Sunday, November 13, 2022

Solidarity When?

Late last week, I happened to be listening to a popular YouTube broadcast of the left when a listener from Florida called in hoping to make a point about how one of the "biggest obstacles to left-wing power in this country" was its "antagonistic relationship with working class people like me and what I believe is a racist anti-white culture within the left that is driving this antagonism "   He came prepared with a 2019 academic study from Colgate University and a personal anecdote to support his premise.  The Colgate Study measured attitudes of those who identified as either liberal or conservative toward a story about the life circumstances of man named Kevin who "lived in NYC, was raised by a single mom, struggled with poverty his whole life, and was currently receiving welfare assistance" but whose race was varied along with whether or not the subject was first given information to read about white privilege.  The researchers found that while conservatives seemed to look down on poor people of either race with or without the benefit of receiving information about white privilege, and liberals who were not first given information about white privilege expressed sympathy toward a poor man whether he was described as black or white,  self-identified liberals who had read about white privilege before hearing Kevin's story were more sympathetic to his present circumstances if he was described as black than if described as white, even to the point of blaming the white Kevin for his own poverty or agreeing with the proposition that "White people deserve to be poor in a kind of moral sense." 

As an illustration of the application of the study to his own experience, he related the story of how when he was a teenager in Florida in the 90s his single mother, working her way through school behind the cash register at a liquor store for little more than minimum wage unknowingly and absent-mindedly neglected to ask for an ID before selling a 6-pack of beer to a woman who turned out to be an underage undercover agent.  Weeks later, the lapse came back to her tenfold when the bust came down.  His mother was subsequently humiliatingly arrested on the job for it for which she was fired on the spot and "frog marched" out of the store to be charged.  Unable to raise bail she was jailed overnight without a chance to let her teenage son know where she was and what had happened to her. Saddled with legal expenses and court obligations for months and no longer on an income she was forced to go on public assistance.  The police and "by extension the lawmakers had nothing better to do with their time and taxpayer money than to publicly humiliate a poor white woman and drive her life into the ditch."  The caller used this as an example and not the worst of how poorly white people are treated by the police and yet at a leftist rallies he had attended  in support of Black Lives Matter following George Floyd's murder by police he had gotten the message that "poor whites have no skin in the game" and their struggles with the police did not matter.  As he told it, he was there in support and solidarity but came away from it disillusioned when one of the speakers reportedly said apropos of nothing that had been said before, "Poor white people, you all need to understand that your problems are not important right now" and then "went on to plug her small business."  The last part of his point was drowned out by one of the hosts mocking his sense of insult.   

Declarations of victimhood for being white have a tendency in leftist circles to raise suspicions along with eyebrows.  (Mine were raised.)  And of course as bad as poor people as a class have it at the hands of police, black people have it the worst .  But I think somewhere in there, the caller (who was not after all raining on a Black Lives Matter protest in progress, but merely trying to air his experience from one to illustrate an assertion on a leftist call-in show) had a valid point which I don't think he perfectly expressed-- not entirely through his own fault, although the responses he excited from the presenters of the broadcast which made it difficult for him to lay out his argument without protest may have to some extent made it for him. His framing of his mother's experience and of the results of the Colgate study as a case of anti-white racism, aside from doing him no favors with the audience he was addressing, is a mischaracterization of the problem that obfuscated matters, provoked a defensive response from the broadcasters and prevented the landing of what I think is actually a very important point.  

"There is without a doubt a class struggle but there is no white people's struggle." the host of the broadcast said accurately in support of his objection to the caller's story and it echoed my thoughts about the fault in the caller's presentation.  But to say that the caller's experience at the rally was an example of narcissistic extrapolation that has no bearing on leftist power seems to me to be missing the crux.  As the caller said, "If we're talking about winning power in this country, we need as many people on board as we can get so when the left alienates poor white people it's not just me the guy in the crowd who got his feelings hurt it's sort of a ripple effect."  Like it or not, and who the hell likes it, there is a problem building solidarity on the left (and has been at least since the time of Marx) which is very much exemplified by the readiness with which many poor whites are prepared to abandon class solidarity at the moment their own very real struggles are discounted by those who should be comrades due to the lack of a racial component to them (which if there is anything to the Colgate study seems to be the point of it).  The anomalous speaker at the George Floyd rally so hasty to draw a boundary of race on whose experiences were permitted to be brought to the table was tellingly a member of the black bourgeoisie according to the caller (or at least that was the perception) -- did she have skin in the poverty game?  Truthfully, how attuned to the pain and humiliations of poverty that doesn't fit the liberal mold are the hosts of the broadcast?  What the caller was talking about is the kind of pocketing of aggrievements that the left is lately so brilliant at festering and fostering but that only manipulators of the right seem to be capable of corralling to their own benefit.

In short, the left has a Solidarity problem.  It will not be solved by alienating anybody for deficiencies in their place on the hierarchy of grievances.  True, the gentleman's story had a huge element of subjective hurt to it.  Whose doesn't?  When someone tells you they are feeling excluded unfairly, believe them first.  Then defend them.  Then march forward together.

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