Thursday, March 01, 2018

"There Are Studies That Show That a Lot of the White Working Class Actually Resent Professional Elites More"

"So, to answer your question, it's almost like, 'At what level of abstraction are you asking me?' Is it absurd to say that in the scope of history where white people have fit in, in this country? Yes. It's an absurd idea. Is it absurd if you actually take the numbers of people being shot randomly and all that kind of stuff? Yes. But is it absurd for an individual human being whose dad may have just died of a heart attack, who has no money, who's on all these loans, who comes to lots of these Ivy League schools and every day is told that he is piece of trash, and that we need more diversity. I think that's reasonable. I don't think it's absurd.
"And I'm not trying to tiptoe around anything, actually. At Yale Law School, if you say, 'I want to go help the opiate crisis in Appalachia,' instantly you could be accused of promoting structural racism. The idea is, 'Look, African Americans and minorities, we've had addiction problems for so long, and you just put us in jail, and now that it's white people, you make documentary films about it.' I get it. I've lived through this myself as a minority, and I have plenty of rage. But I also think that it says something ridiculous about America that because the opiate crisis is actually the same problem across the races, that you have to pick sides on everything."

Isaac Chotiner at Slate interviews Amy "Tiger Mom" Chua about her new book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.

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