How deplorable

 
During a fundraiser the other day, Hillary Clinton referred to Donald Trump's supporters, well half of them anyway, as belonging to the "basket of deplorables" basically racists, bigots, and xenophobes. This of course is not an inaccurate way to describe Trump supporters at all and I liked it a lot, but conventional wisdom says you don't insult a good chunk of the voting populace anyway so she's been catching some flack on that.

Hilarious that the anti-PC crowd, so concerned with not caring about feelings, has its feelings hurt by the way.

I don't feel like this will end up hurting her basically at all, it is clear the campaign is moving into coordinated attacks on Trump and while this is so far the only obvious attack on his supporters, it really isn't something designed to change their minds, rather to drum up enthusiasm for her own base. It will do that just fine and I am not worried there.

I want to talk about the truth of her comments though, and indeed how I think they don't go far enough to described the problems with our population here in America, basically way too many of us are bigoted, racist xenophobes and the blame for that can be placed on one group and one group only:

White people.

Yes, white people, it is becoming increasingly clear that this election, and many social causes are going to be won by minority people and the best white people can hope to do is not hurt the causes progression, I don't think that it is possible these days to be an active and effective white ally to the various causes that champion minorities. I should clarify that there is some intersection stuff here too, while white people are not effective allies for racial minority causes, that doesn't mean they are effective allies for other oppressed groups that happen to be white, like the LGBT community for example, and white men do very little to assist with women's issues of any color, basically the more privilege you have, the less useful you are to progressive causes.

This election will be decided by the minority and to a lesser extent the general female population vote. The Black and Hispanic community are literally saving the world along with themselves when they vote in November. White people have proven that we cannot be relied upon to enforce change that does anything more than help ourselves, like I said, the best we can offer is to try to counter the efforts of other people who actively oppose progressive causes, but it isn't an even exchange, white people are non threatening and don't stand out, if we see a white guy saying something we disagree with, we can safely ignore him and likewise the other party can be assured that even if he fails he personally is unlikely to be harmed by the consequences and this his efforts lack a feeling of being genuine.

The basket of deplorables bright enough to blind you if stared at unprotected and even the "best" of us really only generally keep from doing more harm or at best raising awareness of an issue, when we start being more active in causes it appears that we mostly just succeed in diluting the message or making it about us, hell here I am making a post about equality and I spent the entire thing talking about white people!

Until we learn to join a cause without making it about us, that is pretty much how things are gonna go I think, but we can console ourselves that there are far worse people out there than failed allies. You know that one of the arguments racists use to try to shut down discussion of racial injustice is that the Black community should get a handle on its own problems of Black on Black crime before it goes after the police and such? The reverse is actually much more true! The white community needs to go after itself and the institutions it runs before it turns towards minority causes, rather than spending time arguing minutia of how to properly protest, we should be reforming the police departments or pursuing real campaign finance reform, or tackling student debt, or any number of other issues in institutions created by and for white people. We made those problems, we should fix them.

I realize that it might seem that I am arguing for segregation here in a way, and that might be a fair critique, but it feels like the way our current racial relations are set up in this country that it just isn't effective for white people to join minority causes without diluting that cause's message, we can agree with the cause, and support it financially, but until we make changes to the institutions that require the cause in the first place, then we aren't helping all that much if that makes any sense.

That's my two cents coming off of a long day and three hours of sleep anyhow, I welcome discussion on that point.