“The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity”. -Jacob Burckhardt
One of the reasons the above Liberal White Guilt ad campaign, and other efforts like it, is so excruciatingly bad is that it denies the reality of the biggest group of poor people with bad educations, limited opportunity, and dependency on government benefits in the United States: poor whites, otherwise known as “white trash.” It also denies the complexity of the race issue, which anyone who’s been a white minority in a predominantly non-white neighborhood can tell you is never as simple as this. Recommended viewing on that: 8 Mile and American History X.
This thinking denies the reality that a person of color with an Ivy League education has infinitely more opportunity than “trailer trash” with a thick southern drawl who went through a lousy school system ever will–and that said person of color is probably less likely to have run-ins with the law for that matter, especially if she already lives in an upper middle class neighborhood where trailer trash don’t exist. In many parts of the country, just having the wrong accent–an accent that marks you as a “hick” or a “redneck”–will get you treated far worse than having the darkest skin in creation will. It denies the complex reality that these beautiful, wonderful little girls (who by the way have done absolutely nothing wrong) will have a much easier time in life than this little boy or this little boy ever will.
Which also, by the way, puts the lie to the claim that boys are auto-privileged over girls, another rather obscene bit of condescending Liberal bigotry.
All of this is part of why privileged white liberal John Scalzi’s recently… CONTINUE READING HERE.
(here.)
Dean Esmay is the author of Methuselah’s Daughter. He has contributed to Dean’s World, Huffington Post, A Voice for Men, Pajamas Media. Neither left nor right wing, neither libertarian nor socialist.