I, like, Prashant, was also rubbed the wrong way by your initial post. I can’t speak to what the speaker you referred to was saying because I wasn’t there. You might well be right that his speech was oversimplifying. I also agree that race and class are too often conflated in this country. But for people who are poor AND people of color, these issues might as well be two sides of the same coin because the ways in which these identities intersect is going to position them, socio-economically, in a way that is separate and unique from not being a beneficiary of one or the other (race or class privilege). I also think it’s reductive to expect people who experience an intersection of multiple forms of discrimination to only refer to one or the other when discussing discriminatory policies, because it is precisely how these forms interrelate that’s going to inform the overall impact of certain policies on them. Thus, to say you are uncomfortable or feel “alienated” by the way some people have chosen to frame that reality does sound a little off-putting, and very much like the expectation of someone who unconsciously expects to be accommodated by, if not the center, of all dialogue, especially as there are plenty of spaces that exist to discuss class or gender, or any other system of oppression, absent the consideration of race.

-- RumbidzaiMaweni - 08 Apr 2012

I enjoyed your last two posts, and agree with your overall point. Thanks for taking the time to clarify your position.

Michelle,

I’m not exactly sure how we jumped to “de-legitimizing the poor, white experience.” There’s certainly nothing controversial about anything you’ve said. I think where Kipp and I differ is in perception, and to what extent we feel like there exist spaces to talk about class without everything being subsumed into race. Treating race and class as though they are interchangeable is definitely problematic. I just don’t think that the “alienation” of a white person who felt that a (I assume) non-white speaker spent too much time talking about race, and not class, was a good starting point for that discussion. It gave the impression of privileging white comfort over the fact that the speaker may well have felt that race was the more salient issue at play.

Finally, I’m also not quite sure I understand why you find it discouraging when someone’s good intentions are questioned- there’s a great deal of harm done in this world by so-called well-meaning people, and I don't think anyone should have the privilege of an automatic pass when they do or say potentially questionable things simply because they meant well. I think pushing each other to be transparent and honest about why we’ve chosen our positions on these topics goes a long way towards illuminating the discussion for everyone.

-- RumbidzaiMaweni - 08 Apr 2012

There are two threads of this conversation that have become muddled (primarily because I think we began with a problematic example). I think it would be helpful to separate them out. I hope this is a fair characterization of your first post, and feel free to let me know if it isn’t.

On one hand, as Michelle and Shefali pointed out, it sounds like you may have felt alienated by the overall tenor of the comments in your first example (“white people are greedy”, etc.). I don’t think we were discussing this, specifically, until Michelle brought it up in her second post, and I agree that these statements are oversimplifying and hurtful. That's a fairly easy thing to point out. I also agree with Shefali that it’s important that we all feel like we have an equal stake in and can participate in making our society a more racially equitable one. Just as we can never fully address patriarchy without men examining the concept of masculinity, it’s important that white people also feel like they can examine what it means to be white and engage with that social reality. I’m huge advocate of whiteness studies programs, and Peggy McIntosh? ’s essay, which Michelle helpfully posted, is a great starting point.

However, from the title of this thread, and the overall substance of your posts beyond your first example (i.e. “I would discuss classism absent race or any other consideration if I could”) it sounds like your “alienation” derives from more than one isolated experience where someone mischaracterized “all white people,” but rather from discussions of policies that adversely affect poor people that essentially become conversations about race. If that’s the case, I still stand by my first post. And while I can’t tell you how to feel, I can say that I genuinely don’t understand it (and maybe that’s a failure of empathy on my part), and I’m not sure if it's something that people of color should be bending over backwards to try and alleviate or solve. Shefali and Michelle speak to the need to bring white people into the conversation, but I don’t think that should be done at the expense of circumscribing or limiting the ideas of people of color or telling them that they should have spoken about class rather than race and that, if they don’t, they’ll alienate you (“…the concept of classism was never even broached as a reason. And it felt wrong to discuss them only as an issue of race”). As social theorist Patricia Hill Collins writes in her book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, “Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups." I guess my feeling is that when you say you feel “alienated” because the debate wasn’t framed the way you felt that it should be framed, or because discussions about poverty will often times implicate your identity by, simultaneously, also being discussions about race, it sounds like you expect something to be done about it, and I'm not sure what that is.

I’ll just end by saying that I’m glad you used this forum to start this thread, Kipp, and I really hope you don’t view anything either myself or anyone else has said here as a personal attack. I wish we lived in a country where people felt they could have more conversations like this without getting defensive. This has definitely been a useful discussion for me, and I hope you feel you’ve gotten something from it as well.

-- RumbidzaiMaweni - 09 Apr 2012

It would simply be dishonest for me to concede that I think Kipp’s sense of alienation, as he has articulated it, is something I find understandable or something we should be “wary of” causing, as Toma put it. We live in a white supremacist country. As Shefali stated earlier, “…classism is inextricably linked to racism. The way the country has been structured since its creation has caused this. Though it is possible to speak strictly about classism in certain contexts, I believed that in most other contexts this would lead to a very incomplete discussion about the issue.” Kipp’s suggestion that we engage in more class discussion that takes the “whiteness” out of it because the alternative alienates him sounds like someone who is confusing being “blamed” and “accused of being the problem” with people pointing out that he has an implicated identity- a social reality that can’t be sugarcoated. It’s a mischaracterization to say that when people point that out during race and class discussions they are propagating an adversarial white v. all paradigm. As a middle class American who consumes and uses products produced by people who are forced to work under oppressive conditions in developing countries, I have an implicated identity. I am implicated in their oppression, and I benefit from it. If someone pointed that out at a talk I went to, I would willing concede the point even though I'm not actively trying to oppress anyone. If at that same talk, someone said “all middle-class Americans are greedy savages,” I’d likely find that to be a reductive characterization and not very helpful. It may even upset me (But not in the same way as it would upset me to be called a racial epithet as we all know that discrimination that goes vertically downward is not the functional equivalent of that which goes vertically upward, and it's silly to pretend otherwise). But I wouldn’t assume that because I’m implicated by the very nature of my identity that means I can’t still join the struggle to alleviate the suffering of poor people. I wouldn’t say that I feel “alienated.” And if I did feel that way, I wouldn’t harp on about and privilege that “alienation” as if it’s the most important thing at stake. I would see that as a separate matter I need to grapple with on my own, not something to be tied in with a general discussion about how I think people should conceptualize class. I would imagine that might sound like asking for accommodation. And when Kipp did that, it honestly did sound like some form of privilege to me, even though he wasn’t talking about white privilege at the time, because I haven’t developed this resistance to being made uncomfortable, or this idea that my own personal discomfort caused by people who have less privilege than myself is something to start a thread about or should directly inform how those people shape their politics. That's a very foreign impulse to me. But now that Kipp has done that, he should expect that people will want to probe and push back against it, and should not completely dismiss that as “acerbic language” that “furthers the racial divide.”

-- RumbidzaiMaweni - 11 Apr 2012