She didn’t come in prepared to have a nuanced conversation about private equity firm or hedge fund acquisitions of residential living spaces, so I’m not surprised that she tried to nope out of the conversation. There are thousands of topics I can’t hold up a conversation about, but I think it would be awesome for reporters to do a 15 seconds of fame rule in these cases. Just state “i’ve got nothing to contribute, but you have the next 15 seconds,” and then let them cook.
Uhhhh, this is who she works for. There is a legitimate financial reason not to say “I’ve got nothing to contribute, but you have the next 15 seconds.”
This is why she is a class traitor.
She’s not a class traitor because she’s black or because she’s a woman, she’s a class traitor because she works for a living and is cooperating in suppressing news about the problems caused by the Owner Class.
They’re aren’t implying that it’s because of those things. They are saying as an individual who has undoubtedly been subject to those systemic abuses is makes it all the more stomach turning that they’d be a cog in perpetuating it.
as an individual who has undoubtedly been subject to those systemic abuses
Bullshit!
Plenty of black women are part of the Owner Class, plenty of white men are part of the Working Class - what’s almost perfectly correlated with being subject the systemic abuses of class is “Wealth”. Race (even in the US, which is extra fucked up) is only somewhat positivelly correlated and gender is barelly so (the difference in average incomes between rich and poor is literally thousands of times greater than the difference in average incomes between men and women).
There is no reason to pull out “identitarian markers” when talking about class inequality unless one has been indoctrinated in a Neoliberal “divide and conquer” fake-Leftist political ideology designed to divide the fight for Equality For All into a hierarchy of “differently deserving of having Equality” based on things people wore born with rather than on Need, a view of others and how deserving they are that mirrors the way the Far-Right sees the world.
Not being filthy rich and having to slog in the mud like the rest of us to just keep one’s head above the surface is infinitelly more correlated to not being in the Owner Class than one’s count of X chromossomes in pair 23 or one’s gene for melanine production.
It really pisses me off how people from some political cultures with very right-shifted Overtoon Windows, even whilst they have the best of intentions, have been brainwashed into classifying their fellow human beings and having expectations on them (i.e. Prejudices) using the very same architecture of thinking as the Far-Right, to the point that even when they talk about “class inequality” their mind sees “identitarian markers” (just like the Fascists) rather than “Working Class” which is from where the actual expression “class inequality” originates from.
I understand that wealth is the primary decider of one’s rights in America.
However you can’t say that Reagan deliberately putting drugs in black neighborhoods didn’t have a systemic effect on the advantages of black people in America.
You can’t say that women earning 80% as much as men doesn’t have an effect on how high they could reach.
I don’t think that any one thing decides which class you’re going to be but it does stack the cards against you. Maybe this person never experienced it but she certainly had a higher chance of it.
Re-read what I wrote - being black is nowhere as correlated with suffering systemic abuses from wealth inequality as is being poor or working class, more so for gender as per your own numbers: women earning in average 80% of what men earn is far less unequal than the average worker earning less than 0.3% of what a CEO earns (and way less than that when compared to a billionaire).
There is no inherent poverty in being black or a woman, there’s only that which has been placed there by people who - like Reagan - when they look at other human beings don’t see people, they see ethnicity or gender, and by following a logic that expects afro-americans or women to all be “something” and “having an obligation to behave in certain way” purely because of their race or gender, you’re following THE EXACT SAME MENTAL ARCHITECTURE as the racists and sexists like Reagan of classifying people based on genetics and then having expectations on them and determining what they deserve based on that.
(Emphasys and big caps because that’s the part that really pisses me off)
Fighting inequality by using the very same proxies of worth and deserving as the Far-Right is validating and prolonging the very fundations of Far-Right thinking that say that people should be treated first and foremost based on race and gender. Those who do so, whether they think that they’re leftwing or not, are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
It’s thus not surprising that this kind of thinking is most widespread in Neoliberal countries whose Overtoon Window is way to the right of most countries - you don’t shift politics to the Left by limiting yourself to the perspective on other human being of the Fascists.
