Allison B's List: Race and class

• 20 times that of black households
• median wealth
• From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% among white households.
• Plummeting house values were the principal cause of the recent erosion in household wealth among all groups
• A disproportionate share of Hispanics live in California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, which were in the vanguard of the housing real estate market bubble of the 1990s and early 2000s but that have since been among the states experiencing the steepest declines in housing values
• Household wealth
• accumulated sum of assets (houses, cars, savings and checking accounts, stocks and mutual funds, retirement accounts, etc.) minus the sum of debt (mortgages, auto loans, credit card debt, etc.

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• s fear and loathing and boredom concerning the possibility of being bourgeois.
• The Game’s great sin
• tends to draw out of us are critiques that sound fierce and penetrating but are mostly about arrogance and oneupsmanship and posturing.

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• very conversation about race is tortured—palpably awkward, loaded with triggers, marked by the blind spots of perception and presumption—but that doesn't mean you're doing it wrong or should stop doing it, says Scott Winn. That means you have to keep on.
• He already knew the world was racially fucked. He just had to figure out what to do next, and he began by examining whiteness as the invisible structure that defines everything—that needs to be explored and then exploded
• Deeply Embarrassed White People Talk Awkwardly About Privilege
• white people need to follow the lead of people of color on matters of race
• Our coming around to figuring out that we should be thinking about and talking about and doing work around racial justice is great and it can be spiritual, as you mentioned. But it is in service and in honor to the awesome organizations and leaders of people of color who have been doing this work for decades... The truth is that communities of color are thinking about racial justice all the time. They're living it and breathing it, and there's a group of white folks supporting that work, but it's only a small fraction of the white community at this point
• I say I'm trying to understand the systems that create these inequities, and what's my role in working to change things.
• "It's clear these injustices exist
• "I start with the facts,"
• We're confused about it and we've been taught to be defensive about it. I don't think we should be too surprised about that.
• This city isn't as green as it should be, but at least we'd like it to be—nobody proposes color blindness when the color in question is green
• "I had to stop talking to white people about race, because I kept getting retraumatized," an African American friend told me about her days as a diversity trainer. "They just wanted to talk about why they weren't racist."
• e RSJI is officially anti-color-blind
• Not finding a racially equal world, it does not pretend at one.
• White people have to see race according to the terms they actually benefit from. Not that whiteness is a monolith, any more than nonwhiteness is.
• " But what might matter, what should matter, is that whiteness is a real force that you've personally benefited from in one way or another if you're white.
• hree hundred years of affirmative action for white people," is how author and activist Sharon Martinas sums up American history.
• oom, here comes mortality."
• "Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,"
• white people believe they are the real victims of contemporary racism (reverse racism). But look closer at the study—it surveyed 417 people total.
• "Americans love to reduce racial politics to feelings and etiquette. It's the personal and dramatic aspects of race that obsess us, not the deeply rooted and currently active political inequalities. That's our predicament: Racial debate, in public and private, is trapped in the sinkhole of therapeutics

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• She means that white men are the standard of universalism, and if something doesn’t affect them, it is considered a side issue and not part of the universe.
• The common message from the panel was that we have to tell our own stories on our own terms if we’re going to reframe these debates, and tie them to an economic justice agenda.

• It's about the rhetoric used by the white left that makes OWS unable to articulate, much less achieve, a transformative racial-justice agenda. 

• race was invented by the few in power
• to keep poor and working-class white folks from allying with everyone else because that alliance had (and has) the power to topple global capitalism.
• One of the things about white privilege is we are taught to see our work and ideas as individual, as arising purely from ourselves and our own intellect/smarts/genius
• , by all movements that came before, by all organizations that have been throwing down and building for years.
•  If we create a world in which those of us most marginalized by capitalism are free and have our needs met and our voices heard, then we have a created a world in which that is true for all of us.
• we’ve already seen what happens to movements that marginalize those already marginalized.
• The divisions among us are created by systems.  Let’s learn to understand those systems by listening to each other and learning our collective history in order to build real unity and healing in the face of all that tries to keep us apart. 

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• They have not succeeded because the poverty they live in is not accidental. It’s the result of decades of political choices that first created ghettos and then left them prey to a still growing industry that profits from their existence.