There are two threads of this conversation that have become muddled (primarily because I think we began with a problematic example). I think it would be helpful to separate them out. I hope this is a fair characterization of your first post, and feel free to let me know if it isn’t.

On one hand, as Michelle and Shefali pointed out, it sounds like you may have felt alienated by the overall tenor of the comments in your first example (“white people are greedy”, etc.). I don’t think we were discussing this, specifically, until Michelle brought it up in her second post, and I agree that these statements are oversimplifying and hurtful. That's a fairly easy thing to point out. I also agree with Shefali that it’s important that we all feel like we have an equal stake in and can participate in making our society a more racially equitable one. Just as we can never fully address patriarchy without men examining the concept of masculinity, it’s important that white people also feel like they can examine what it means to be white and engage with that social reality. I’m huge advocate of whiteness studies programs, and Peggy McIntosh? ’s essay, which Michelle helpfully posted, is a great starting point.

However, from the title of this thread, and the overall substance of your posts beyond your first example (i.e. “I would discuss classism absent race or any other consideration if I could”) it sounds like your “alienation” derives from more than one isolated experience where someone mischaracterized “all white people,” but rather from discussions of policies that adversely affect poor people that essentially become conversations about race. If that’s the case, I still stand by my first post. And while I can’t tell you how to feel, I can say that I genuinely don’t understand it (and maybe that’s a failure of empathy on my part), and I’m not sure if it's something that people of color should be bending over backwards to try and alleviate or solve. Shefali and Michelle speak to the need to bring white people into the conversation, but I don’t think that should be done at the expense of circumscribing or limiting the ideas of people of color or telling them that they should have spoken about class rather than race and that, if they don’t, they’ll alienate you (“…the concept of classism was never even broached as a reason. And it felt wrong to discuss them only as an issue of race”). As social theorist Patricia Hill Collins writes in her book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, “Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups." I guess my feeling is that when you say you feel “alienated” because the debate wasn’t framed the way you felt that it should be framed, or because discussions about poverty will often times implicate your identity by, simultaneously, also being discussions about race, it sounds like you expect something to be done about it, and I'm not sure what that is.

I’ll just end by saying that I’m glad you used this forum to start this thread, Kipp, and I really hope you don’t view anything either myself or anyone else has said here as a personal attack. I wish we lived in a country where people felt they could have more conversations like this without getting defensive. This has definitely been a useful discussion for me, and I hope you feel you’ve gotten something from it as well.

-- RumbidzaiMaweni - 09 Apr 2012