https://us.yahoo.com/news/opinion-jayne-poor-white-voters-140100477.htmlExplaining why people vote how they do is a complex task with no simple answers. But the questions above are at the core of "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone."
The book, published this year, was written by Heather McGhee, and it provides a damning item-by-item inventory of how systemic racism has held back this nation over the past several decades. But there is more to it. The gist, if it is possible to summarize a 300-page book in one sentence, is that many white Americans vote against their own self-interest because policies that might help them would also help minorities.
Which doesn't make sense. White Americans, after all, make up the largest cohort of the uninsured and impoverished and minimum-wage workers — even if people of color are more likely to fall into those categories. Yet whites, including poor whites, comprised the bulk of Donald Trump supporters.
Of course it makes sense. "Whites"
are acting in their self-interest: it's just that their self-interest is on a larger scale than that of individual economic security. To put it another way, "whites" are acting in their self-interest not as individuals (which is what False Leftists consider to be the only valid self-interest) but as "whites" ie. as members of the "white" tribe. Until more leftists stop complaining that "whites" are acting "irrationally" and instead understand they are acting very rationally, but merely with priorities other than their own pocketbooks, they cannot understand what is required to stop rightism.
To illustrate this, McGhee writes about swimming pools. In the mid-1900s, American cities commonly had grand community swimming pools, developed as a testament to civic funding and civic pride. When pools were desegregated, countless communities chose to close those facilities; it would be better for everybody to have nothing rather than provide a service that includes Black people.
This is what I mean. If "whites" thought as individuals, then obviously keeping the pool open would be rational. But "whites" were not thinking as individuals. They were thinking:
"If the pool becomes a venue where multiethnic interaction becomes psychologically normalized, this will threaten the survival of white identity in the long-term." Once you realize what their actual objective is, not as individuals but as "whites", their choices turn out to be rational, but in service of a tribal objective. You cannot fight them effectively until you realize what their objective is.
Such thinking has diminished our society and fractured our sense of community. And it answers the overriding question posed by McGhee's book: Why can't we have nice things?
Because the most inferior fraction in our society would rather have "whiteness".
Which brings us onto the next question: should the left be merely about getting nice things, or should the left be about permanently getting rid of most the inferior fraction of society first?