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In reply to the discussion: A very quick comment on the diffusion of white, male privilege... [View all]AverageJoe90
(10,745 posts)As I pointed out earlier, the whole analogy of all white people benefitting from racism falls apart when you look at history.
Did Germans, or Russians, Serbs, etc. as a whole benefit from decades, and even centuries, of anti-Semitic and anti-ziganist bigotry, structural or otherwise? In fact, Jews were used as a scapegoat to keep the status quo of reactionaries alive for as long as possible, including the prevention or rolling back of, social advancement. It happened in Russia under Alexander III in the 1880s, in the Southern U.S. starting under President Hayes in the 1870s, in Germany in the 1930s, and even after Bacon's Rebellion in colonial Virginia. And not in any of these cases was there any benefit for all of the same group that the dominant elites happen to come from. Why? Because in our universe, Western racism never worked that way; it was always done for the few who sought ill-gotten gains.
And in fact, another fact I'd like to make clear is that, ironically, this very same "every white benefits from racism" argument was(even if coming from the opposite angle!), believe it or not, made, in various ways, by none other than the very proponents of Jim Crow in the South! And they believed it, too! But it wasn't true; the South was one of the poorest & most screwed up regions of the country.....even many whites didn't have it too good, even if they were incredibly fortunate compared to Southern Afro-Americans who couldn't try to vote, who couldn't quite marry whom they wished, who couldn't disagree with white folks, etc., without the risk something terrible happening to them, including murder(Emmett Till, for example).