Meta-Hullabaloo On Race and the USer Social Fabric

Digby wrote, in analyzing an exchange between Joan Walsh and that straw-haired pinhead Chris Mathews, in which Walsh schooled Mathews on White Murkin racial "real-Politik,"

But one of the fundamental reasons America is so resistant to programs that provide for the common good is that there is a long tradition of rejecting any proposal that taxes white people to pay for programs that benefit non-Whites."

Here's the context and the Vid: "Joan Walsh tried to give Chris Matthews a history lesson, but he took it as Marxist propaganda. Yes, he did.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Then from the hustings came the perpelxed cries of offended White privilege:

Way to go Digby! Another one of your trademark white people suck and are all racist barbs! You are averaging several a week these days, congrats. I guess all of those poor whites in Appalachia would benefit from some of those programs, but thats a small factoid you can ignore.

Maybe us "racists" are opposed to handing out huge sums of $$$ because of the concept on which this country was founded, ya know, hard work and pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps, etc. Remember the term "self made man"? Probably not. Maybe it is a bit sickening to see people who don't do that dine from the public trough.

But again, I think you score points with your buddies when you bring racism into the picture, so do what you do best.
Jimmy Dean | 07.30.09 - 5:04 pm

This elicited a suitably mocking, irreverent reply from the commentariat:

Poor Jimmy Dean, can't let go of that white inferiority. Pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps? You mean like the slaveowners and their descendants, now the banksters and fraudsters of Wall St.? It took George W. Bush to destroy the myth of white superiority, and you've been unmasked, or unsheeted, as your case may well be.
Paladin | 07.30.09 - 5:11 pm

Then the inevitable rejoinder, the last defense:

Uh, Paladin I never owned slaves. My family came to this country at the end of the civil war, so don't blame me.

But you are still full of shit.
Jimmy Dean | 07.30.09 - 5:15 pm

How many times have I heard that codswallop from White people straining to escape the taint of our Systematic USer racism and their participation in it. And how weary I grew for over a dozen years endeavoring to show privileged white students that they were mostly just lucky winners of the sperm lottery. Good luck widdat, I know...whatever. In any case, I replied:

Jimmuh Dane, every person in this country who claims to be "whaht" has profited in some way, or benefited, or been helped along in some respect, at the expense of a person of color because of the legacy of slavery, which I suspect you have yourself done little to ameliorate, nest paww?

Your family mightn't have owned slaves, but somewhere along the line one of 'em got in a union that didn't take blacks, or joined a chjurch where blacks were not allowed to worship, or got into a school that was denied to blacks.
Woody | Homepage | 07.30.09 - 5:29 pm

There is no such thang as a "self-made man." Raising oneself by pulling on one's own boot-straps is both a physical and an emotional impossibility.

The tenor of the health care debate highlights the classical 'definition' of racism: The use of political power by the majority to deny shared, common goods--like health--to despised, presumptively inferior minorities.

And that this opposition to any benefit going to the despised "other" is so fierce demonstrates how deep is the animus held by whites--especially but not certainly exclusively, rural and poor whites-- against aid to folks whom they deem "undeserving" out of a racist sense of entitlement, that they oppose it even though they would themselves benefit enormously from the 'liberalization' of benefits.

But if it helps the Negroes, then Ma n' Pa Kettle, thar agin it...

The scariest thing for a lot of White people in this country is to be deprived of their illusions that they actually deserved the advantages and privileges they still enjoy in virtually unrestricted and unregulated percentages, that they achieved whatever they did because they had unfair advantages. They hate to think they got where they are because the rules were bent for them.

It's the obverse of the medal from their criticism of Affirmative Action.