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In comments to yesterday's "white resentment" post, I thought Weboy made some good points:
It's worth remembering that slavery benefited wealthy landowners; poorer whites did not have the ability to own blacks, and so their notions of superiority, naturally, had to be defined by a "not like them" notion that said someone else was inferior...Civil Rights, then, feeds back into those notions of resentment, as does affirmative action, quotas, busing, and anything else meant to suggest to poor or working class whites that they have to share a small piece of the pie with others they have tried, forever, to see themselves as different from, and in some sense, better than. It's when you can define a common sense of purpose - i.e. that the economics that have them fighting one another, rather than leveraging their numbers together to force the wealthy to share more of the overall pie - that you can help to eliminate the prejudices and resentments. Wealthy southern whites feel superior to all of this. Wealthy northern whites - the liberals in this - don't share the resentment... but at the same time, they don't necessarily see the struggle of poor whites - especially poor southern whites - as also having value.That's a fair point, but though it may be politically wise to reach for a "common purpose," we're not, fundamentally, dealing with common experiences. The fact that many poorer Southern whites didn't own slaves isn't the same as saying they didn't benefit from slavery and, later, discrimination. As an easy example, before civil rights, when African-Americans couldn't compete for many jobs, the labor pool was smaller and downscale whites faced less competition. But more broadly, I think this mainly points towards what Ta-Nehisi Coates said yesterday. "The idea that Affirmative Action justifies white resentment may be the greatest argument made for Reparations."
