Reply #13: In my experience, even nice, well-intentioned middle-class white people [View All]

[QC]

tend to universalize their own experience. In other words, they tend to assume that their background, lifestyle, comfort, privilege, etc. are the norm and to be quite surprised when they discover otherwise.

I can think of a number of examples, like the woman at work who just could not understand why on earth I borrowed so much money to go to college. Well, she's married to a lawyer and lives in a million dollar waterfront house. My father, on the other hand, worked back then in a factory that makes truck beds for semis. The only way I could go to college was to take on debt. She's a nice lady, but a pampered one, and found the whole idea shocking. Then there are the people I was in grad school with, from backgrounds like hers, who were shocked that I had never been to Europe. And then there are my old professors who were always boycotting something in solidarity with people many thousands of miles away but couldn't understand why the grad students thought they should be paid more than $750 a month to do all their teaching for them. (I guess exploited labor is not so bad when it makes one's 2/2 teaching load possible.)

These are not bad people I'm talking about here, only naive. But they need to get over that naiveté right away if they want liberalism to survive, because so long as we in the bottom 90% remain divided from one another, the Right will rule us all.