Comment by tyjen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyjen | Hacker News Reader

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America's vieux riche spend exorbitant resources to muddy the waters of classicism and racism to prevent collective action. Look at the parent companies that own large swathes of media assets and look at what they push for information. Class issues are often reframed as race issues to disrupt collective action. This isn't to suggest there isn't residual overlap from historical racism, but there is a clear intention to prime Americans to believe most issues stem from racism rather than classism. Which leads to the issue you point out, Americans lack knowledge of classism, and I would suggest that they're overexposed to framed racism to avoid acknowledging classism.

The unfortunate consequence is developing political policy solutions that do not solve the underlying problems, which create additional problems. This seems ideal for vieux riche, who are insulated from the problems. Not to mention, that you generally require significant amounts of money to successfully run for public office. The rich are the gatekeepers of American society and want to maintain it that way, even if it causes chaos for people lower on the social hierarchy.

The narrative that America’s issues stem from socioeconomic classism instead of racism is just as biased and full of assumptions that it might as well be centrist propaganda. From a non-American looking outside, America clearly has both, and nothing screams American stupidity more than its people debating which of the two is the root cause of their suffering, as if the debate in itself matters and as if it’s supposed to be a contest of who’s more oppressed. The only thing that this whole debate does is for classism and racism issues to cancel each other out and for people protesting socioeconomic inequality to gloss over the issues of racism (I don’t see people protesting racism invalidating the existence of socioeconomic inequality in America). People who believe that racism is a class issue can’t even explain how it is so, or how come an affluent African-American man can still be discriminated against in affluent circles on the basis of his skin color. This is not where the discourse should be headed.

> I don’t see people protesting racism invalidating the existence of socioeconomic inequality in America.

I have. Mostly college kids in private colleges; they're in a bubble and only exposed to other well-off kids, which means that none of them have experience with classism and therefore they can dismiss it, whereas racism is a problem for rich POC and therefore, because it can affect their classmates, it's a huge issue (just like homophobia, transphobia, and sexism).

But it happens outside of that as well. One example is the framing of what happened in Flint as a solely racial issue, when the city is poor as hell (I made 28k and I believe I was in the top 20% of household income for the city) and about half its residents are white. The people making those arguments had never been to Flint and wouldn't have cared about the white students I saw who were so poor they only had a single set of clothes. Flint wouldn't have happened to a city of rich black people. (Of course, the fact that the city proper has more POC is partially due to the impacts of racism so the disproportionate impact is caused by racism and I wouldn't deny that).

Like how I see racism mostly dismissed from people who live in poor, white majority areas: It's really hard to understand the pervasiveness of racism if you're in that situation. (And from racists, of course, just like classists dismiss classism.)

"College kids in private colleges" are a tiny minority, are you sure that they comprise most of those protesting racism in the U.S. e.g. as regards policing and criminal justice? That's quite disappointing if true.

No. The OP just had mentioned not being sure if it DID occur, so I weighed in to say it did.

I wouldn't say they're most of the people against racism (particularly when it comes to criminal justice and incarceration issues), but they do have an outsized media presence precisely due to their privilege.

These topics are so filter bubbled I don't have a good sense of which, if either, of the two dismissals is objectively more common.

> "College kids in private colleges" are a tiny minority, are you sure that they comprise most of those protesting racism in the U.S. e.g. as regards policing and criminal justice? That's quite disappointing if true.

They are tiny minority with a disproportionately loud voice. They are also probably the group where the people with the loudest voices in society tend to be drawn from.

I only meant to say that in my subjective experience of the internet, I hardly see it happening but I did not discount that it could happen.

Anyway, this is really a small part of my entire comment.

It was, yes! Just a part I found interesting to contrast our bubbles.

I'm a nerd about the subjectivity of the modern internet experience.

> Flint wouldn't have happened to a city of rich black people.

Bizarre statement since no such thing exists. Previous attempts at creating a rich black city were met with violent white supremacy. The possibility a black community could be rich enough to buy influence to prevent its municipal water from being switched to a source that corrodes its water mains is so far removed from reality, it hardly seems useful to speculate on.

> the fact that the city proper has more POC is partially due to the impacts of racism

No, it’s entirely due to racism through explicit public policies such as redlining.

I'm going to assume you're referring to Black Wall Street, which happened 100 years ago in OK, and was only part of a municipality. I think whether or not there was a repeat of that would depend on a lot of things: Where it was, what group of black people were involved (for instance, a neighborhood of upper-class African immigrants is going to be treated differently than a neighborhood of well-off African Americans), etc. If it was a city with Flint's demographics (about 50-50 black and white) where the median income was 200k instead of 20k, I stand by my statement that it wouldn't have happened.

I'm also going to assume you're not from here/have never lived in the region. Flint's decline took place mostly AFTER the Fair Housing Act was put into place, and the reason there were so many black people in Flint to begin with is that (like Lansing and Detroit), the auto industry actually treated black people relatively decently. Unlike in Detroit, the white flight from Flint didn't result in the outer areas developing instead: The area just lost half its population because there were no more auto jobs.

