re: #309 HappyWarrior

I don’t hate socialism btw but too many socialists including Sanders are too obsessed with it to see other problems going on and maybe that’s why their message fails to take hold. Inequality IS a problem but so is racism, xenophobia, sexism, etc and for someone representing a state with less minorities then my home country to just dismiss it as a “distraction” is insulting.

Too damn many have got it in their heads that economics is THE sole, singular, animating problem and all else spawns from it, that if you just make everything perfect economically, that all those other issues will disappear. You see this especially with racism, where they claim racism is used as a distraction from classism, and if you solve classism, racism will naturally melt away.

They don’t get that the issues are interrelated, rather than the same issue in disguise. Yes, racism has been used to distract from classism, but it didn’t not INVENT racism. Racism was a convenient existing crowbar already there that could be used to co-opt another issue. Giving everyone basic income though, however, will not magically make people stop treating other people as sub-human purely on the basis of skin color or ethnicity. Even in our Prosperity Gospel-soaked psyche, we see how even the richest minority can often be treated as lesser than the poorest white person when push comes to shove.

You saw this during the initial surge of ‘What about the WWC?!’ bullshit after the election. You see it in the absolute erasure of Clinton voter PoVs post-election, where it’s almost like they don’t exist except when cast as villain to the Trump voter protagonist. And as many have pointed out, there’s a goddamn reason so many PoCs voted for Hillary and the Dems. It’s not a fucking game, and we’ve already seen how being sold an economic utopia gets people left behind because it ‘s either sold on the foundation of bigotry or turns a blind eye to it on the assumption that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’.