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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhites don't understand white privilege the way that fish don't understand water.
Whites dont understand white privilege the way that fish dont understand water. Its a failure of imagination. They cant imagine a world thats any different.
Ta-Nehisi Coates destroys the myth of the White Working Class voter as explanation for Trump's win
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/9/7/1696846/-Ta-Nehisi-Coates-destroys-the-myth-of-the-White-Working-Class-voter-as-explanation-for-Trump-s-win?detail=emailLL
cyclonefence
(4,483 posts)A transformative work of art.
MrScorpio
(73,631 posts)nocalflea
(1,387 posts)handmade34
(22,758 posts)Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay is a must read... his writing is exceptional and mesmerizing
Americas first white president (This essay is drawn from Ta-Nehisi Coatess new book, We Were Eight Years in Power)
The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has been restrained by a kind of cordiality that held that its overt invocation would scare off moderate whites. This has proved to be only half true at best. Trumps legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington and better schooled in the methodology of governanceand now liberated from the pretense of antiracist civilitydoing a much more effective job than Trump.
It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was singularly disastrous for modern civilization or James Baldwin claims that whites have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white, the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous presidentand he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it."
ismnotwasm
(42,020 posts)raven mad
(4,940 posts)ananda
(28,885 posts)But I would add that it's not so great for females either; it's more
like white *male* privilege.