Someone commented on one of my posts about intersectional feminism where I was talking about how the patriarchy hurts men, too.
This person thought they were being clever when they said:
“oh yeah? then racism hurts white people too”
They thought this was a gotcha but like… it does, actually. Like, there are a lot of examples I’ve seen of black activists and authors and educators talking about where racism hurts white people too, especially in cases where economic class intersects with race.
There are real cases where towns during the end of segregation literally closed down public spaces rather than be forced to integrate them, and that hurt the white people who used those spaces. A lot of racist attitudes towards welfare hurt white people, because making it harder to get on welfare in general makes it harder for white people to get on it too. One of the reasons racism was pushed so much was to destroy class solidarity between poor white and poor black folks, so everyone poor would keep suffering.
Now obviously white people shouldn’t only care about ending racism because it hurts us, too - we should want to end racism because racism is bad. But this person just showed so much ignorance about the subject area and literally thought black folks had not spoken on these things, when they absolutely have.