b-boy bouiebaisse: I think I would reframe this and say that ameliorating capitalist inequality would go a long way towards addressing the material impacts of race hierarchy but that also, there is no path toward a more equitable world that doesn’t involve tackling racism head on (see: king jr., martin luther)

to add a little more here, it is not that economic anxiety is fake, it is that it cannot be neatly disentangled from racial anxieties. for instance, if you are doing well but see black people doing better, you may feel anxious on account of your internalized idea of what the racial order should be.

i have largely stopped arguing about this on social media because it isn’t fruitful, but this finding gets to why you should be skeptical of theories that try to sideline or excise race from an explanation of the white rural turn toward reactionary politics news.cornell.edu/stories/2024...

Growing rural-urban divide exists only among white Americans | Cornell Chroniclenews.cornell.edu Researchers have found that when it comes to politics, Black and Latino residents of rural America differ far less, if at all, from their urban counterparts than do non-Hispanic white residents.

Solving economic inequality does nothing to solve systemic bigotry. That is something Bernie Sanders and his followers have never understood.

I think I would reframe this and say that ameliorating capitalist inequality would go a long way towards addressing the material impacts of race hierarchy but that also, there is no path toward a more equitable world that doesn’t involve tackling racism head on (see: king jr., martin luther)

there is a concept in Computer Bullshit of “mutually recursive watchdogs”, where two processes are not only interdependent and defined in terms of each other, but also if one of them fails, the other one can last long enough to restart it. it’s useful for keeping a system running no matter what

the technique was considered harmful, even malicious, for decades. it only became useful when it became cheap and fast to turn it all off and back on. anyway

As long as we are a world of limited resources, some group (Whites) are going to think they are more deserving of those resources than everyone else. Even if we achieve Star Trek-like limitlessness, people are going to still hoard until they believe it actually exists.

yes, it's not like the economic effects of racism are an inexplicable accident unconnected from the racism

The problem is that the economic effects are downstream from the racism, not the other way around.

Oooh...that's where systemic implicitly steps in.

Even if you leave aside it being the right thing to do (and you should not leave that aside), undermining the systems of racism will shore up the flanks of the economic project.

When did this happen? Especially without a massive backlash?

I feel like "solving" economic inequality and "solving" racism have substantial overlap, but are ultimately divergent aspirations because they address different facets of human nature.

If race was created either by or for using people as capital, doesn’t it seem that it might work both ways? Maybe I’m not understanding DuBois, so it’s an honest question.

I might reframe this and say that eliminating racial hierarchy would help us go a lot further towards mitigating capitalist inequality than would be possible otherwise, and that this is a big reason why we see so many billionaire douchebags pushing/ supporting white nationalist causes.

I think that Bernie understood this and that he decided to crack one nut at a time and went with the one that, while likely to be the least effective in the long run, would be likely to help him keep the most votes in the short run.

Of course it would be better if he could have won by addressing race head on first, instead of a more general assessment of economic inequality, but he made the calculation that he'd win fewer votes that way. Maybe he was right and maybe he was wrong...

... but I think he was the closest thing we've seen in a long time to someone winning a lot of political power in spite of being motivated by things that are, on balance, not terrible.

Whatever he managed to do (which was minimal) is outweighed by him sandbagging Hillary Clinton in 2016 so we had four hideous years of Donald Trump.

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