I am very, very angry today.

In my state, we have a sizeable Latin@ population. Mostly descendants of Mexicans. A lot of these Mexican-descended people are lower-class - you can tell, because they make up between ten and twenty percent of the local population but until the economy crashed they made up a sizeable population of the people shopping at Wal-Mart (yet were almost never seen at Costco or Fred Meyer).

The other day, while my mother and I were shopping for groceries, I stopped to look at a stand of Valentine's Day cards (or Singles Shaming Day cards, whichever you like). I discovered that all of the cards that depicted humans were showing peach-skinned people (to no surprise on my part). I pointed this out to my dear white mother, who immediately informed me that (to paraphrase) "they probably get the cards in from somewhere else where they don't have that population; I doubt they have any control over what they get in."

Later, my sister remarked that if I asked the store employees (again, to paraphrase), "they'd probably tell you that they have the cards with animals for the non-whites."

I've been thinking about this today, and I'm still mad.

• I'm mad because my low-class, brown, yet straight neighbors - be they Mexican-descended or any "other" race, can't afford to shop at a store that actually cares enough about them to represent them in the merchandise.
• I'm mad because that's exactly what the damn store employee would say.
• I'm mad because if I want to get a card for me and my hypothetical significant other, I have to fully transition (whatever the hell that means - T, chest surgery, phallo) and spend the rest of my life with a white woman; any other possibility rules me out of the group. And if I didn't toe the line in relationship terms, and complained about the lack of cards representing us, someone would point me to the animal cards. And it's the same way for most people in queer relationships, regardless of their skin color. For the same reason that they won't make cards with brown people for my non-peach, but straight neighbors - THEY ARE BIGOTS.
• I'm mad because, when I shop for cards, I can expect any card that shows a man dominating a woman to be "funny" in a "yuk-yuk, he's in charge, all right" way and any card that shows a woman dominating a man to be "funny" in a "yeah, my wife walks ALL over me, too - why can't she do everything I want?" way. NEVER MIND the lack of same-sex and/or brown people cards depicting this, much less in a positive light.
• I'm mad because anyone in a committed relationship with more than one person, even if they are peach-skinned and heteronormative, can give up on finding ANY card representing them, even if they're white. Even if they're rich. Not even the animals. Heck, if they tried to get a custom job done they would risk gross-out reactions, bigotry, and potential threat to their physical selves.
  
• I'm mad because if I complain about this to someone who doesn't have any problems finding people like them on greeting cards, I can expect to be answered with "Well, I can't find people who look just like me, either," (i.e., HAVE THEIR EXACT FACE) or "So just don't get one with people on it," or (class privilege a-comin') "So just make a custom card with your faces on it. That would be romantic." LIKE AS IF I OWN A PRINTER.
• But I'm mainly mad because my straight brown neighbors who shop at Wal-Mart are a VISIBLE DEMOGRAPHIC, and a not insignificant one, and Wal-Mart puts out its merchandise like they don't even exist. My non-heteronormativity (and that of my neighbors of all colors)... well, I know that they actively hate it around here. And yeah, that pisses me off, but the failure to acknowledge brownness, specifically, feels like they don't even care. WHY THE FUCK DO YOU NOT CARE. Owait. Because white people all around you keep telling you how demanding those brown folks are and how ignoring them is the best way to deal with racism. Yup yup.
• The cards depicting fat people aren't exactly charitable, either. We're either slobs or we've somehow "fallen apart."
  

MUST SEE: Tim Wise on White Privilege

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Xe1kX7Wsc

Full transcript:

'Cause if you know the history of the whole concept of Whiteness, if you know the history of the whole concept of the white race, where it came from and for what reason, you know that it was a trick - and it's worked brilliantly.

