Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 53

"Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you are on; class analysis is figuring out who is there with you." I remember this quote from a radical feminist poster of the seventies. I still don't know who said it and my Google search has been fruitless. I still find those words resonant and that they can apply to many situations and occasions as well as the struggle of women towards equal rights. As I've been hearing the black and white rhetoric about White Privilege (pun unintended) I have been having to figure out who is really saying what, and to whom the words are being directed. Even though, I am racially Caucasian, I have never benefited from so-called White Privilege. My skin colour has done absolute squat to help me advance forward in life. Even though I have lived an ethical and responsible life, I have always been poor. White Privilege is simply Middle Class Privilege. All you have to do is look around and see how many well-off and comfortably employed people in Vancouver are racially Asian or South Asian and you will know exactly what I'm talking about. Whatever they have that moves them forward, I am lacking. So, skin colour has nothing to do with success in 2018m, and I am sick to death of hearing the angry whining from Aboriginals, blacks and the White guilt-ridden egghead upper middle class academics at the CBC who buy into such a trite and easy slogan. Yes, there is still discrimination and intolerance in this country, and there are still horrible people who make horrible and hateful racist comments, but stop blaming me for my skin colour just because you have had a rough go of life. I am white and I have had every bit as hard a time as you, First Nations, Black or Latino. Is your skin colour an impediment to moving up and forward in life? Well, this certainly hasn't been a problem for a lot of well-off Chinese Canadians, so please watch whom you are blaming. I have a friend who reads this blog who insists that White Privilege is alive and well, based upon his own personal experience. But unlike my friend, I was not raised in a nice neighbourhood, by middle class academic parents. My parents were working class and all kinds of toxic dynamics in my family made my lack of doing well a certainty. I listen excessively to the CBC. What I find particularly aggravating about those people is they are assuming that all their listeners are just like them: university graduates with nice professions and good incomes, lovely families, beautiful homes, and a very privileged life to feel guilty about. Their information is slanted by their privilege and by their guilt about their privilege. They don't seem to know, or even care, that other people exist. This is what makes me angry. I am not invisible, and there are a lot of other people out there, very much like me, and we are treated as though we do not exist: we often come from working class or single parent families, have survived childhood abuse, often have some post-secondary education, are above-average intelligent and gifted, but our lives have always been hobbled by any number of obstacles, often from a simple lack of luck and connections, and we struggle with under-employment and jobs that pay poorly and are often vulnerable to homelessness. Some of us have mental health struggles, but most of us are just so tired and exhausted from coping, from not being able to meet our potential and for being treated as though we don't exist. When are we going to be given existence by you idiots?