for bringing knives to school, graduated without being able to read above a third grade level. The administration always said they have to get off for these things because they didn’t want to be called racist. Shouldn’t everyone have to complete the same standards wether they are white, black, hispanic or asian. Or how about within the United States military. The promotion rate is almost 50:50 between white and black. Look at the records there are blacks being promoted without passing the tests so the the promotion rate stay equal. Now I know it does go both ways and in other situations whites do receive unearned privileges but don’t forget to recognize that it does go both ways.
Shouldn’t standards be equal for everyone!
“Passing” kids who haven’t mastered the material is a huge problem in US public schools. It’s done with kids of all races, and it’s never the answer to ANY problem.
I do firmly believe that after denying certain groups of people education and job opportunities, your society needs to correct that imbalance with another imbalance to get everyone on equal footing. But making standards unequal is not, IMO, the right way to go. The better solution is to hand out opportunities, not rewards. I.E., don’t just hand someone a title or a job – hand them the education or training they need to earn that job. And I’m speaking as a woman, which is a group that’s had education and jobs denied to it and still on the whole is not paid equally to men when we do the same exact work.
This explanation is a bunch of hogwash.
To put it simply, for a privilege to have an ethnic adjective, it has to be exclusive to that group. If you read Peggy McIntosh, Tim Wise, or other “White Guilt” mongers, they tend to mix fact with fancy. There is no denying that White privilege existed in this country. It was a legal fact written into federal law. But even then the law truly wasn’t directed at giving Whites a privilege, but at placing burdens on specific groups. Different exclusionary acts. This is what is called an incumbent, majority or ethnophobic/xenophobic legalization.
That having been said, those laws were long ago repealed. Does majority/mainstream privilege still exist? Of course. It exists in ANY country where a population is the significant majority. Most media portrays them; their face is the most familiar, etc. But majority privilege can quickly be reversed by regional demographics where other groups may hold the majority, either individually or in combination. Many urban areas show this effect. Many places in the south where Hispanics are a majority can also affect this.
But removing majority privilege such that we explore discrimination in a situation where all populations are of the same size. When we analyze Peggy McIntosh’s list you find that many of those privileges claims simply dissolve. Furthermore, those that don’t many times are not exclusive to Euro-phenotype people. In many cases, the discrimination is ethno-specific. Like cultural biases against African Americans in certain cases where just not being of that ethnic group allows for a lack of that burden. In other words, if you can point to any other group that can get away with it, then it isn’t White privilege; it is a “insert ethnic name here” burden. Example, NYC and hailing cabs. Most Whites would have no problem hailing a cab. But neither would most other ethnicities. It is actually only a few ethnicities that have been stereotyped as violent, misers, or in other racist terms such that cab drivers, many of them non white themselves will purposely avoid picking them up. Similar analysis for shadowing in department stores.
Secondly, there are populations of Euro-phenotype people who suffer from their own burdens unique to them. Be it from multigenerational poverty, regional biases or stereotypes or many times ethno-regional biases of what American White or mainstream looks like in the first place.
Thirdly, there are situations where being Non-White has its privileges as well. Because of the assumption of a ‘White privilege’ or worse innate White evil intent.
It is assumed in many circles that you should not speak badly of each other, but you can speak badly of White people. It doesn’t matter if that person may happen to be a recent migrant from a third world country, war torn region, or what not where they haven’t received any advantage in their life. There is an assumption they have privilege and they can be the target of ridicule because of it.
Finally, we must understand that there are populations that are predominantly White, who have profited from exclusionism, profiteering from exploitation, not just of non-Whites but also many other White ethno-social groups, who will have kids that may be raised to continue such exclusion, by ethno-class based doctrines and even racial ones, but rarely without the first one included. These groups do not reflect on all Euro-phenotype people. And you see their counterparts in the elite of other countries as well. Japan, China, India, etc.
Then you have a group racialists whose only possible privilege is the illusion of privilege in itself. Many impoverished Eurodescent populations who live in abject conditions hold on to it to try to make some sense of their lives. Holding onto fantasies of past White glory.
