Wow, the forty year old you hit me hard. First off, I love that you showed your journey of growth in that format. Second, I really like how you made your mom a villain and then redeemed her again at the end. This is a very good insight into the status quo. Your observation is in line with how I feel about the status quo of slavery. My observation about the status quo during American slavery is that the status quo of compliance by violence became the bedrock of our current societies.
What I mean is that if you were a white person during this time period and realized what you were witnessing was wrong. Viewing the violence and barbarity of some of your neighbors toward black people would have terrified you into compliance anyway. In essence, if you were sane you were surrounded by a status quo of crazy people with whips.
Mainly white males with personality disorders. Which we now like to call them serial killers or psychopaths. I won’t mention how low the non white serial killer population is. Or draw any conclusions as to where psychopathy may have started.
This compliance by violence might mirror how many white people feel now while watching law enforcement genocide African Americans in front of them.
I propose that the process of dehumanization was a coping mechanism. While most people are marginally aware of this many people don’t link it to any conclusions in the present. To me the continued dehumanization of black people in 2021 suggests a similar form of coping. Which means that in fact the people we have the most chance of reaching are the ones who actually violently deny any inequality. It is a reactionary racism. Well then what are they reacting to?
The people who uphold the status quo and oppress black people the most in the U.S are actually the people who don’t react at all. The ones who don’t care enough to even justify it. They simply live in their bubbles of wealth and live life as it has always been lived.
It is my suspicion that the 1% that inherits their fortune known as “old money” inherited it from the actual oppression of black people. By this I mean what exactly is “old money”? How old ? The nation isn’t that “old” when was this money made? Yes, there are many who made it during industrialization. But typically even they started out in families from a higher social class.
Again, the poor or middle class white people know there are unfair conditions in the U.S. Even if they only think it’s unfair for white people.
Their denial of black oppression is nothing more than a front. Very easy to see through based on how vehemently they deny it. If a white person feels they must justify inequality they aren’t the true oppressors either.
The oppressors are the ones who shape the status quo. The millionaires and billionaires. Class is marginally important here but what’s more important to me is following the money.
The reason reparations have never fully moved forward in this country is because the very same political elite that attended Harvard and Yale are aware how old their family’s money really is. Reparations have never moved forward because it’s personal for them. They know if they can get poor and middle class white people to believe that if reparations moved forward it would be taken from poor and middle class white people. They can continue in their opulence.
They have always provided a maze of confusion for their fellow poor and disenfranchised white people. So much so that the white people I’m talking about don’t even think of themselves as poor or middle class. A middle class life style in America starts somewhere around 90k. But if you just started making that salary and don’t have 4–5 years of savings to back it up the middle class still eludes you. The fact that many white people in lower and oppressed classes see themselves as more well off than they actually are is the trick.
Many of them don’t understand that for the true “white privileged class” 90k is almost the equivalent of $9,000 for the wealthy. When the middle class white person occasionally splurges on a nice family dinner for relatives and spends $500. For the wealthy that splurge is closer to $5,000. What the middle class person makes per month can easily be spent on one dinner for the wealthy.
Yet, even with this information they still deny that white privilege exists.
My point is that if you look up the millionaires and billionaires in the US the 1% the true “privileged class” barely any non white people occupy those rungs. And just because a negligible amount of the 1% happens to have more than some white people do this would never supersede the rationale of using majorities.
If the majority of the 1% is white than this means that some privileges are afforded specifically to white people. The fact lower class white people even display bitterness toward African Americans that have made it into 1% shows their white privilege.
What is there to feel bitter about ? Are you upset because you think you should be there? Are you admitting that certain privileges ought to belong to you?
