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[–]Alienhunter 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Yes it's just replacing the class based oppression dynamic with a group based one instead.

It's retarded of course. The class based oppression dynamic is one that makes some degree of sense, especially if we are talking about slavery because that can be described as a form of oppression far easier than employment can.

Of course the problem with slavery wasn't the fact that black people were slaves, it was the fact that you were owning people. Doesn't matter who the people were.

Once you make it a racial identity issue it takes the focus away from slavery being bad and just replaces it with this racial antagonistic relationship that can't really describe the realities of the economic hardship disparities that fall along racial lines. White people oppressed black people? But what about the majority of poor white farmers who owned no slaves? What about the rich black landowners who owned plantations with black slaves?

The racialist essentialist mindset doesn't really describe anything. It just is an excuse for further dividing the working class into easily controlled groups that can be pitted against each other rather than having them collectively exert pressure on the ruling class to improve their working conditions and the expense of ruling class profits.

The truly insidious nature of this approach is that it doesn't condemn slavery either, it turns into a weird black purity movement, it vindicates reverse oppression in the form of reparations, but it's entirely unachievable as a political ideology, and frankly there's a hilariously ironic embracing of the stereotypes typically thrown at black people by racists. "I want reparations because I'm black" is not functionally different than "I want free shit". How is that not an total embrace of the lazy nigger stereotype?