Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 52

I have already mentioned that White Privilege is a narrative. One of many. This doesn't mean that it isn't of value. Most narratives have value. They help to focus on the issues at hand, to define them, understand them and affirm them. Nothing at all wrong with that. Where narratives tend to fail is when they take on an ontological gravitas and their adherents assume that the perspectives that their particular narrative have helped sharpen and focus will also have a universal application. One size fits all. They can also become the motherlode for conspiracy theories, or at least a contained malaise, anger and self-pity, and too often a very reduced sense of proportion. Narratives work very well for oppressed and marginalized groups, as well as for anyone who is trying to formulate new ideas or perspectives. They can also become very easy tools and sometimes weapons for the intellectually lazy. White Privilege addresses the historical, systemic and still chronic discrimination and oppression that nonwhite, particularly people of African and aboriginal heritage have had to, and still unfortunately have to, endure from the white oppressors. Now there is pushback. There is a danger here. Racism is not an exclusively white domain, and now we are seeing a lot of blowback from working class and socially and economically marginalized Caucasians, especially in the US, organizing against nonwhite people and voting for idiots like President Dump, the Great Deplorable squatting in the Oval Office. They have adopted their own obnoxious and destructive white supremist narrative, irrationally casting themselves as victims and casualties of political correctness and globalized free trade. Those who read from the hymnbook of White Privilege are singing and chanting in triumph because now the white oppressors have become their own white toilet paper. They are filling the ranks of unemployed and homelessness and they are angry. It is helpful to remember that conditions have not changed that noticeably in the US for African Americans, by the way, and statistically they remain well ahead of whites for crime, poverty and mortality statistics. The disenfranchised working class white males in the US need also to understand that it was economic restructuring favouring globalized free trade (NAFTA, anyone?) that sucked all the good paying jobs out of the American Heartland and transferred them to Mexico, then to China, then to Southeast Asia and elsewhere. But immigrants are an easy target, and everyone struggles all the more. Here, in Canada, unions have been disembowelled, and not everyone has the education, credentials, nor the financial resources to upgrade and retrain for better paying jobs in this era of creeping credentialism, or creeping credentialitis, as I like to call it. Still, White Privilege, as a narrative, also has its limits. Perhaps it needs to be called Middle Class White Privilege, as I really don't see a lot of working class whites coasting on White Privilege. Because it is increasingly harder to find decent paying employment without credentials and degrees as long as your forearm, I think that it is going to be all the more difficult for anyone without the advantages and connections of wealth, family, and professional and social connections, to somehow not have to end up spending at least a few weeks of their lives homeless or lining up at the food bank. And if you look carefully at those who are moving ahead in life, not all of them are white. It is partly the fault of the chattering class (white, middle class). The eggheads at the CBC or in academia or in media journalism generally do not mix socially with people who are not their own kind, and their own kind usually has the same skin colour, the same income, live in the same nice neighbourhoods, drive the same nice cars, send their kids to the same nice schools, and all drink the same nice scotch and dine in the same nice restaurants and all belong to the same nice clubs and go on the same nice vacations to the same nice resorts. Business class, of course. They have no idea of the reality of the lives of the people they presume to study, write and broadcast about, and I really don't think that any of them are about to. They want to stay comfortable.