Will Shetterly: DO NOT ENGAGE

[coffeeandink]

I am not putting this public just because I banned willshetterly a few years ago and I think it's tacky to make a public post warning people against him that he cannot comment on. But I am willing to be tacky in front of my friends! Never mind, I will be tacky in front of the world. It is worth it if I can spare someone the pain of attempting to argue with

Comments

Will Shetterly IHU

[sparkymonster]

Case in point about willshetterly

(orig context, since deleted http://willshetterly.livejournal.com/53471.html)

Will Shetterly (willshetterly) replied to your LiveJournal comment in which
you said:

> I wish someone would do a taxi test with a middle class black and a
> "trailer trash" white. For those who want to play the oppression
> hierarchy game, the result would be interesting.> Michael Moore did with Yaphett Kotto and a poor white man who had an

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[winterknight]

This is extremely true. We were dirt poor (like nothing but powdered milk and relish in the house to eat, but I should add -- we had a house, which was a very good fortune and a privilege, thanks to my uncle, who paid for most of it until my parents were solvent; we enjoyed the residue of my mother's father's financial prudence but we would not have been able to afford much of a home at that time) but both my parents had post-secondary educations and my father was a professor. We were what my mother always called "the academic poor". She never believed we were "socially deprived" because of our finances and often pointed out exactly what kind of privilege my father had because of his position

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[sparkymonster]

, but I should add -- we had a house, which was a very good fortune and a privilege

One a personal side note, something I found out recently was some part of the legal paperwork on my grandparent's house actually said that it could not be sold to negroes. I don't know how they got around that.

Also, I wanted to thank you for your comment. You have said some great things, thank you for sharing.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[winterknight]

actually said that it could not be sold to negroes

I'm very glad for your family that, for whatever reason, your grandparents were able to circumvent that. It was incredibly wrong that it should ever have been a concern. My mother told me about things like that when she talked about life in Texas, so I grew up with such things as part of my awareness. (Not that I would ever claim that knowing those things stopped me from internalizing a lot of my own culture's racism. That's the shitty thing about internalizing, it's part of the fabric of your understanding and it takes huge effort to see it and pick it out.)

I'm grateful that whatever I said 'worked'. I have my on and off moments. *g* Thanks for pointing it out.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[nojay]

A few years ago a British software guy, earning significantly above the average even as a SAP development manager was getting stopped by the British cops on a regular basis while driving his canary-yellow Mercedes SLK with lots of custom racing bits (it was worth 100 kilobucks or thereabouts). His all-time record was eleven cop stops in a single 100-mile journey.

Oh, did I forget to mention he is black? When he posted about this, he had been stopped 170 times that year alone -- and it was only July.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[skywardprodigal]

You don't know me, and that's fine. But you might want to step off before I introduce myself while calling you out your name.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[coffeeandink]

That seems a little harsh. If it hadn't been for the username attached, I might have taken your comment as attempting to downplay/divert from the issue of DWB, too.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[skywardprodigal]

I see your point, now.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[coffeeandink]

I think you're misunderstanding skywardprodigal's point. I am pretty sure she's not trying to argue against DWB.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[skywardprodigal]

I see your point.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[joycemocha]

Yeah. The worst ones are the Self-Identified Poor White Men With Trust Funds. Gotta watch out for those--saw plenty when I was doing Democratic party politics.

Someday I'll tell the story of getting pulled over for Driving While Broke in my beater pickup. The cop was all set to write me a ticket--and then he saw the address on my driver's license. Not the fanciest in town, but was definitely not the sort of neighborhood where beater pickups were common (we were the neighborhood white trash component living in a tiny cottage).

Ticked me off because the stop itself was pretty spurious (obviously a "Driving While--" stop) and his reaction ticked me off even more because it was obvious he'd been making a subjective call to pull me over. This was also when there were a lot of ugly, nasty, racist Driving While Black incidents involving our police force (including a death) and untold Driving While Hispanic incidents. IIRC, the cop was one involved in some of those incidents, later on...

Common People

[lostwanderfound]

As I said somewhere about this, it seems to me that the Self-Identified Poor White Men Who Are Just As Oppressed As Everyone Else are generally comparing their privilege to George W. Bush's, not to actual poor people or actual oppressed people.When I was growing up, I thought we were fairly well off. We lived in the suburbs, always had a roof over our head, plenty to eat and new clothes when we needed them. All of the neighbourhood kids referred to the only two-story house in the suburb as "the mansion", and buying a house was something that two people devoted a lifetime of full-time labour to. The concept of an "investment property" was unthinkable. Overseas holidays were things that people did maybe once in a lifetime

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[badgerbag]

Gotta say... I wonder what he thinks of the families of the 33% of his mom and dad's county in Florida who were Negroes and could not send their children to Minnesota for the summer so they could avoid the KKK? Did you read that bit?

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[brown_betty]

I didn't. But I'm sure he will be willing to tell you how it comes down to class.

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[veejane]

Yep. In one of his posts about "imagine who I'd be if I'd grown up black" (also deleted, but I think it was http://willshetterly.livejournal.com/60125.html ), he mentions that a relative died and he got a (probably modest) trust fund, and that paid for Choate. And probably a little more, if he was expelled at 16 and thus didn't actually attend or pay for his senior year.

In other posts he mentioned details like sharing a bed with his younger brother and the same room with his sister; so I don't think he was actually, you know, bathing in Cristal and wiping his ass with diamonds. However, Choate is not exactly a neutral social class marker, you know? And I vaguely recall that the same post entailed an in-depth comments-debate about investment portfolios, i.e. he did not believe that having or even seriously thinking about an investment portfolio said something about the social positioning of his parents/family

Re: Will Shetterly IHU

[brown_betty]

Well, I guess wealth and class are not synonymous, but yeah. I didn't quite get the implications of a Choate education, although I had read that post before.