Class Action

While naming “white privilege” is an important part of exposing and dismantling structural racism, I can see how the term “privilege” is hard to swallow for white folks on the downside of our economic system.  Being marginalized in one power system doesn’t mean you can’t be privileged in another.  But this particular form of pushback should not be so easily dismissed as generic white resistance to confronting white privilege.  Rather, the resistance I experience from poor and working class white people feels like an important opportunity to check my own class privilege and cross-class competence, as well as to develop either different language or perhaps different techniques to help the language resonate more clearly.  Force feeding doesn’t work with anyone, and it gets in the way of building cross-race solidarity.