We should not however be telling children to use an “oppression matrix” to group and divide one another by identity, teaching children that if they are white they are automatically racist, or teaching historical fabrications like the 1619 project.
Using a sociological analysis tool that highlight corner cases of systemic racism to justify a statement that analysis is akin to saying that all white people are racist is in my eyes a straw-man logical fallacy. It is equating emergent behaviour with individual mens rea; one does not follow from the other.
I, too, used to think that "oppression matrix" = "all white men are evil," but putting aside the paranoia and simply thinking about it calmly helped me realize that it's not that radical of an idea.
Even as a kid I instinctively understood that as a white dude I have it easier in America than most other identities, even though I didn't have the words to express it. It's a pretty simple idea, and all the knee-jerk reactions against it just come from an emotional unwillingness to face that fact head on, I think. Which is its own deep issue that I won't pretend to fully understand or to be immune from.
I think Barack Obama got it right, when he recognised that talk of "white privilege", bred resentment especially amongst the working class, despite some, usually of the left leaning middle-class, willing to adopt the label to describe themselves.
> In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience — as far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything. They built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=884784...
That quote is quite thought-provoking. Playing the thought experiment that the former president is on to something, it seems ironic that the left claim to badly want to help the poor and underprivileged where (it seems) a decent-sized sub-group of said poor and underprivileged are of right persuasion.
The conservative working class doesn't necessarily want tax breaks and handouts, especially if structural problems remain, like the complete capitulation to artificially lower price goods coming from China's command economy.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/news/magaz...
Sorry from formatting, currently on mobile.