Hey Argumentative Penguin! I appreciate your respectful disagreement. Your point does make me think. And I recently spoke with a white whiteness studies professor who mentioned this same statistic about there being technically more poor whites, though black people have a higher likelihood of being in poverty.
To be honest, I am not the most liberal, but I care about racial justice. The left is loud and wrong on at least a couple issues, very disturbingly so, but the left appears to care way more about acknowledging and addressing racial inequities than the right. Those people you claim are being seduced by right wing rhetoric are more than likely white and trying to preserve their interests. Where does that leave someone like me?
The right downright denies the deep legacy of racism, it falsely excuses the reasons for the wealth gap, police brutality and mass incarceration - issues that I cannot turn a blind eye to by virtue of my identity. It might be identity politics to you, and there may be a certain level of absurdity to the idea of quantifying oppressions, but that's only because the basis of the oppression was absurd in the first place. It's not black people's fault that we were forced to the bottom rung of the racial hierarchy. The only tool we have in our arsenal is the fact of that truth, that society was literally legally created off the concept of ensuring we remain at a disadvantage. And yet there's this expectation that "white women" and "poor whites" should be included in our hard-fought progress. Were white women lynched? They were the ones lynching us. Were poor whites lynched? They were the ones lynching us. Did you know less than 1% of lynching cases were ever brought to justice? That's just one of the many many ways we were psychologically and financially disadvantaged by this society.
And now folks wanna complain that they're being cancelled for being racist? Cancel culture isn't written into law or hanging you from trees now is it. This last part is a bit random but clearly on my mind lol
