From Science of Us: A recent study found that working-class white Americans are dying in middle age at a faster rate than minority groups, and their deaths are very often connected to drugs, alcohol, or suicide. The mortality rate was found to be highest among whites without college degrees, which is indicative of economic stressors.
Yet another reason why liberal identity politics is asinine. Do all these dead people need to check their privilege?
Seriously, the problem isn’t that some people have privilege and others don’t, it’s that the entire capitalist system is based on the powerful keeping the powerless in their place. Sure, some are lower on the hillside than others and get more shit dumped on them, but the problem is people dumping their shit on people below them. Readjusting and having some with less “privilege” get higher up the hill so they can have someone to dump on really doesn’t change the dumping system in the least.
Wish you had been around for THAT discussion a while back.
As the song goes, “We waste our precious energy and quarrel over crumbs; we could reshape our destiny before the darkness comes”…
I think checking ones privilege is dependent on the context you’re speaking in. I can acknowledge that as a petite white woman living in the nice ‘burbs, I’m less likely to be killed by a police officer than a large black male. I am less likely than a black person in the next county over to be the target of a sub-prime mortgage by unscrupulous lenders. I’m less likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than a black person with the same symptoms. My psychiatric symptoms got nicer names like ptsd, DID, and BPD. I do in fact, have first world problems, as much as I hate how that term is used to dismiss legitimate distress.
However, in the larger context, when 8 people own half the world’s wealth, (or is it 6 now?), I won’t pretend that I have much control over anything important or that I have any importance at all. I am but a cog in a much larger machine.
All in pursuit of little green rectangles, of course.