You fight the suffering of systemic abuses by punishing and stopping the abusers and helping the ACTUAL victims, not by accepting the reductive and prejudicial proxies of the abusers themselves and shaping your thinking on the subject and fighting around those - that’s just willfully playing by the rules of the Fascists.
PS: But don’t trust me, just look at the actual results - Identity Politics has been way worse than things like Social Democracy or even Unionism in reducing the systemic abuses its supporters claim to want to address. In fact in the countries and period were Identity Politics dominated left-of-center (relative to the local Overtoon Window) politics, the suffering due to systemic abuses has actually worsened when compared to periods and places were Social-Democracy or even just Unionism were more dominant.
This was the twist of a great movie about corrupt cops
movie name
In Rebel Ridge, the protagonist, a black guy, is trying to get a bag of bail money back from a corrupt police department that enacted civil forfeiture. It often cuts away to the one black woman in the dept who has to drive a shittier car than the rest. Then, we learn there’s an informant to IA inside the dept trying to bring them down. The protagonist figures it’s the black woman. He’s wrong; she betrays him, trying to arrest him. Turns out, the informant was the white guy who first stole his money, as a way of trying to build trust with a department that had been doing a lot of the same.
Oh, I absolutely know it’s not new. Long ago, I thought that Uncle Ruckus in the Boondocks was an absurd fictionalized character. But people like that absolutely exist.
I don’t often get to talk about this because I’m a straight white guy from the south with a thick accent. I ain’t upset about it because I would assume the worst of me too.
I think it’s at least semi common knowledge that conservative/racist/sexist/homophobic white men often assume all other straight white men think the same as them and will say some wild shit on that assumption. Well it wasn’t common but I definitely remember a few black folks that may as well have been Stephen from Django Unchained
The cherry on top:
She didn’t come in prepared to have a nuanced conversation about private equity firm or hedge fund acquisitions of residential living spaces, so I’m not surprised that she tried to nope out of the conversation. There are thousands of topics I can’t hold up a conversation about, but I think it would be awesome for reporters to do a 15 seconds of fame rule in these cases. Just state “i’ve got nothing to contribute, but you have the next 15 seconds,” and then let them cook.
Uhhhh, this is who she works for. There is a legitimate financial reason not to say “I’ve got nothing to contribute, but you have the next 15 seconds.”
This is why she is a class traitor.
She’s not a class traitor because she’s black or because she’s a woman, she’s a class traitor because she works for a living and is cooperating in suppressing news about the problems caused by the Owner Class.
They’re aren’t implying that it’s because of those things. They are saying as an individual who has undoubtedly been subject to those systemic abuses is makes it all the more stomach turning that they’d be a cog in perpetuating it.
Bullshit!
Plenty of black women are part of the Owner Class, plenty of white men are part of the Working Class - what’s almost perfectly correlated with being subject the systemic abuses of class is “Wealth”. Race (even in the US, which is extra fucked up) is only somewhat positivelly correlated and gender is barelly so (the difference in average incomes between rich and poor is literally thousands of times greater than the difference in average incomes between men and women).
There is no reason to pull out “identitarian markers” when talking about class inequality unless one has been indoctrinated in a Neoliberal “divide and conquer” fake-Leftist political ideology designed to divide the fight for Equality For All into a hierarchy of “differently deserving of having Equality” based on things people wore born with rather than on Need, a view of others and how deserving they are that mirrors the way the Far-Right sees the world.
Not being filthy rich and having to slog in the mud like the rest of us to just keep one’s head above the surface is infinitelly more correlated to not being in the Owner Class than one’s count of X chromossomes in pair 23 or one’s gene for melanine production.