An ideology that was implanted by elite in this country as early as the indentured servitude period after European and non European servants and slaves rebelled together. Basically, a mental opiate to keep populations apart.
Consider it similar to more extreme versions of religion and brainwashing that lead to feel-goodism about yourself no matter what your situation while pointing to all non-believers of your particular dogma as inferior people.
Some articles that explore the idea of non-White privilege as well:
http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/race/2008/07/is-there-such-a.html
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5782
http://hiphoprepublican.com/2006/04/end-black-privilege.html
http://www.rastafarispeaks.com/repatriation/index.cgi?noframes;read=39353
All I know, is that no matter how poor a white woman is, all she has to do is take a bath, maybe change her name, read-up on a subject or two, put on a suit and cut and dye her hair to start cultivating creature benefits of societal white privilege in the USA. A black woman? Not so much. She simply cannot wash the black off. All the other wha-hoo about sexism and classism is immaterial to the discussion.
Salsassin, there is no material difference between giving one person a privilege and giving everyone else a burden. Your argument is non-sensical in more places than I have time to note here.
Black girl, it’s not quite that simple. It’s true that a poor white person can pretty quickly put together the outward appearance of a white middle classer, while a person of color obviously can’t. But there are a lot of behavior markers that aren’t explained in any book. For example, to white middle classers, certain topics that poor whites talk about all the time are off-limits. Bring up one of those topics, and whoops, you’ve outed yourself as The Other, and that’s the end of fooling anyone who heard what you said. But it is true that the barriers for a poor white are more transmutable and transcendable than the barriers for a person of color, simply because skin color is such a glaring dead giveaway that you are The Other. And that was my point in the article.
Black Girl,
I have to disagree with you that “all a poor white woman has to do is take a bath and change her name” in order to “pass” into and ascend to the ranks of white mainstream middle class society.
When poverty means that you couldn’t get timely dental care and as a reult, you have a mouth full of visibly decayed, broken, or missing teeth, it’s obvious that you lacked access to dental care…for which everyone else looks down on you and judges you – that you must obviously be a druggie or some sort of social deviant for not looking “normal”, for failing to “take proper care of yourself.” It’s next to impossible to get even a $6/hr no-benefit cashier job in a supermarket when you’re a poor white woman with missing/rotting front teeth.
Every time you open your mouth to speak (to a prospective employer/job interviewer or socially in the dating scene) your visibly decayed/broken/missing teeth are a dead giveaway that you are “the Other”.
That is something you cannot simply wash away or change with the stroke of a pen in a pro-se filed name change petition. And that is a highly visible social class marker.
Classism Part 1
Classism Part 2
Classism Part 3
Classism Part 4
Classism Part 5: Conclusion
I went searching for “class privilege” (on Google) and found this extraordinary post! (And after a little more perusal will definitely be looking into adding this blog to my usuals)
That said, I do take issue with the comments where “illegal” is used as a noun to describe illegal immigrants.
As the bumpersticker/signs say: “Ningun ser humano es ilegal”. No person is illegal. It’s ironic and frustrating to see that type of label used by people who are (rightfully) critical of the term white “trash”. To me, calling someone “an illegal” is similarly dismissive and rude as saying that they are “trash”.
Anyway. I realize those comments happened years ago, but I also didn’t notice anyone speaking out against them.
P.S. Don’t forget: one can be both be an illegal immigrant AND white.
Ezekiah, thank you. I never thought of the shortened term “illegals” as hurtful, possibly because I’m an anarchist and don’t consider “illegal” to be very invalidating. But then I’ve never been an immigrant of any sort, so I’ll avoid that term from now on.
Just a couple points on the “illegal” comments. Firstly think about the white privelge of not having to be detained, interrogated, and deported because you didn’t have something on you called a green card(It’s even happened to people with full U.S. Citizenship).
Think about the irony of the fact that the more you look like one of the first people of the Americas(think contintentally not what you gringos ignorantly refer to as “America.”) the more your chances of this happening to you increase. The more you look like your ancestors were Vikings, Pilgrims, or whatever, the less likelihood this will happen to you.
