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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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it's not just racism. it's classism too.
rich whites love public services that benefit them, but not when poor people get them too.
The UK remembers when Margaret Thatcher took their kindergarteners' free milk. Shortly before she fucked up their parents' not-free housing market.
It's also ableism! The wealthy and powerful often think that because they "succeeded", everyone else who didn't is less of a person than them and deserves their position in life. They frequently believe that everyone in life has the same opportunities and were just too "stupid" to take them. I have also seen this internalised - many people have said they're "not smart enough" to be rich, which was always patently untrue. The truth is that growing up in richer families often leads to better health outcomes (less contaminated water, regular doctor access, better pregnancy education and maternal health, etc.).
Sometimes Prosperity Theology kicks in too, with the premise that God rewards those he loves most. The corollary being that poor people must be somehow sinful and hence deserved their circumstances.
And then, when the poor are malnourished and contaminated with lead and chemicals dumped in their water supply and can't perform to anywhere near their potential had they been born to a rich parent... well. That's just evidence they were right about them all along
The common problem is the unwillingness to share. Our power structures reward a lack of empathy with money.
The thing about the swimming-pool example is that "town leaders" (rich whites) were okay with poor whites using town pools, but freaked out at black people using them.
While this is true, I think it's more of a symptom of the in-group expanding when it acquires an easier-to-distinguish bullying target. Excluding the Irish and Italians in the US was (generally) more difficult than looking for melanin or hair texture, and as they lost their accents many could blend right in before being noticed. And once you're in, you're much harder to dehumanise. These days a "no Irish" sign would be quickly laughed off or removed, but they were everywhere in the US once.
Same problem with excluding poorer whites of all varieties from pools, you might be able to do it by looking at clothing, but even that's harder and there will be infiltrators to the niche in-group social sphere. The Great Gatsby infiltrating the ultra wealthy, and the kid from the wrong side of the tracks makes friends with less-poor kids at the community pool.
You can see it in England as well, the old-money Londoners will look down on another equally white English person for having an accent that indicates they're from Manchester or Sussex. Or even worse, gasp Yorkshire! I've seen that happen to Bavarian and Saxon Germans too - people ashamed to speak because their accent identified them as out-group.
I'm glad this is slowly changing as more historically out-group people make it into in-group leadership positions, and people aren't as shamed out of intercultural relationships. But I think that there will always be some arbitrary group of people who are considered to be the bottom of the social hierarchy. And those people will generally be the people who are most obviously different from the equally arbitrary 'ideal'. Like people who rely on assistive technology, or people who are very overweight, or people with 'bad' teeth.
Maybe in the future it will be all humans if we're conquered by an alien species who we can't easily blend in with. We'll all be inferior to the many-tentacled, who are clearly the superiorly limbed species.
I dunno. Closing facilities in response to mid-20th-century desegregation was a very specific movement. I'm not sure it has anything whatsoever to do with Irish or Italian immigration or any other group. It was really, narrowly, specifically about black Americans — making sure that they could not share in the public spaces that their white peers enjoyed. The pools were closed only after town authorities were told that they could no longer exclude their black neighbors, the same black families who had lived there for generations.
This is literally the opposite of that.
It's ridiculous how the school lunches debate got turned on its head
Poor kids already get free lunch, nationwide.
This is literally a debate about using public money to fund free lunches for kids whose parents can afford it.
I haven't formed an opinion myself, I can see both sides of the issue. But there are SO MANY uninformed people jesus. Usually we (leftists) are the smart ones.