It really pisses me off how people from some political cultures with very right-shifted Overtoon Windows, even whilst they have the best of intentions, have been brainwashed into classifying their fellow human beings and having expectations on them (i.e. Prejudices) using the very same architecture of thinking as the Far-Right, to the point that even when they talk about “class inequality” their mind sees “identitarian markers” (just like the Fascists) rather than “Working Class” which is from where the actual expression “class inequality” originates from.
I understand that wealth is the primary decider of one’s rights in America.
However you can’t say that Reagan deliberately putting drugs in black neighborhoods didn’t have a systemic effect on the advantages of black people in America.
You can’t say that women earning 80% as much as men doesn’t have an effect on how high they could reach.
I don’t think that any one thing decides which class you’re going to be but it does stack the cards against you. Maybe this person never experienced it but she certainly had a higher chance of it.
Re-read what I wrote - being black is nowhere as correlated with suffering systemic abuses from wealth inequality as is being poor or working class, more so for gender as per your own numbers: women earning in average 80% of what men earn is far less unequal than the average worker earning less than 0.3% of what a CEO earns (and way less than that when compared to a billionaire).
There is no inherent poverty in being black or a woman, there’s only that which has been placed there by people who - like Reagan - when they look at other human beings don’t see people, they see ethnicity or gender, and by following a logic that expects afro-americans or women to all be “something” and “having an obligation to behave in certain way” purely because of their race or gender, you’re following THE EXACT SAME MENTAL ARCHITECTURE as the racists and sexists like Reagan of classifying people based on genetics and then having expectations on them and determining what they deserve based on that.
(Emphasys and big caps because that’s the part that really pisses me off)
Fighting inequality by using the very same proxies of worth and deserving as the Far-Right is validating and prolonging the very fundations of Far-Right thinking that say that people should be treated first and foremost based on race and gender. Those who do so, whether they think that they’re leftwing or not, are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
It’s thus not surprising that this kind of thinking is most widespread in Neoliberal countries whose Overtoon Window is way to the right of most countries - you don’t shift politics to the Left by limiting yourself to the perspective on other human being of the Fascists.
You fight the suffering of systemic abuses by punishing and stopping the abusers and helping the ACTUAL victims, not by accepting the reductive and prejudicial proxies of the abusers themselves and shaping your thinking on the subject and fighting around those - that’s just willfully playing by the rules of the Fascists.
PS: But don’t trust me, just look at the actual results - Identity Politics has been way worse than things like Social Democracy or even Unionism in reducing the systemic abuses its supporters claim to want to address. In fact in the countries and period were Identity Politics dominated left-of-center (relative to the local Overtoon Window) politics, the suffering due to systemic abuses has actually worsened when compared to periods and places were Social-Democracy or even just Unionism were more dominant.
This was the twist of a great movie about corrupt cops
movie name
In Rebel Ridge, the protagonist, a black guy, is trying to get a bag of bail money back from a corrupt police department that enacted civil forfeiture. It often cuts away to the one black woman in the dept who has to drive a shittier car than the rest. Then, we learn there’s an informant to IA inside the dept trying to bring them down. The protagonist figures it’s the black woman. He’s wrong; she betrays him, trying to arrest him. Turns out, the informant was the white guy who first stole his money, as a way of trying to build trust with a department that had been doing a lot of the same.
I’m glad fiction helped you see the modern problems with class traitors.
Oh, I absolutely know it’s not new. Long ago, I thought that Uncle Ruckus in the Boondocks was an absurd fictionalized character. But people like that absolutely exist.
I don’t often get to talk about this because I’m a straight white guy from the south with a thick accent. I ain’t upset about it because I would assume the worst of me too.
I think it’s at least semi common knowledge that conservative/racist/sexist/homophobic white men often assume all other straight white men think the same as them and will say some wild shit on that assumption. Well it wasn’t common but I definitely remember a few black folks that may as well have been Stephen from Django Unchained
😭🫂