Think about having your parents taken away from you on an ICE Raid one night, and you’ve now been raised on this side of the border(think of it as a child born of rape, meaning the Mexican American War) all your life and could never adapt to where your parents came from.
While we’re along those lines let’s not be so narrow, and blindly ignorant that we don’t think about the relationship between developed and underdeveloped nations since the Age of Imperialism.
Think about things like Banana Republic, Raw Export producers while the common people get shafted, and the U.S. has been a big part of this since the 1890s(That’s after they got done dealing with the Indians, and stealing a 3rd of Mexico).
Don’t stop there look at your cherry on top. Globalization which the coporate media tells everyone that people in the 3rd world benefit from it but it leaves out the fact that it makes bad situations worse in the cities, and it undersells farmers in places like Chiapas Mexico(remember the Zapatista Rebellion?)
Oops forgot the whipped cream. The media tells us things like all the kids are speaking the languages of the countries of their parents, but the very opposite is true. They’re losing the culture and language of their parents. It’s the writing of English that eludes them, but then that same coporate media doesn’t tell us that poor whites do just as bad if not worse in writing and grammar. And it’s not even standard English that they’re learning. Trash T.V. and their trash T.V. immitating peers are what is teaching them English.
I agree that the situation of poor whites and Appalachians(“hillbillies” we say) needs to be looked at more objectively however for those of you tooting the horn about “illegal immigrants” please don’t make me break out the banner with the Aztec Warrior pointing the finger and saying “Whose the Illegal Alien Pilgrim!”
Victor, to a degree, you are right. But it still isn’t White Privilege that is at play. It is majority privilege. When Northern Europeans overpopulated North America they created an environment where they are the most common features. So even other European features less common in the north can and have been questioned here. Add to that, a specific burden that has been placed on Mexican immigrants (and all that look like them or come from that direction) since that is where most migration comes from, and you do have it harder in many cases for people who are Latino with non Northern European features.
But let me remind you, that the majority of Latinos here are not majority indigenous. We are Mestizo. Genetically the vast majority have more European than they have Native.
But two factors play a role. Obviously, having partial ancestry in a country where mestizos are not the majority is a burden. Add to that, the European ancestry we have is not the one most common in the US so the features are different even before adding the indigenous factor. It’s what makes us unique, but it is what makes us a minority in this nation.
Of course, as African Americans said, “We shall overcome,” we Latinos said “We shall overpopulate.” That is truly why racists and Nativists in this country fear us so much. Because it is not White privilege, it is majority privilege that rules. And with our migration patterns and reproduction patterns, we will become the majority in this country.
What we still have to overcome is the education gaps. If not we risk being a majority in the lower classes but a minority in the middle classes. And then you have the burden of class based stereotypes come into place. If one class has a majority from one group, or one group tends to have their majority in one class, that group tends to be stereotyped as belonging to that class.
That is the biggest problem in Latin America, where class based looks privilege is enforced by the upper classes.
You can see this marked difference in our media, where White faces are openly overrepresented. And Indigenous or Afrodescent faces are mostly present in stereotyped lower class roles (if that, because many times even the maids look like Goldilocks). The only reason why it still isn’t true White privilege is that Middle Easterners and Asians are not placed in these subservient roles as well.
This does not happen in the US. Our facial variety is shown a lot more throughout Media. And I would say Afrodescent faces are more than equally represented in the media. 12% of the population, but more than that in the media.
But the US still does place a larger burden on the Indigenous faces. At best, you will see mestizo faces, but it is rare to see full blood looks (or mestizos that favor the indigenous side a lot more) in general media, and when they are showed it tends to be with some of the same class based stereotypes that permeate Latin America.
‘Shouldn’t everyone have to complete the same standards wether they are white, black, hispanic or asian.’ (Courtni)
The kids are supposed to be learning; any system that just passes them while leaving them nearly illiterate is not doing them any favours. An upper-class idiot may have contacts that can put him in the White House. A poor black kid, not so much, so he is a victim, not a beneficiary.
