Fuck yes.

[trinityvixen]

It doesn't have to be white privilege. Privilege is just as insidious in any form, but because our country's class imbalance skews along color lines (predominantly, though, of course, there are exceptions), it often manifests as racial.

Read the whole thing because it's brilliant.

Comments

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Really, it's all about partisanship. My side can do no wrong, while your side can do no right. Happens on both sides.

I have to agree with edgehopper on this one. I think the article is an excellent example of people who have already made up their minds being hypocritical against the candidate they already decided not to support. I agree that these are all incredibly unfair points.

However, I only think a handful of them have anything to do with racism.

And I also think that declaring that every bias against Obama is due to race (when many are because he's a Democrat, a "celebrity", an "intellectual", what have you) weakens the arguments when genuine racism comes up. White privilege is a real problem; however, when you insist that every adversity faced by a single black individual is due to racism when there are a host of other, more plausible factors, it makes people stop listening when the real racism comes up.

...and it occurs to me part of what's been bothering me about Palin. She feels like affirmative action to me. I don't feel like she would have been chosen if she were a man - I really do think she's vastly underqualified, and there are plenty of other people with similar charisma but more useful experience. And so it makes me feel like she was chosen simply because "woman" was a useful quality to have on the ticket (whether or not that's justified). I don't want our first female VP/pres to have won just because she has a uterus. I want the first one to win because she's clearly the best for the job. It's one of the things that made me nervous about Hillary - if we elected a female president and she got tarred as a "bitch", then it would be another fifty years before we got another one. I'd like either a black president or a female VP because they were the right person, not just because they were a historic check in the box, so we could go back to electing white men for another half dozen decades.

Wow, that went off topic. Sorry.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Well, at least we can all take comfort in the knowledge that Sarah Palin won't be the first woman elected President...

I'm a little leery of the whole race issue here, because it would be so easy for any of the "I'm just uncomfortable" reasons (ahh, the complete lack of rationality that has become elevated as the American way) to be proxies for race. At the same time, assaulting his "celebrity" doesn't really seem to be race-sensitive, so much as nonsensical... but would they say the same thing about JFK?

(These days, they probably would...)