I don’t think I did a very good job explaining myself on privilege. I think white privilege exists. I too have never had the fear of authority or cops that many people of color have to face, and I would never in a million years tell a person of color that my privilege doesn’t exist because of poverty and classist ideas.

However, I rebel at all the white social justice crusaders who have fat bank accounts and an Ivy League diploma on their walls telling me that I am their equal because of the color of my skin. Classism exists in America – everywhere, actually. I think liberal elitist dogma that insisted that the white man living below poverty’s privilege excluded him from pity, compassion or help is what has fueled the rage in the Tea Party.

So I think white privilege exists, but like Goad, no person of color has ever told me to check my privilege. Only white people whose class makes their admonitions all the more offensive.

“American Revolution Two” shows this much clearly: that in the aftermath of the Democratic convention, a group of formerly voiceless, even opinionless Uptown whites became galvanized into a community that was fed up. That these people were able to understand that their enemy was not the black man (or another stand-in target) but an establishment that dismissed them as poor hillbillies and, therefore, less than equal. That these people formed an alliance with the Black Panthers, borrowing their methods of organization and protest. And that this alliance has created, in the midst of a city largely without a voice, (unless you’re white, unless you’re educated, unless you’re affluent, unless you have clout), a community which found its voice and used it.

It would be nice if that sort of thing happened more often, but it was probably a freak event.

Have you read historian David Goldfield’s America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation? He makes it clear that Northern abolitionist despised Catholics and the working class, and didn’t much care for blacks once slavery was abolished. The Northerners’ romantic notion of the Antebellum South helped legitimize southern racism. Slavery By Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon of the Wall Street Journal, makes it clear that virtual slavery existed in the South until World War Two.

I think it’s untrue that white privilege doesn’t exist, however, even for poor whites. For example, I spent most of my life near or below the poverty line, and have only recently clawed my way into the (barely) middle class, but I was never afraid of the police or the justice system. I’ve known relatively well off black folks who are.

While I am no apologist for Goad (though I was unaware a Holocaust denier was among the sources cited for RM and will look into that just to see what’s what), I came away from this book with a sense less that Goad was encouraging anyone to ignore racism and sexism, but rather was making a case that class is easily as important in terms of social analysis and that the social climate then (as well as now) refuses to consider it. Moreover, I think this book was less an attempt to paint over racism on the social canvas than an attempt to show that it’s very hard to swallow the idea of complete white privilege when individual experiences show a very different experience.

Perhaps that colored my reading of the book, the fact that my personal experiences as a smart white trash girl ensured that I had the assumption of certain privileges but was permitted to exercise precious few when class came into play. Who knows, but your comment is certainly food for thought.

I cut Goad a lot of slack for being a “complete piece of shit” in his personal life when he was a younger man. He’s not one now, and having had a questionable youth myself – though one that never ended in a prison stint and one that does not dog my reputation now – I understand how he ended up being the sort of man who hit a woman and the sort of man who lacked certain levels of common sense in his relationships. But us trashy girls get away with a lot more in the long run, I suspect, as long as we don’t drag kids into our messes. Unless Goad regresses, his current behavior leads me to believe his assholishness in his personal life is very much in the past.

Thanks again for the comment and if you read here again and some authors pop up that you think would be of interest, please share!

I recommend Tim Wise who tackles basically the same problem in several works while also acknowledging the facts of white privilege which cut across class lines and has his facts straight in many more significant ways (and unlike Goad isn’t a complete piece of shit in his personal life, not that that counts for anything w/r/t his books’ accuracy).