You can’t break a glass ceiling if you’re standing on ice.

[kpete]

.............


If the government, especially at the federal level, is no longer as reliable an enforcer of white privilege, then it’s grassroots initiatives by individuals and small groups that are helping to fill the gap — perpetrating the micro-aggressions that roil college campuses, the racial slurs yelled from pickup trucks, or, at a deadly extreme, the shooting up of a black church renowned for its efforts in the Civil Rights era. Dylann Roof, the Charleston killer who did just that, was a jobless high school dropout and reportedly a heavy user of alcohol and opiates. Even without a death sentence hanging over him, Roof was surely headed toward an early demise.

Acts of racial aggression may provide their white perpetrators with a fleeting sense of triumph, but they also take a special kind of effort. It takes effort, for instance, to target a black runner and swerve over to insult her from your truck; it takes such effort — and a strong stomach — to paint a racial slur in excrement on a dormitory bathroom wall. College students may do such things in part out of a sense of economic vulnerability, the knowledge that as soon as school is over their college-debt payments will come due. No matter the effort expended, however, it is especially hard to maintain a feeling of racial superiority while struggling to hold onto one’s own place near the bottom of an undependable economy.

While there is no medical evidence that racism is toxic to those who express it — after all, generations of wealthy slave owners survived quite nicely — the combination of downward mobility and racial resentment may be a potent invitation to the kind of despair that leads to suicide in one form or another, whether by gunshots or drugs. You can’t break a glass ceiling if you’re standing on ice.

It’s easy for the liberal intelligentsia to feel righteous in their disgust for lower-class white racism, but the college-educated elite that produces the intelligentsia is in trouble, too, with diminishing prospects and an ever-slipperier slope for the young. Whole professions have fallen on hard times, from college teaching to journalism and the law. One of the worst mistakes this relative elite could make is to try to pump up its own pride by hating on those — of any color or ethnicity — who are falling even faster.

Much more:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/12/america-to-working-class-whites-drop-dead.html

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Those who thought they had a future were foolish enough to believe in 'exceptionalism' and

'individualism', the seminal lies of the American experiment. Now, the ones who aren't too inflexible are having to face reality denied for hundreds of years, that survival lies in working together, that they can't ignore the spectre at the feast, and turn their eyes away from those who have even less to avoid the thought that they could fall into such a state themselves.

Those with the brains to overcome their fears, and not scapegoat those with less power and influence, still have a chance to instead work WITH them, to give a hand up to their brethren, rather than trying to stand on their heads as the lucky few ignore the rest and steer the world into the iceberg.