Dispatches From the Race War by Tim Wise;

Author:Tim Wise; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2020-01-22T21:00:00+00:00

WEAPONIZING APPALACHIA

RACE, CLASS AND THE ART OF WHITE DEFLECTION

LITTLE KNOWN FACT: Apparently, all white people are from Appalachia.

Not really, but you’d think we were after listening to how most of us respond whenever someone brings up the idea of white privilege, the notion that whites generally have advantages over people of color in the job market, schools, housing, or the justice system. Whenever the issue is raised, it seems like every white person is suddenly a coal miner’s daughter (or son), or at least knows someone who is. What better way, after all, to repel the idea that one has advantages over others than to lay claim to one of the poorest identities around?

To be sure, Appalachian poverty is genuine, and the claim it places on our conscience and the need for serious public efforts to address it are real. Millions of white folks—and not only in Appalachia—are hurting due to deindustrialization and economic shifts that have worked to enrich mostly the top 0.1 percent at the expense of the rest of us. That said, it is also the case that racism and discrimination against people of color continue to marginalize black and brown folks, and that whiteness still carries with it real and tangible advantages—the flipside of discrimination—which also deserve attention. And these advantages are not erased because some white people live in trailer parks.

After all, there have always been poor white people. Even during the period of enslavement, when most black folks were property, many whites lived lives of deprivation, even as some free blacks owned property and lived in relative comfort. But so what? Would anyone doubt that during the period of enslavement, whites were advantaged in America? Or during the period of Jim Crow segregation, when Appalachia was also a thing and the white people who lived there were poor? Surely no one would deny white privilege during periods of formal white supremacy. Despite the millions of genuinely desperate whites who lived in those times, any rational person would acknowledge that on balance, it still paid to be white in America. So the mere existence of whites who struggle means very little to larger social reality.

Here’s an analogy to demonstrate the point. Consider persons with disabilities. Some of these are affluent, with the financial means to provide for their families, live in large homes, and lead comfortable lives despite their infirmity. Alternatively, we can envision plenty of able-bodied folks who are poor, have lost their homes to foreclosure, and have been laid off from their jobs. That said, would anyone point to these well-off disabled folks and their poor but able-bodied counterparts as proof that the able-bodied weren’t advantaged vis-à-vis the disabled? Of course not. Able-bodied privilege is a social fact, which remains every bit as factual even though individual able-bodied persons experience barriers based on class.

Or consider an even more obvious example. Suppose I were to say, “Smoking cigarettes causes cancer.” On the one hand, scientists can say with certainty that there is a positive

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