{"id":32745749135,"date":"2016-08-15T00:00:01","date_gmt":"2016-08-15T05:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/samrocha\/?p=32745749135"},"modified":"2016-08-15T04:45:44","modified_gmt":"2016-08-15T09:45:44","slug":"where-white-privilege-will-not-go-white-poverty-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/samrocha\/2016\/08\/where-white-privilege-will-not-go-white-poverty-in-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Where White Privilege Will Not Go: White Poverty in America"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Image<\/a>
Image taken from Flickr.com<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The questions of race, ethnicity, culture, and more are among the hardest to understand because they are almost impossible to consider with any honest sobriety. They tend to become projections, distorting mirrors, self affirming defences. When the different, but related, questions of racism, genocide, and cultural harm come into play, this is even harder to understand. I hope you will take this short and insufficient post as a way to perhaps think about such ideas as faithfully to reality as possible.<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00b7\u00b7<\/p>\n

One of the most insightful\u00a0aspects of\u00a0Ta-Nehisi Coates\u2019 recent book-length letter to his son, Between the World and Me<\/em>, was its\u00a0consistent denial of\u00a0the metaphysics of White identity. One finds no White people in that book, only so-called<\/em> White people. I was inspired by\u00a0the same sentiment in Malcolm X\u2019s speeches when I delivered a\u00a0Chapel Talk at Wabash College in February 2011, titled \u201cWhite History Month<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

I understand the logic\u00a0of race that supports the notion of \u201cWhite privilege,\u201d but I have long felt that its structural and systemic analysis leaves a great deal incomplete, subverting more ambitious attempts, like Coates\u2019, to disestablish the very idea of Whiteness. I am no fan of those who dismiss ideas of White privilege as \u201creverse racism,\u201d but I cannot ally myself to the idea of White privilege as a whole either. Among other things,\u00a0I am not sure what the notion of privilege (White or otherwise) does that the preferential option for the poor cannot do. Furthermore I am not sure how power can replace the more intimate realities that govern social relations.<\/p>\n

The biggest issue I take with the idea of \u201cwhite privilege\u201d is that it is incapable of giving an account of the person in a way I recognize as\u00a0real within the life-world. In other words, my primary critique of the notion of \u201cwhite privilege\u201d is phenomenological. At some point I hope to provide a book length\u00a0phenomenology of race, which I nod towards in my book Folk Phenomenology<\/a><\/em>. But for now I can only point to a strong counter-narrative that has recently enjoyed some good writing online (and elsewhere) in links to follow on the topic of White poverty in America.<\/p>\n

\"Flickr
Flickr image.<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00b7\u00b7\u00b7<\/p>\n

I do not have a first-person, direct understanding of urban poverty. But I suspect that rural poverty may be the area that is most apt for this particular phenomenon. Going to junior high and high school\u00a0in a small West Texas town, I witnessed and understood\u00a0a\u00a0social strata teeming with racial tension, implicit and also quite explicit, but I was also aware of a certain underclass of White poor folks who were invisible in plain sight. I lived below the poverty line, but these poor White folks lived below the statistical lines of demographics and, I suspect, even the whole-cloth notion of Whiteness, including White privilege.<\/p>\n

They suffered a leper\u2019s\u00a0distain, and were feared because their condition was so stark, with no recourse to \u201cculture\u201d or anything but a vulgar body, marked by the smells and dirt of their suffering. Believe me, there was\u00a0no structural privilege there of any kind; this form of Whiteness could\u00a0not dress up or disguise itself even as White.<\/p>\n

To be clear, this was a class well below farmers and workers and general poor folk. I think most of us, by suburban standards, were poor in that town. But this sort of White poverty\u00a0was a hopeless social situation without institutions, religious or civic, readily disposed to serve or help. This was not the creative lower classes; this was an underclass I never saw again until living in Steubenville, Ohio, in the upper reaches of\u00a0Appalachia, and then again in Crawfordsville, Indiana.<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00b7\u00b7<\/p>\n

I was reminded of this social category in a recent group\u00a0of online writings pointing to some recently published books that I plan on reading as soon as I am able.\u00a0The first two articles are \u201cThe Original Underclass<\/a>,\u201d from The Atlantic<\/em> and\u00a0\u201cTrump: Tribune of Poor White People<\/a>,\u201d in The American Conservative.\u00a0<\/em>I disagree with the articles\u2019 sense that Trump\u2019s candidacy has had an electoral effect on this class of constituents. These poor White folks are, like most of America and almost all of its poor, apolitical beings who never vote and lack any sense of social will or power as a group, so I find it hard to believe that a New York City billionaire has reached their hearts for the first time in history.<\/p>\n

Surely the nativist tone of Trump\u2019s campaign\u2013which I see more as lower-middle class suburban ressentiment than a rural poor populism\u2013does strike some\u00a0resemblances and reminds us of this the largest demographic of\u00a0America\u2019s poor.<\/p>\n

The one that hit closest to home for me as a trash-class\u00a0academic of sorts was \u201cCoding \u2018White Trash\u2019 in Academia<\/a>,\u201d at\u00a0AuntieBellum<\/em>. In this article I think the sense in which \u201cWhite privilege\u201d can be severely limited, even in the power dynamics of a place as political as the postmodern Academy, is compellingly stated.<\/p>\n

I hope you will read these sources\u00a0less to be\u00a0reminded of the speculated effects of Trump\u2019s political moment and more so to see the place where generalized accounts of Whiteness and White privilege break down and subvert\u00a0the more radical claim that Whiteness itself is an ideology, not an ethnicity.<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00b7\u00b7<\/p>\n

The obvious contradiction in this post is not lost on me. How can I reject the metaphysics of Whiteness on the one hand and, on the other, describe this underclass of White folks? This may seem logically impossible, and indeed it is on purely logical terms, but then again the rules of logic are not the atomic source of social meaning. So I\u2019ll have to leave it at that for now.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 The questions of race, ethnicity, culture, and more are among the hardest to understand because they are almost impossible to consider with any honest sobriety. They tend to become projections, distorting mirrors, self affirming defences. When the different, but related, questions of racism, genocide, and cultural harm come into play, this is even harder […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1216,"featured_media":32745749136,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[70],"class_list":["post-32745749135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-political-theology","tag-race"],"yoast_head":"\nWhere White Privilege Will Not Go: White Poverty in America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"  The questions of race, ethnicity, culture, and more are among the hardest to understand because they are almost impossible to consider with any\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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