‘no matter how poor a white woman is, all she has to do is take a bath, maybe change her name, read-up on a subject or two, put on a suit and cut and dye her hair’ (Black girl)
Not really. The class system is complex. You don’t sound right, you don’t know the right things, you don’t have the right interests, you don’t know the right people and they don’t know you. Or if they do, they treat you as one of the help.
[...] http://whatprivilege.com/white-trash-blues-class-privilege-v-white-privilege/ [...]
[...] means never having to explain why it doesn’t work for Others by Jennifer Kesler White Trash Blues: Class Privilege v. White Privilege by Jennifer [...]
Yea I grew up poor in more of a rural community for most of my life. the area that I lived in there practically everyone was poor. If there has been an image that has been created by television or movies generally about how most people in america live they havent really seen all there is to know. And man it doesnt matter what color you are. There isnt really such a thing as white privlage where I grew up or anything like that. There probley is a heirarchy of upper middle class individuals, some of which, not all though, will do anything to ensure there is a low class of poorer type famlies for their own personal gain. This isnt to chacterize anyone in particular, but no doubt it exsists. In my case I grew up moving in and out of different homes within a general area of both villiages and farm country. Most of the homes we lived in lacked alot of things people take for granted everyday. Adequate and avaiable heat. Reliable utilities like running water. You know if you grew up then in rural areas we didnt have our own washer and dryer so clothes were washed out by hand and hung up to dry. Also in rural areas the avaiability of will say charitable organizations which provide a safety net I guess for some aren’t always readily avaiable, especially if the individuals who require assistance do not have easy or reliable transportation. In my case clothes were handed down by my cousin. However he wore a Husky Size Jeans. As long as they fit around my waiste i was wearing them so it wasnt unusual for me to wear jeans too short for me, that was common. School clothes some years ment getting a package of plain white tee shirts. The same problems that exist in the many inner city communities do exist in rural areas without some of the crime, however the underlying problems still are there. the only thing to do usually when your alittle older is to drink and smoke pot, little ealse to do besides that and fish and maybe hunt. thats just what alot of folks have to learn to accept the way life is.
There isnt really such a thing as white privlage where I grew up or anything like that.
The whole point of my article was that white privilege always exists. There are times when it gets canceled out by all the privileges working against you, to the point that it might as well not exist for you, but if your situation changes and you look at things honestly, you will see yourself occasionally catching breaks for no reason other than your race and the race of the others involved.
I wouldn’t say it always exists, nor that it gets canceled out. More like it exists in some places. In others, there are specific burdens placed on some ethnic groups, and in some places there are burdens placed on Whites.
I disagree, and think you have both missed the entire point of the article.
[...] found that culture to be rife with open gender bias and I criticize it for that. But you know what? Stereotyping Southern and poor whites as lazy, perverted scam artists is not cool. Southerners are no more likely to pull scams instead [...]
I love you! Do you have a Twitter?
The rich are manipulating us to keep us down. They did this back in slavery, giving the poor whites a few “privileges” so that they would stop rebelling with the slaves…..and stop the threat of an over-throw of the rich plantation owners.
Bad mistake for the poor whites to turn their backs on the slaves because this was the start of the “pitting against” each other…..by two groups that did, and still do need each other.
Now, they are manipulating us again by making a poor black higher on the social class then a poor white, and giving them a few “privileges”, hoping we’ll continue to fight amongst ourselves and they will continue to rule and continue to gain all the wealth
The rich have figured out (very brilliantly) how to manipulate us & have us fighting with each other over stupid reasons such as race , class, religion, or just to get basic rights! We need to get smarter then the rich…realize what they are doing and then do something about it! There are way more of us then them!
Great article, but can we start another word for poor whites besides “trash”?
Jeannine, nice points you make here about the “divide and conquer” strategy. I forget to use my Twitter, but it’s here:
http://twitter.com/JenniferKesler
And yeah, we certainly need a word other than trash – I used it with quotes in an attempt to emphasize just how harshly other white people speak of my class.
