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josie's avatar

Why is "White Anger" less important than "Non-white Anger"?

Asked by josie (30934points) September 10th, 2017

http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-election-politics-662496?spMailingID=2255615&spUserID=MzQ4OTU1OTgyMjMS1&spJobID=870437732&spReportId=ODcwNDM3NzMyS0

There are few folks I am angry at.

But Hillary Clinton, in her latest blame rant, confesses that she should have paid attention to “White Anger”

Why would a savvy politician imagine “White Anger” is irrelevant, but “Non-white Anger” is an important constituency within which one can scrape up some votes.

Or is there another motive for her declaration?

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14 Answers

ragingloli's avatar

Because so-called “white anger” is based on racism and thusly unjustified.

josie's avatar

Certainly Mrs Clinton must have imagined that.

But what if you and she are wrong? You can’t survive forever on a false premise.

What if it’s economics?

Or something else?

Espiritus_Corvus's avatar

Who makes up this shit? Who invents and defines these oversimplified, inaccurate terms, then uses them as soundbites in a guise to address serious problems in our society? I just want to slap the shit out of them.

ragingloli's avatar

Just like the restrengthening of Nazism in Germany in the guise of the AFD, so-called “white anger” must be taken seriously only in the sense that it is a cancer of society and must be stamped out without mercy.

josie's avatar

Wasn’t it Nietzsche or Hegel or one of those guys at Berlin U. who talked about someone or the other being stamped out without mercy?
And look where it got you.
Figures.

gorillapaws's avatar

It’s a way to re-frame the conversation to deflect blame from herself. She’s a corporate sellout and the DNC has basically evolved into the Republican party of the 90’s with identity politics and pro-choice thrown in. By re-framing the discussion of the plight of the American working class as “angry white men” it’s a tactic to draw attention away from the fact that she and her pals in the Democratic establishment have abandoned FDR-era Democratic principles and voters. As a consequence, voters have been abandoning the party in droves.

Bernie put it well when he said (to paraphrase) “There are people who are happy to go down with the Titanic as long as they have a first-class ticket.”

kritiper's avatar

There shouldn’t be a difference, if it exists at all. Hillary might have been referring to a “term” that some voters might understand, but may not believe in herself.
GA, @Espiritus_Corvus .

NomoreY_A's avatar

I wish that Hillary would just go away. Don’t go away mad, just go the fuck away.

ragingloli's avatar

@josie, it is called ‘Denazification’, Bozo, and it is time for another, more thorough round.

Soubresaut's avatar

The headline says “White Anger.” Hillary never used that term—and if she did, then the article really should have quoted that passage of her book instead of the one they did. She also never says the “resentments” people felt weren’t important, and she never says she wasn’t paying attention to them.

Here’s the passage: “I understood that there were many Americans who, because of the financial crash, there was anger and there was resentment. But I believed that it was my responsibility too [sic] try to offer answers, not to try to fan it. It was a mistake. People didn’t want to hear my plans, they wanted me to share their anger.”

She’s not comparing the relative importance of different angers. She saying that she wanted to offer solutions for the problems that were inspiring the anger instead of simply stoking/fanning the anger for political gain. She also says that her approach “was a mistake” on her part. She misjudged the type of message people would want to hear. That’s all the passage is saying.

There might be a tinge of frustration in the last sentence. Or there might not be. We’d have to see how the passage reads in the context of the book. I know I feel frustrated that cogent plans didn’t win out over bluster and heated rhetoric that sought to blame an “other” instead of offering actual solutions, but that’s just me.

People can agree or disagree with Hillary’s assessment (that her time on the podium may have been better served feeding into anger than looking to provide answers for it), but to suggest that it’s simply a rant where she says she regrets ignoring a section of voters is a misrepresentation.

Separately, my understanding of the term “white anger” is like what @ragingloli described.

From what I understand, it’s not any grievance felt by anyone who happen to be white. It’s the kind of anger we can see exemplified quite dramatically by white nationalist/supremacy groups (but isn’t exclusive to them, unfortunately)—the kind of anger that claims that “whiteness” is under some sort of imagined attack, that diversity is a threat, that minority groups are the problem, etc. Ugly, divisive nonsense that deserves only as much attention as is required to get it out of people’s heads.

ragingloli's avatar

“Now, I don’t know about y’all, but I sure as hell didn’t come down from the goddamn Smoky Mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my way through half of Sicily and jump out of a fuckin’ air-o-plane to teach the Nazis lessons in humanity. Nazi ain’t got no humanity. They’re the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin’, mass murderin’ maniac and they need to be dee-stroyed. That’s why any and every every son of a bitch we find wearin’ a Nazi uniform, they’re gonna die.” – Inglourious Basterds.

Jaxk's avatar

Democrats have been using white people as their whipping boy for decades. ‘White Guilt, White Privilege” basically blaming all our troubles on white people the same way Hitler blamed all the problems in Germany on the Jews. Hilary even went so far as to declare that coal miners (mostly white, middle class, blue collar) would be losing their jobs under her administration. The whole point of ‘Black Lives Matter’ is to exclude white lives. Of course if you don’t accept that whites are the root of all our problems you are a racist which proves you are the problem. This is the natural outgrowth of ‘Identity Politics’. Hilary played that card to the hilt and can’t understand how it backfired. And, probably never will.

kritiper's avatar

@Jaxk I found the humor in that. Good joke!

Tropical_Willie's avatar

@Jakx are you a writer for SNL ? ?

“Oh, never mind”, Rosanna Rosanna Danna.

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