One of my favourite Canadian blogs has a very interesting conversation going on in the comments of this post, as explained here. To sum up, there's a Nice White Guy who feels Indiginous peoples have unfair advantages, and Scott has some very compassionate and well-argued points. I urge everyone to go and read.
I've been hearing and reading versions of this conversation everywhere lately. The well-meaning, hard-working white guy has a tougher and tougher time making it these days. He looks back, feeling nostalgic for a time that seems simpler; the time before the women's movement, before civil rights, before various other liberation struggles. There's a tendency among many regular working class people to blame those who are below them in the heirarchy but catching up, rather than those at the top who are keeping everyone down. Thus you have increasing fear, and a huge backlash against so many of the progressive reforms hard fought and won. Vicious anti-feminism, anti-immigration, and that sort of soft reactionary racism that is common these days (such as the belief in reverse discrimination).
See, on the left, we usually see the rise of neoliberalism as one of the main causes of the increasing difficulties for the white middle class. We blame those at the very top, and their cheerleaders and supporters in the market fundamentalist government, corporate media, and think tanks. Most (though not all) of these people are white, wealthy, Christian, hetero men. That doesn't mean we blame white people, the wealthy, Christians, heteros, or men.
The nostalgic past in which life was simple and good for a hardworking everyman was experienced by a minority of white Westerners. The 50s look very different to a black woman in the US, or an aboriginal person in Canada, an Algerian in Algeria, or a Palestinian in a refugee camp.
The last few decades have seen amazing struggles, many successes, and many setbacks. I certainly don't want to bedgrudge any group the rights they fought so hard for. I want them to have more. I want us to have more. That's what social justice is about. If I may use a dog-and-meat-metaphor: we should not be fighting amongst ourselves for the scraps, but going after those who are eating the prime rib. (Well, more precisely those structures that dole out prime rib to some and scraps to the rest.)
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