See, prior to the mid- to late-1600's in the colonies of what would become the United States, there was no such thing as the white race - those of us of European descent did not refer to ourselves by that term, really ever, before then. In fact, in the old countries of Europe, we had spent most of our time killing each other. We didn't love each other; we weren't one big, happy family. The side of my family that comes from Scotland, hell, they didn't even worry about fighting people outside of Scotland. Highlanders and lowlanders just fought the hell out of each other. So there was no white race, but in the colonies of what would become the United States, what did we see in the 1660's-1670's? We began to see that Africans of indentured servant status (many of them not enslaved yet, they were not necessarily permanently enslaved; some were, others were indentured like many poor Europeans for periods of seven to eleven years - they could work off their indenture and then they would be free labor, technically) realized, as did the white indentured servants, the Europeans (who hadn't even been called white yet) that they had a lot of things in common, like the fact that they were all getting their clock cleaned by the elites. And so they would get together, more than our history books taught us. To fement(?) rebellion against the elite, to try to get a better deal for themselves on the basis of economic necessity and economic justice.

And what did the elite do? When you see that you're outnumbered by black and white folks who are penniless, landless, peasants, you have to do one of two things: you either have to kill them all, but you can't do that, 'cause who's gonna work? Rich folks weren't going to. They had to get poor people to work. The whole point was to be a person of leisure, back in those days. That was the goal, was not to work. So you couldn't kill them all, you didn't want to kill them all, you'd have to do the work yourself! You'd have to build your own levy. Build your own house. No. Pick your own tobacco! Harvest your own cotton... no. We're not going to do any of that. So you can't kill them, but you can co-opt them, and so the elite in Virginia, for example, in the colony, begins to give certain carrots to people of European descent, saying things like "You know, we're going to let you own a little land. Not much, but just a little. And we're going to get rid of indentured servitude, now you're free labor - and by the way, once you're free labor you get fifty acres of land. Just because you're free labor, see, so we're going to cut you in on this deal. We're going to let you enter into contracts. We're going to let you testify in court, and here's the best of all: we're going to put you on the slave patrol. To keep those people in line," right? The idea was, "you're still going to get your clock cleaned. We still don't like you. We still aren't really going to empower you or change your economic subordination, but we're going to make you honorary members of this team, and you're going to help us keep those other people down."

And so they got a little taste of power, and it did effectively divide and conquer those coalitions - those rebellions began to stop almost instantly. Fast forward to the Civil War era, you have rich white folks in the South where I come from, standing up and openly admitting that the reason they're prepared to secede from the Union - and the only reason they ever articulated publicly, EVER - was to maintain and extend slavery and white supremacy, not only where it already existed, but into the newly acquired - that is to say, stolen - territories from Mexico, to the west. That was what they said. Now we lie about it. We say it wasn't about slavery. That it was about state's rights. Yes, the right of the states to keep and maintain slaves, exactly. But back then they had no shame, so they didn't try and cover it up. They only said it, but once again the rich didn't want to go and do the work - are you kidding? No. They're going to get poor people to go fight for them. And the poor folks didn't even own slaves. Now think: how do you get poor people, who don't even own the shirt on their back - let alone slaves - to go fight to keep your slaves for you? You've got to convince them that their skin is more important than their economic interest, because think about it: if I am a farmer who has to charge you a dollar a day or two dollars a week to work on your farm, to harvest that tobacco or pick that cotton, but you can get a black person to do it for free (because you own them), who's going to get the job? Not me. In other words, slavery actually undermined the wages, and the wage-based economic floor, of the typical white working-class or low-income person. But they were told, "if these people are free they're going to take your job." No, fool, they got your job. That's the point. And so at some level, again, working-class white people being harmed by white privilege. Relatively, being advantaged, right? Being given a leg up, being given a membership to the club, but in absolute terms being kept economically subordinated by the very thing that gave them a sense of superiority. How's that for irony?

Then in the present era - this hasn't stopped, this is not ancient history - now we have people running around insisting that we should close the border with Mexico because, if we don't, the wages of working-class people will continue to fall, the implication being that the only reason workers are paid like crap in this country is because the border is opened. But if you believe that, you would actually have to believe that if that border were closed, then all these owners of capital and industry would just say "Oh, well, you figured us out. Here, it's a raise." Do we really believe that the only thing keeping bosses from paying people more is the presence of low-wage, medium-semi-skilled labor from south of this artificial border? Is that really what we believe? We know that if that border was closed, it isn't going to be closed to capital. It isn't going to be closed to goods. If you have a border that can be crossed by capital, looking for the highest return on investment or goods, looking for the highest price, but labor is chained to its country of origin, how is that going to work to the benefit of working people? By definition, it doesn't. By definition, it emiserates the working class. Divide, and conquer.

