2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: White progressive analysis of politics is fundamentally broken. [View all]JCanete
(5,272 posts)strategic and humanistic grounds, but I would suggest trying to take things less personally. There is a lot of frustration and pain, and white people(I am one by the way) predominantly delivered a bigot into the White House who is sewing and emboldening racist sentiment. People have been suffering severely at the hands of institutional racism not to mention the overt kind, and they are tired and scared and deeply hurt that this is the other side of the last eight years of something that offered hope for their future.
And they rightly assess that some of us don't really get their day-to-day struggle. Not that they are the only ones struggling, but the kind of fear and stress that comes out of not being able to trust even hospitals to care for you or your loved ones as well as they will white people, not to mention the threat from authorities like police, which is very real--particularly in some communities, but really everywhere--takes an emotional toll.
So it's understandable to me that people would see certain messaging and think "hey...you are saying lets not fight racism!" It's also understandable to me that to some degree, that divide seems to fall along racial lines. That said, I disagree to an extent with the accusation, at least as it pertains to those leaders who are espousing economic justice. I don't think Sanders for instance, is missing the racial component at all, one of the things he's said that I think is so important, is what the op and other posts in the thread are saying, that racism is a tool used to maintain an economic divide. People take umbrage at his denigration of "political correctness" and "identity politics," again understandably, and maybe he could have been more careful with his terms, but on the other hand, maybe he's using right wing language that already has legs, and altering it to his own meaning to a purpose.
But between the media, which is wholly off the mark when it talks about this stuff, and even some posters here who have repeated the notion that we've become the party about bathrooms--which in my opinion is a very flawed way to think about our party or to discuss our direction, because of course, we should always be standing up for civil rights--there is something people here feel is being lost in translation, and their feeling is that it is us who are losing the plot, because we aren't under the same constant threat..because we don't see racism day-in and day-out.
Anyway, I think that's where that frustration is coming from, and I myself do not take umbrage at it when it comes my way. I get frustrated myself because I think that that sort of language is strategically damaging, and you and NoGoodNamesLeft are cases-in-point, but then walking away from the party because you get your feelings hurt is also strategically damaging to our cause. What do you care about at the end of the day?
Conversations like the one the OP started are opportunities for us to share our differences of opinions on these issues, and its an opportunity for those of us on both sides to grow, if nobody walks away from the table in a huff, or for that matter, strongly attempts to push others away from the table, as we've seen some examples of in this thread.
So stay. Learn something. Teach something.