It wasn't explicit public policies that made black people in Flint less able to leave, for the most part. Implicit and private racism played big parts, as does generational poverty and the latter generational affects of slavery (e.g. since most of Flint's Black people moved there in the 20s-40s and the city crashed in the 60s-70s, they didn't really have time to build the communities needed to do things like help them leave a newly dead Rust Belt city).

Flint in particular is a giant clusterfuck of interconnected issues of class, race, etc., which is why it was my example. (And also because I used to live there).

One problem I have with modern racial discourse is the insistence on flattening all history into one singular (usually American centric) model. Local history and context matters.

I'm from Cleveland, which is similar in its industrial history with race, but obviously different in other ways. My knowledge of Flint comes from books. With that out of the way, my experience doesn't jibe with the idea that racists aren't also going to be racist and xenophobic towards African (or Caribbean) immigrants, no matter how educated and hardworking "the good ones" are.

Housing discrimination didn't start with the FHA. It didn't even start with the New Deal-era Home Owners Loan Act. Those laws merely encoded the racial policies that created the segregation already in place. Sorry if I'm arguing a different point that what you're making here. I don't see how any of what you said comes from "class etc." when the reason why they were poor and separated from communities of support is because of race.

Local context matters, but I've lived in a few big cities and I think it's pretty tall order to show that your local racists are significantly different than the Median National Racist.

Hello, fellow Midwesterner! I apologize for the tone; these conversations often frustrate me, but I shouldn't have been rude. I want to lead with saying my thoughts here aren't meant to minimize racism; I believe that getting into the weeds on the details is necessary to come up with solutions that help people. (For example, a fair portion of my concern re: class is making sure that working class and poor POC don't just get a palette swap of their oppressors and have it heralded as progress).

I don't think racists in general are less racist to African/Caribbean immigrants, I think that the racism would be expressed differently. My point is that if you're a racist, you don't bomb things unless you're very sure you're going to get away with it, and upper-class immigrants are more likely (in general) to be well-connected and have the resources to fight back. Since overt racism is riskier, there are more microaggressions, 'I can't prove this is because I was Black but we all know, don't we?' type situations, etc.

You mentioned Flint's water crisis as being solely due to 'explicit public policies'; my point was by the time Flint started its decline that the racism had moved to being pushed through IMPLICIT means and by private companies. It matters because the mechanisms behind how racism acts determine where and how we should try to intervene.

Class enters the Flint situation in particular because:

- The entire city is poor as hell. Like REALLY poor. Like makes Cleveland look like it's doing well poor. It was routine for cars to die in the middle of the road and be left there because people couldn't afford to move them. Unfortunately, this means that homes are neglected and the city has no money. Which made the whole 'replacing or coating the pipes' question a clusterfuck, because in half the houses the pipes weren't in great shape to begin with, which makes it even more expensive to fix. The limbo of the city going so long without safe water was directly related to 'who should pay for it?' and if the residents or city had funds, it wouldn't have been such an issue.

- Some of the failure to address the situation came from false promises and utter failure on the part of the well off, including POC. Obama's visit and promises amounting to nothing, donations and invitations from celebrities not coming through, a ton of people involved in the cover up (especially in local government) were Black...etc. Hard to say it's 100% racism when the people hanging you out to dry are also Black.

I don't think there is such a thing as a Median National Racist, because racial history and relations vary so much throughout the country. Not that I'm making any claim about BETTER or WORSE: Just that the racism is different and I don't think there is a descriptive median.

Might be in a decade or so though, as the media defines one for us.

Temple Hills, Maryland, is upper middle class and predominantly black.

I don’t think there’s any way you can define $66k as upper middle class. That is below the statewide median.

> The narrative that America’s issues stem from socioeconomic classism instead of racism

¿Por qué no los dos? "Race" is merely a social construct, and subcultural differences are a big part of what defines that construct in the first place. And the whole point of referencing 'class' is that social and economic differences can in turn feed back on culture.

> ¿Por qué no los dos?

You should have read my entire comment before you replied.

I’m quite doubtful about your theory that there is a conspiracy of wealthy Americans to reframe issues as race issues. It’s plausible, but without evidence I find it counter intuitive.

What are we supposed to garner from looking at the parent companies of media assets? Time Warner owns CNN, Comcast owns nbc, etc… so what?

Much simpler explanation is that “Critical race theory” and similar veins of thought which view issues in terms of race at the expense of class were not born out of the media but from academia. Most journalists are highly educated and thus often have an academic viewpoint.

Anecdotal, but just from journalists I know, they are universally idealists, and I suspect that is common for journalists. The idea that they’re publishing narratives for the super rich seems far fetched.

$$$

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

> Class issues are often reframed as race issues to disrupt collective action.

How does reframing class issues as race issues disrupt collective action? Race issues lead to protests like Black Lives Matter, for example.

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