But the best example of all, perhaps, in the contemporary era - in the greater New Orleans area after Katrina - here you have two communities that were the worst hard-hit: the Lower Ninth Ward, mostly black community, 94% African-American, about 40% official poverty rate, heavy working-class community, and right across the canal, St. Bernard Parish Chalmette, 95% white, also working-class, high levels of poverty, economically very similar. And at the end of the day, in those first few days of September 2005, more similar than they probably would have realized. Because when those levies broke, they all got their stuff jacked. They all got their stuff destroyed. But if you had asked the white folks in Chalmette - and I've done it - who was the cause of the problems in the greater New Orleans area part of that flooding, they would have pointed across the canal at those black folks (wouldn't have called them black folks) and would have said "there, that's the problem." 70% of the white folks in St. Bernard Parish voted for David Duke, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, former head of the largest Ku Klux Klan group in the United States, when he ran for governer in 1991. Seven out of ten gladly voted for him, because he was blaming black folks for all of their problems and they bough it. What's the irony? The irony is that while they were blaming black people for their problems, while they were blaming black people for the conditions of the greater New Orleans area in which they lived, nobody was paying attention (least of all they) to the fact that these white elite politicians, either in Baton Rouge or in Washington, whose job it was to secure those levies, to make sure that levy funds were spent in the proper way and that they were spent at all, those mostly white and mostly elite politicians did nothing at the end of the day, it wasn't just the black folks in the Lower 9th Ward they didn't care about, they didn't give a rat's ass about those poor and working-class white folks either. And yet when the people of Chalmette - people of St. Bernard Parish - got back into session, first time they had a city council meeting, parish council meeting after the flooding, the lights aren't even on yet. The water isn't even hooked up, and the first order of business was to pass an ordinance saying that you couldn't rent property in St. Bernard Parish to anyone who wasn't a blood relative. Now I'll leave it up to your imagination as to why they'd want to pass a law - that law had never existed before - but now that it's been emptied out and you don't know who might be coming back, that's a damn good way to keep black people out, isn't it? 'Cause if you're 95% white to begin with, if you pass an ordinance that says that, that's a great w-you can't say "no blacks need apply," you can't say "no blacks allowed," but that was an ingenious way to get around the law. Now, they got caught, there was a lawsuit threatened and they got rid of the ordinance. But my point in bringing it up is to say, once again, "divide and conquer" is working. These white folks in Chalmette need to march across that canal and join hands with the black folks who've been sitting there, more than willing to work with them for an awful long time, and march on Baton Rouge, and march on DC, and march on the Corps of Engineers, and recognize their commonality of interest. But the whiteness, and the lure of whiteness, has tricked these have-nothing-in-their-bank-account white people into believing that they got more in common with the rich white folks on St. Charles Avenue, that didn't lose anything in that flooding, than they have in common with the black working-class folks who live about five hundred yards away.

This is a brilliant, powerful, and utterly illuminating piece. One of the biggest flaws I have noticed in anti-racist work (at least on the blogosphere), from people of any color, is the simple inability to connect with white allies. They express the problem, they express their rage, and they have that right, but it is rare for someone to actually communicate, to cause the white person to truly appreciate that they useful in the battle against racism and in fact have a sizeable stake in it. This communication may not be cathartic, and one often feels that the other party does not deserve such treatment, but it is vital in the acquisition of allies - something that other marginalized groups have already discovered. Tim Wise (likely by virtue of being white himself) has managed to communicate with the white mind, bringing to light one of its greatest flaws - to believe, because of the repeated affirmation of their whiteness on all sides, that even the most disenfranchised white person has more in common with their own oppressors than with their fellow oppressed. This is, in a word, bullshit - and I will try to remember that in the future.

(I will also remember to double-check my sources. I wasted a huge amount of time transcribing the talk, optimistically thinking that I was doing something useful, when there was already a PDF version available. Oh, well.)

(Via stuff white people do.)