Jennifer, I agree…it’s one thing for one of us to refer to the way our class is treated by using the word “trash” in quotes, but there’s a totally different meaning conveyed by the privileged when they refer to us disparagingly by calling us “trash.”
And I want to make this perfectly clear: Whenever our class is referred to as “trash” and punished for our conditions of poverty, it is not only poor rural whites that are being abused, it’s poor urban whites too.
Having rown up in a Philadelphia ghetto of poor whites, I have found a stronger sense of belonging, a greater shared understanding with my poor brothers and sisters in the heart of Appalachia, and in the “podunk” towns of the Midwest than I feel around middle/upper class people of any race.
That said, I think it is incumbent upon us to call people out on their class bigotry whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head — as it did on the January 30, 2009 episode of the “reality TV” show, “Wife Swap”, featuring Stephen Fowler, a wealthy British immigrant who easily gained US citizenship by virtue of his wealth and marriage to a wealthy American ‘trophy’ wife. I called him on his class prejudice for his abuse of a poor Midwestern woman who was his temporary wife on the show. If anyone wants to read my letter to Stephen Fowler, I have it posted on this Google page:
http://jacqueline.homan.author.googlepages.com/home
Really good article here, though I’m dissapointed that many of the comments seem to be intent on trying to say that class or race are worse oppresions. It is much more complex than this, and saying that class or race are more important than the other does noone any favours. While racism (and sexism) are rife in our culture, there are many situations where an eloquent, well educated black woman will be taken more seriously than a poor white man.
One thing that I do get a bit riled about though is when people talk about issues that are fundimentally about class and economic standing as if they are soley about race. I have seen a campaign against a university putting up it’s fees where it was talked about how this was racist as it would reduce the number of people of colour being able to attend. I don’t know if there were other campaigns running alongside this that talked about class issues, but it did seem like the people running this campaign had forgotten that the reason people are exculded in this example is how much money they have, not the colour of their skin, and poor white folks seem to be being ignored.
It’s important to remember that it’s much easier to be aware of one’s oppressions than one’s privilages, so someone might see their oppression as a person of colour as more important than another person’s oppression as being considered “trash”, but forget their own privilage as a middle class person with an education, in the same way that a poor white person may see class as the most important issue but not notice their privilage as a white person.
“I called him on his class prejudice for his abuse of a poor Midwestern woman who was his temporary wife on the show. If anyone wants to read my letter to Stephen Fowler, I have it posted on this Google page:”
Good for you! I have also decided it’s time to start speaking up more. I wrote to a radio station recently for referring to a woman who was describing her brother’s experiences with meth as “a piece of trailer trash” and I’ve been thinking of complaining about the Jay Leno show. He uses the term “white trash” frequently as well as using poor whites for humor constantly.
“though I’m dissapointed that many of the comments seem to be intent on trying to say that class or race are worse oppresions.”
Who has done this? This accusation always seems to come up. I’ve tried a number of times to bring up the issue of class on feminist and academic and science blogs in cases where I think it’s being ignored, and I am always accused of denying other privileges or claiming class privilege is the most important when I have not even said anything close. I also get called a “loon” and have had “trailer” jokes made about me in response. It’s ridiculous to deny class privilege. That is the point being made. And scapegoating is not progressive! “Progressives” who mock lower-class white people lose all credibility (and we shouldn’t let them get away with it).
I too was frustrated that some of the commenters on this article wanted to make out that one (lack of) privilege is better/worse than another. I let a few of them through moderation because I thought the conversation was good to have, but I did not post several that I felt would only hurt feelings.
Yes, the entire point of the post is that ALL anti-privileges are bad, and it doesn’t matter who’s got it the worst, and that having one privilege doesn’t cancel out the fact you’ve got several anti-privileges working against it. I agree that when “progressives” mock poor whites or any other group (white feminists of means have often left out women of color, women who aren’t heterosexual and disabled women in addition to poor white able-bodied heterosexual women) they are not living up to the label of progressive and must have it pointed out to them. Some of them will learn from it and we’ll all be better off. Others will refuse to learn, but in showing up their hypocrisy, we’ll reduce the hurt they would have caused.
