I don't think we're all that far apart in perspective. Kipp can handle himself though (and I don't want to ascribe my thoughts to him), so from here on out, these are just my views. 

I agree that race (like any other subject) should be on the table for discussion whenever it is relevant, and that others' personal feeling of discomfort should not limit expression. However, I think Toma's post highlights a valuable distinction in what expression is productive and what isn't. I don't agree that abstaining from engaging in "othering" is a lofty platitude with no practical value. Discussing race to further mutual understanding is important; using it as a bludgeon to promote adversarial conflict is wrong. I think Rumbi and I are sort of in agreement here. She can correct me if not, but she makes a point that Kipp may be confusing his "implicated identity" being pointed out as being "blamed" and made an adversary. I can't speak to his confusion much beyond what Kipp shared in his example, which is to say, not much. Still, I do think there are instances where race is still used as an "us vs. them" tool that doesn't work to dismantle "white supremacy," but to further a feeling of "otherness" for both/all parties. 

One final point as to implicated identities. I'm of the opinion (and this is a worldview that I don't necessarily believe is the only correct one) that race should never implicate negative identities to people. The concept that someone who devotes her life to ending racial/social/class-based strife is somehow a contributor to the problem solely because of the color of her skin is antithetic to my view of improving racial relations. She can no more change her race than I can. The post-racial world that Toma (and, to some extent, Eben) discusses requires one of two things - adding negative racial connotations to those who don't experience them or removing them from those that do. I'd prefer to live in the latter world.

-- SanjayMurti - 11 Apr 2012

It would simply be dishonest for me to concede that I think Kipp’s sense of alienation, as he has articulated it, is something I find understandable or something we should be “wary of” causing, as Toma put it. We live in a white supremacist country. As Shefali stated earlier, “…classism is inextricably linked to racism. The way the country has been structured since its creation has caused this. Though it is possible to speak strictly about classism in certain contexts, I believed that in most other contexts this would lead to a very incomplete discussion about the issue.” Kipp’s suggestion that we engage in more class discussion that takes the “whiteness” out of it because the alternative alienates him sounds like someone who is confusing being “blamed” and “accused of being the problem” with people pointing out that he has an implicated identity- a social reality that can’t be sugarcoated. It’s a mischaracterization to say that when people point that out during race and class discussions they are propagating an adversarial white v. all paradigm. As a middle class American who consumes and uses products produced by people who are forced to work under oppressive conditions in developing countries, I have an implicated identity. I am implicated in their oppression, and I benefit from it. If someone pointed that out at a talk I went to, I would willing concede the point even though I'm not actively trying to oppress anyone. If at that same talk, someone said “all middle-class Americans are greedy savages,” I’d likely find that to be a reductive characterization and not very helpful. It may even upset me (But not in the same way as it would upset me to be called a racial epithet as we all know that discrimination that goes vertically downward is not the functional equivalent of that which goes vertically upward, and it's silly to pretend otherwise). But I wouldn’t assume that because I’m implicated by the very nature of my identity that means I can’t still join the struggle to alleviate the suffering of poor people. I wouldn’t say that I feel “alienated.” And if I did feel that way, I wouldn’t harp on about and privilege that “alienation” as if it’s the most important thing at stake. I would see that as a separate matter I need to grapple with on my own, not something to be tied in with a general discussion about how I think people should conceptualize class. I would imagine that might sound like asking for accommodation. And when Kipp did that, it honestly did sound like some form of privilege to me, even though he wasn’t talking about white privilege at the time, because I haven’t developed this resistance to being made uncomfortable, or this idea that my own personal discomfort caused by people who have less privilege than myself is something to start a thread about or should directly inform how those people shape their politics. That's a very foreign impulse to me. But now that Kipp has done that, he should expect that people will want to probe and push back against it, and should not completely dismiss that as “acerbic language” that “furthers the racial divide.”

-- RumbidzaiMaweni - 11 Apr 2012

The exercise of “othering”, no matter who is engaging in it, can be detrimental to the pursuit of social justice. If we have in mind a vision of the future that is truly post-racial—one in which a person would have to look at their hand to find out what race they are—then we should be skeptical of any attempt to reinforce racial boundaries. If we have in mind a vision of the future which is less classist—in which we are no less kind to the poor than we are to the rich—then we should, at the very least, be wary of alienating anyone who supports our cause.

This does not mean that we should avoid conversations about white privilege, about systemic discrimination, or about the all-too-strong correlation between race and class. We must talk about these things. We must DO about these things. But it is probably possible to engage with these questions without using acerbic language which exacerbates racial tensions and discourages candid conversations such as this one.

-- TomaLivshiz - 11 Apr 2012

(1) There is a distinction between policies that are based on race and based on class.
(2) There is a conflation of the two primarily because of the historical fact of "white supremacy"
(3) Framing and challenging class-based policies as racial clashes of "white vs. all" is counterproductive today because
  (a) it doesn't get to the root of the problem
  (b) it informs white people that they can't be a part of the solution ("alienation")
  (c) it furthers a racial divide

I don't think Kipp was trying to argue that people of color should circumscribe their views so he doesn't feel bad (although, cynically and politically, it may be a valid argument). Kipp is invested in trying to help the poor, but a history of white supremacy means he operates in an arena where the upper class is predominantly white and the lower class is predominantly minority. I don't see why he's not allowed to feel alienated when he's framed as the problem (because of his race) when he's working to help solve it.

-- SanjayMurti - 11 Apr 2012

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