in re: Noah Berlatsky's Post "Why Class First Leftists Are Wrong"

Mea Culpa...Mea Culpa...Mea Maxima Culpa.

The genesis of this came, as the title says, from Noah Berlatsky’s February 14, 2023 Substack post “Why Class First Leftists are Wrong”, which I recommend and think you absolutely should read. It started out as a reply to the post itself, until I realized I shouldn’t be going on a vision quest on his time….

It look me a long time not to see race, or gender, or sexuality being what’s divisive in certain Leftist critiques of capitalism, and their solutions to oppression. I grew up as a White working-class kid whose father was career Army, and who was able to go to college because of an academic scholarship—and because at the time, the state of California offered tuition-free Community College. My Mom’s from Southern California, it’s where my parents met, and it’s where my parents fetched up when Dad was discharged from the Army. I was a great believer in Class and Merit as what held people back, because Dad never went to college and Mom only started going after my folks split up.

I moved to New York City after leaving college, and believed even more that was the case, and that if I worked hard enough at being an actor, a writer, or a filmmaker, and caught a bit of luck, that I would some day be amazingly successful. Even my first close friend in NYC, a Black actor from a professional-class family I met during a shoot in the South Bronx, believed that it was merit and brains, more than race, that separated successes from failures. We thought we were going to set the world on fire, writing, acting, and making movies....

Well, that really didn't happen: As successful as my friend's parents were, they couldn't advance him the money to make a feature film or even a short not shot on video. He and I wrote a couple scripts, shopped them around a bit, shot a couple things on his video camera (this was pre-camcorder), then over time drifted apart as we both had to engage in the work of Surviving in New York City.

While I worked on a bunch of projects in various capacities from grip to director, most of them were small-scale speciality videos for other people's art gallery shows or acting showcases, public access programs, and no-budget point-of-sale videos for aspiring con artists entrepreneurs! I lost touch with my friend, fell in love with an aspiring writer who came from a lower-class broken home with an abusive drunk of a birth mother, accepted I was an alcoholic and quit drinking (forty years now, thanks for asking), worked for a radio drama company my girlfriend had helped found, got married, worked as an office temp, suffered the frustrations of a freelance creative’s life….

Meanwhile, my friend? Was slowly dying of AIDS and just retreated from the world altogether—he didn’t even attend my wedding. I didn't find out he was sick until a few years after I was married, when his ex-girlfriend called me up out of the blue to ask if he and I had ever had sex! We hadn’t because he wasn’t that kind of a friend, and I was still dealing with a lifetime of homophobia thanks to having being brought up a Christian Conservative Army Brat.

Fast-forward about fifteen years: I had had a good decade of writing for consumer electronics magazines, and got to use a lot of the video gear I was asked to write about to shoot some more art gallery shows and public access programs. My wife was successful enough at writing to do it for a living, something I was very proud of her for, and we were living the creative life in New York City—we even got to go to a couple writers’ Meet & Greets:

Just Like BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, Only with Less Witty Drunken Banter!

In the midst of that, a Black Feminist Blogger wrote a post attacking my wife for her "White Privilege" in writing a female Hispanic character, and how her "feminism" was that of a Rich White Woman. I got into it with that blogger, defending my wife and her writing, what her upbringing was like, and how she carefully researched other cultures to write about them rather than resorting to stereotypes—but the blogger kept telling me it didn't matter because my wife wrote like a privileged White Feminist who didn’t understand non-White women at all.

I wish I could say I had one of these moments while arguing with her,

but I didn’t at the time.

It wasn’t until I saw the Right’s reaction to Obama’s election in 2008 and 2012, and started hearing about Trayvon Martin, shot and killed for shaking a bag of Skittles at a “Neighborhood Watch” asshole named George Zimmerman, that it started to occur to me what that Black Feminist blogger was angry about. Suddenly, it seemed that stories of cops shooting unarmed young Black men, “concerned civilians” shooting unarmed young Black men, cops “accidentally” killing Black men with chokeholds or sitting on them until they stopped breathing, were everywhere—and soon after that, I heard that those stories weren’t at all new, they were just…not reported, because who cared if “young Blacks thugs” got shot, anyway?

I couldn’t believe it—and yet, I could very easily because I spent most of my adult life insisting, “It’s not race, it’s class! If everybody has enough, there will be no more of this White People v. Black People hatred and violence…or if there is, it’ll just be a few cranks.” As I realized, there are a lot of those “cranks” out there, and they’re proud of taking things beyond just spewing racist epithets to outright murder. (Whatever Obama’s Secret Service detail is paid? It’s not enough.)

I also realized something else—no policeman has ever threatened to shoot me, or put me in a potentially-lethal choke hold. A cop pulls me over and, sure, I’m ticked off because WTF doesn’t he go after some of other people driving worse than I am? But one thing I’ve never had to be in fear of is my life from a police stop, whereas if you’re Black, Hispanic, or Middle-Eastern, or even look like one? Fearing for your life is a very real possibility.

Best-selling, award-winning SF writer, and bane of the Whinily-Entitled White Male SF Fans known as “Sad Puppies” or “Rabid Puppies” John Scalzi wrote a post on his Whatever Blog in 2012 that has stuck with me; “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”. His thesis is that, no matter how hard things are for you, Mr. Straight White Male? They are much harder for anybody who is not Straight, White or Male, because you go through life playing on the “Easy” setting.

So, yes—those of us who are, or were, “class first” Leftists, Progressives, or Liberals? We were, and are, wrong—because to far too many White Americans, it doesn’t matter how low you are, as long as somebody with a different skin color, internal plumbing, or sexual attraction is lower than you, you must be Living the American Dream! As for the rest of us? We should take a second to think about how good we have it, and why our experience isn’t Somebody Not Us’s experience….