“While these points still aren’t germaine to a topic about white privilege”
I also have to disagree with this to some extent. Sometimes the references to white privilege do imply class privilege, and this needs to be pointed out.
Also white upper-middle class bloggers and other progressives will do this, or make seemingly self-deprecating remarks about white people in general, and in this way diffuse a lot of the blame for the oppression of others onto a whole race. And by making these statements they get to seem superior to the inferior whites who think they’re better than other people (redneck racists, whatever). A neat trick!
This was a great thread, there are a lot of good ideas here.
For some fun, check out TurboWhiteTrash
[...] won’t” matters in breastfeeding advocacy. I also found Jennifer Kesler’s piece on the difference between class privilege and white privilege at her blog What [...]
I apologise for some of the generalisations that appear in this post, but I can’t think of a way to express what I mean without using them, at no point do I mean to imply that people in these groups actually actively think in these ways.
I’ve read a few of these blogs now and I’m starting to get the impression that there is really only one (maybe 2 if you include super normative) set of privileges that really needs to be discussed and that is the privileges of the norm (or normative privileges depending on what sounds better).
Basically put, the closer you are to societies expectation of normal the easier it is for you to get by (it gets even easier if you exceed the norm), e.g. for a white collar worker it might be able-bodied white middle class cis-male that’s not too excitable (in the UK anyway). For child care it might be white middle class married woman (try being a stay at home mum as a man, and needing to change a nappie at the shops…).
Any deviation from the norm will be met with a backlash (removal of privileges) from those that consider themselves more normal than you (“ooh look at her, leaving her children at home while she goes off to work, no wonder they’re such devils”) while still not gaining all the privileges of those that you are breaking away too. While those that society considers super normal will gain more privileges. Thus if a person tries to break out of the small box that is considered normal for them and reach for the more general normal of the society they’re living in they will get ridiculed, put down, beaten up, discriminated against, and worse just for “daring to think they are above their station”. Those lucky few that manage to brave the journey and find their place closer to the norm (or super norm as the case maybe) tend to look back and see that their journey wasn’t so hard so why can’t they do it, while at the same time still resenting the privileges that they haven’t yet gained.
IMO the main reason that those that are poor are more stigmatised that those that are in another group (and so meaning that the difference between a poor black person and a poor white person is negligible in terms of the privilege that they have available to them while their poor) is that the privilege of wealth is something that is easier to lose than, say, gender, colour, etc. and so those that have that privilege are a little frightened of the reminder of what losing that privilege would actually mean (by perception rather than actuality), and so have to tell those little lies like, they obviously don’t work hard enough, or they didn’t have the right opportunities, or or or…
Conversely those people that are in the super normative group tend to think of themselves as better in some way than those lower down, whether it because they’re exceptionally lucky, better at bargaining, more beautiful, have more responsibility, or just plain worked harder, and so they are due the additional privileges that come with their station/money/position.
Ideally all of these privileges would actually be based on merit where it’s something that needs to be earned (ability to go to the pictures without worrying about which meal(s) you’re going to have to skip), given to everyone where it’s something that’s needed (education), or abolished all together where it’s just an unfair divide (higher wages for white men).
Make a “dumb blonde” joke, and someone sooner or later will call you on your sexism; make a “you know you’re a redneck when…” joke, and chances are everyone will take it as good clean fun.
You’re right. I never even thought how classist that was. Thanks for pointing that out. I know I’ve made comments like that before, and laughed with people who made them. I won’t again.
This was an excellent article. Well, all the articles here are fantastic, but I really appreciate this article for showing that privilege isn’t a “which is worse” or “who has it worse” game, nor is it cut and dry but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
[...] has an interesting perspective on “white privilege” here that a lot of non-wealthy white people share: My approach is to look at all the types of [...]