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A quick anecdote about the material benefit of anti-racism. I was talking to an acquaintance of mine who identifies with the current social justice movement and is all riled up about racism. This guy is also waiting on what will be a significant inheritance. 1/
His inability to understand the tension between his financial interests and aspirations and his social justice beliefs regarding race is highly informative. For him to reconcile with the fact that he *wants* his parents money and lakeside house he *needs* to believe... 2/
that the struggles of groups who have been historically mired in disadvantage are due to the moral failure of other people (people other than himself). Not only that, he needs to make that sin of “bad thoughts” to be the primary variable in determining outcomes. 3/
He *needs* to amplify that sin, to make it a pure evil, a demon that *must* be exorcised from the minds of poor white people *before* anything else. He can’t allow himself to think about the relationship between having the lakeside mansion and the suffering of poor Americans 4/
You have around 200 African Americans killed every year by cops, less than a dozen of whom weren’t armed. At the same time you have almost 7-8,000 African Americans who die every year because of lack of healthcare. 5/
Solving the problem of African American deaths caused by lack of proper healthcare is orders of magnitude more comprehensible (there are literally bills in both the house and the senate for universal healthcare) and more valuable than whatever the fuck “fighting racism” is. 6/
But the intangiblity of the goal of “fighting racism” is exactly the point. Providing universal healthcare may cost my acquaintance a few percent from his riches and might force him to share a hospital waiting room with unkempt poor people. 7/
Moreover the “fighting racism” model allows him to feel the necessary resentment towards the evil “racist” phantom of poor white people to be able to watch them die of poverty and despair without feeling any responsibility (that would cost him money). 8/
This is of course all unconscious to him. He doesn’t realize how his class and material interests are reflected in the ideology that he gravitates towards. No matter how many times I explain it to him, his brain won’t allow him to get it, that house on the lake is too sweet. /end
