As touched on in an article by Penny Red, the London Riots are "viral civil unrest" and it absolutely and completely demands attention. As easy as it is to watch and chastise young, white, youth for their violent rage it begs the question: what is so bad about a white kid's life that would make them so angry? And as Penny Red says, they have "nothing to do and little to lose". Unfortunately, underneath racism's mechanisms, economic shortcomings like job losses and cuts to social programs affect the entire working-class population of a country. Divisions of race mask a smaller upper echelon of power who don't care about your race, as long as those at the bottom are distracting themselves with it.
Class oppression is hard to identify, because it crosses and spans and confounds all other power mechanisms such as gender, race, sexuality, ablism and ageism. That white youth are angry suggests that the class oppression has gotten to a boiling point where even white straight males feel that something's wrong, even if they can't quite identify it. And so maybe that's why they have taken to the streets to express rage. Because for years there has been a gross feeling stirring deep within them of things not being right. And despite being white and young, they still don't have jobs, and their government isn't doing much to help them. And the cuts that have kept coming have gotten deep enough to really hurt, and it seems worth it to just destroy anything the minute someone is paying attention.
Class oppression is hard to identify, because it crosses and spans and confounds all other power mechanisms such as gender, race, sexuality, ablism and ageism. That white youth are angry suggests that the class oppression has gotten to a boiling point where even white straight males feel that something's wrong, even if they can't quite identify it. And so maybe that's why they have taken to the streets to express rage. Because for years there has been a gross feeling stirring deep within them of things not being right. And despite being white and young, they still don't have jobs, and their government isn't doing much to help them. And the cuts that have kept coming have gotten deep enough to really hurt, and it seems worth it to just destroy anything the minute someone is paying attention.
These are young people with crippling student debt, people who have been turned into demographics and marketing brackets and not much else, people who have lost the will to fight after being told countless times to sit-down and shut-up. If they choose to say something peacefully they are told, "Protests will never amount to anything!".
I can't tell you the amount of times I've heard people complain about the "apathy of young people today" (myself included), and yet the minute young people get some attention (inevitably through destruction), they are immediately demonized by the media as criminals who are anti-democratic. People act as if these events are coming from absolutely nowhere and cannot be explained. The truth is this: when young white people are angry, it means something is terribly, terribly wrong. These are not people held back by race, but rather those who privilege from it. When the privileged are angry it means everyone else has already been close to silenced.
read this and did a bit of a "wut"... had a few questions.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, are you assuming that the London Riots were largely comprised of white, privileged kids? Everything I've read suggests the opposite, that the ethnicity and class lines were a mishmash of classes, ethnicities and genders.
Also, if you believe that the "young, white, youth" are the ones being blamed "for their violent rage" i feel like i got an opposite opinion, and feel like lower income black youth are primarily the ones being accused of the effects of the London riots - the speaker in the Penny Red interview who's talking about why he's rioting isn't white, as implied his referencing the black community organzied march on Scotland yard several months back.
i know this is kind of nitpicky, but what bugs me about this post is that it seems to be implying that somehow straight white males are at the heart of either the London riots, or the occupy movement, and this feels both like a crucial misreading and an elevation of their status to the protagonists of a narrative that's not about them.
Also, feel like when you say "when white people are angry, something is terribly terribly wrong" is a weird way of phrasing it - are you implicitly saying that white people have no place protesting, or that white people only protest when their comforted status is threatened?
You also say "when the privileged are angry it means everyone else has already been close to silenced" are you suggesting that the problems that affect this class are completely removed from the plight of minorities so much so that there's no overlap?
Maybe i'm just reading this wrong but i can't really understand what you're trying to say and reading this just rubbed me the wrong way.
Hi b,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment. In no way did I want to imply that either the London riots or the occupy movement are entirely made-up of white, privileged kids. However, I wanted to respond to a lot of the rhetoric I heard re: the London riots, which inadvertently expressed disdain for the youth who was involved, suggesting they had little to complain about (either out of their positioning as citizens of a developed country, their race, their presumed class position, etc.). I am interested in whiteness as privilege, however, what I wanted to express in this post was that although whiteness can be a signifier of privilege (on the basis of race), race often functions to mask issues of class that are at the core of inequity in our society. I believe this is the issue at the core of the London riots, and similarly is at the core of the occupy movement now: there is severe class inequity and this affects everyone regardless of race.
In this sense, in no way or form do I feel that white males are at the heart of the London riots, or the occupy movement. In fact, I feel quite the opposite, in that the issues that should be brought to the forefront are issues that affect the most marginalized groups of people, and more often than not, these groups tend to be non-white. By suggesting that when white people are angry, something is wrong, I meant to imply that the class lines (and inequities) have become so bold that even those who are privileged by race are still facing harsh realities of disadvantage and injustice. That every other group of people does not have race "on their side" in the same way whites do, suggests that every other group is hurting even more so. I do not feel that whites and non-whites are so disconnected that there is no overlap -- not at all. What I do think, however, (especially now in regards to the occupy movement) is that those who are white and involved, need to be very conscious of the "plights of minorities" and try and understand that some may be different from their own. I feel that most plights of whites can be understood by the marginalized, but the reverse is not true without dialogue. This needs to be remembered so as to not marginalize non-whites within the movements themselves.
I hope that helps in making my position more clear. Thanks for reading.