I miss the show Roseanne. I miss that, for a little while, we were reminded that being poor and white did not mean you were an ignorant, racist shit. Poor white people are no more racist than the anyone else, they just haven’t been trained in the subtle art of talking out of both sides of their mouths. Here’s another difference, they don’t have the power to enact systemic racism. Bob from the parts plant may have some choice epithets, but Geoff at head office sets the corporate climate that prevents people of colour from advancing.
And lets talk about language for a minute. I’m not going to talk about how important our word choice is here, that’s been talked to death. And while I generally agree, I have seen too many privileged, educated women use their book learnin’ to silence women who are using the only words they’ve got. Rather than hearing what she is saying they are like heat seeking missiles waiting for her to ‘slip up’ with the wrong word choice. Perhaps we should give some credit where credit is due. Why not give some voice to the woman whose criticism of the kyriarchy comes from her gut, without the benefit of a degree in women’s studies.
I watched my friend who was working for shit wages in a garment factory get driven out of a feminist collective because they treated her like a moron. This while she deals with the reality of being paid half as much as the men at the factory up the road and gets forced to do overtime by her union rep.
So what does all of this mean? Poor white people are an easy target. Instead of engaging in some meaningful dialogue, and finding ways to include them in all levels of discourse, we dismiss them out of hand because they have bad grammar. How many times have you, or someone you know, dismissed an online comment because of a spelling or grammar mistake? I come from a family of grammar nuts but that? That is classism my friends. This is why the Tories and Republicans do so well when they talk about intellectual elitism.
So maybe before we go off assuming that being poor and white means you’re racist and ignorant we should recognize all the ways in which we exclude them from the conversation and the movement.
*waves*
ReplyDeleteHi. I came across your blog via Womanist Musings, and I want to echo some of your ideas here.
As a woman of color from the South whose parents come from a rural, working-class background, you know which White people treat me best and understand where I'm coming from?
Working class white people.
It's easier to cut through the bullshit when it doesn't take the form of collegiate pseudo-intellectual heuristics (see, White people, I got a college degree too!). Working class people understand that it's not how you package ideas, but how you treat people.
White people who learned anti-racism from their liberal arts colleges and their women's studies classes get all the theory but none of the practice. Which, in effect, simply makes them more educated racists (with, I may add, greater access to power and resources than the unschooled Rebel flag-waving Bubbas of their imaginations).
Who do you think is a greater threat to me?