Originally posted by normhead My black uncles fought in WW2, so these privileged white folk could talk like this, and then came home to segregation. All they asked for was a fair shake at home. My cousins, 3 univerity graduates out of 3, one PhD, my father was a PhD, one of my cousins graduated from Princeton. And we are sick and tired of supporting all these white people on medicare... we need some factory jobs for them so they can earn an honest living.... hows it look going the other way? You understanding the implications yet?
The interesting part is there's ways that's closer to the truth than you'd think. "Factory Jobs" (regardless of what was being made, really, though we could discuss *that* if we still had factories) have *always* been buffers in certain ways: not being comprised of particularly-hard tasks to be able to accomplish, ) ...but that's been a kind of job that's been shrinking way too long for decades, now. And it gets to things like class and race and ethnicity and sex about the dwindling jobs there *left.* Frankly, I've spent a lot of my life perfectly-capable of factory work, even probably quite-well-suited to it, even short-term. but that's just not how the system's been set up a long time now.
(And, yeah, if there were factory jobs, I probably could have paid my way through school, like I'd originally planned when I turned down the Ivy League for state school in the first place. Before 'conservatives' got hold of the state budget, including the universities' Somehow managing to turn a pile of merit scholarships that'd have paid most of the way through a lot of top schools into 'You need to come up with five more grand a year in 'fees' to keep going to this state school we're dismembering.' Made sense at the time, anyway. I considered the militaty, too, but try being a queer gal in the 80's and thinking, 'I'm darn near bugging at *this* point, do I want to go through trying to be a poster child in *that?*'
Part of the problem there is that if the 'factory jobs' don't exist or are shrinking, it's just not that easy. And if you find yourself on your own, or worse, hiding, some 'privilege' can work *against* you. "We looked up your SSN and see your family has pretty good income." 'Yes, they've been working for the town for longer than I've been alive, are already in hock, and if they find me, they'll go *further* into hock trying to turn me straight. And this will help neither my education nor what's left of my nerves. Didn't I do *everything* to earn a crack at even a humble education in my own right?" Never mind a burger-flipping job. If for some reason you're *not* on the other side of some lace curtain or up some 'ivory tower,' well, they don't admire your pluck and enterprise and work ethic: they assume, 'Well, there must be something *terribly* wrong with *you.*
People who won't hire or treat you might even say 'Why don't you 'just join the army and lie?'' And you'd be like, "I was *raised* by a Marine, the last thing I'm going to do personally is swear a false oath to a country I still believe in,' ...and I realize the importance and sometimes necessity of someone being there that way, it just wasn't me that was going to be able to do that this time.
People start trying to *make* stuff just about race, and stuff, and don't pay attention to the real situations, and the effects of their demands and narratives.
But we're the 'people' All of us. Some ways, whatever the pretext, it's the same old, 'Get a job, ...But not here.'
Then we wonder why stuff breaks down.