I live in the Allston-Brighton neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. (View photos of 500 of my neighbors, each one proudly holding a sign proclaiming—zoom in to read it—their egalitarian revolutionary aim here.) According to an email posted a while back to my neighborhood's email group by neighborhood resident, my neighborhood's ultra-liberal City Councilor, Liz Breadon, and another very liberal resident of my neighborhood, Justin Brown, had recently, at a City Hall forum, expressed (Brown) and supported (Breadon) the view that too many white people live in my neighborhood.
The implication was of course that the white people in my neighborhood are guilty for being white and also living here, that maybe they should therefore leave the neighborhood (as many, ironically, are being forced to do by gentrification.)
White working class residents who heard these liberals are understandably angry at them. And since these liberals speak as supposed "anti-racism" ("pro-diversity") activists, their kind of activism only helps the ruling class make white working class people believe that anti-racism is code for anti-white, which in turn drives some white working class people into the welcoming arms of white nationalist leaders whose pitch is "We will defend you against the blacks and their anti-racism supporters." This is how race war is fomented. For an example of this in a Boston hospital context, see my earlier post here.
My neighborhood of Allston-Brighton (two zip codes) is majority white working and middle class. I lived in a different neighborhood of Boston (Jamaica Plain) from 1974, when I moved to Boston, to 1994 but after my divorce I couldn't afford the higher rents there. I needed to live where public transportation could still (as it did in Jamaica Plain) get me to and from work, and I ended up finding an affordable tiny apartment in Brighton where public transportation was convenient for me.
I got my apartment by going to a realtor office and explaining what I was looking for. They showed me an apartment in Brighton (where I had never even been before) and I took it. Would they have shown me that apartment if I had been black instead of, as I am, white? Who knows? Maybe not.
Is my neighborhood majority white because of racial discrimination against non-whites? Perhaps. But here's the thing.
If racial discrimination against non-whites is indeed partly to blame for the majority white status of my neighborhood, the guilty people are the people (such as, perhaps, racist realtors or banks that may still be doing something like the infamous "redlining" that created black ghettos in northern cities including Boston as recently as the 1960s by denying mortgages to blacks) who actually did the racial discriminating, not the innocent white people who ended up living in my neighborhood.
As I mention in my article about what's wrong with Affirmative Action (in which I show that there is a huge difference between actually opposing systemic racial discrimination versus merely pretending to do so and doing it in a manner that is designed to foment white resentment against non-whites) the FBI (or equivalent) ought to be identifying people and institutions who engage in racial discrimination and throwing the book at them; but it doesn't do this.
Instead liberals accuse ordinary whites of being guilty for having "white privilege." This foments resentment and mistrust and anger between white and non-white people, exactly what is needed to get a bit of a race war going whenever that’s necessary to destroy working class solidarity threatening to break out and upset the apple cart of class inequality.
What do you think?
Thank you for this. Are you saying that Brown and Breadon are doing this intentionally (to foment resentment & anger among whites against non-whites, push whites towards the open arms of fascists, and cause racial division among the less wealthy classes) or unintentionally (meaning well, but unaware of how it perceived and the consequences of what they are doing)?
If unintentionally, then is there a way to this message/post to reach them so that they might be aware of what they are causing?
This appears to be a thickly veiled attempt at reinstating racial discrimination in housing. It is profoundly reactionary and a betrayal of all stated values of “liberalism”, that is, a reform movement under Capitalism. I lived in the Boston area several times and am familiar with these neighborhoods.