Thread by @EmmaDabiri

Im sorry but the phrase #whiteprivilege hardly created adverse material conditions of “WWC”. Let’s start w/ Enclosures Acts of 1700s. These allowed wealthy farmers to buy up large sections of land that smaller farmers relied on for centuries to graze their cattle collectively

I don’t think it was the phrase ‘white privilege’ that “forced” the British parliament to increase private land ownership impoverishing multitudes of people who were forced into industrial towns to seek work in factories and mines fuelling the Industrial Revolution

and the accumulation of obscene wealth and economic and political power for British elites (at the expense -always- of the poor)

In these towns and cities the poor lived, worked and died in abject poverty and dire conditions, men, women and children, toiling brutal 16 hour days ! They weren’t allowed to vote, infact universal male sufferage was only achieved in this country in 1918

(property qualifications had excluded most working class men) Again hard to lay the blame for this ongoing historical impoverishment and intentional disenfranchisement -a key feature of British class relations- at the feet of a 20th century phrase.

The ‘white working class’ has been a group intentionally impoverished and exploited by the elites of this country for centuries. The same class of people who colonized the world, starting with Ireland, murdered the indigenous inhabitants of multiple continents,

kidnapped and enslaved millions of Africans and their descendants, and who now turn around to announce that the phrase ‘white privilege’ is somehow the root of the problem

The same class of landowners and law makers who invented the idea of a ‘white race’ and codified it into law in the English colonial Caribbean and what would become the United States are the same class of people who continue to weaponise race

and mobilise racism to do the work it was invented to do since the 17th century, the prevention of coalitions and the manipulation of people to act against their own best interests for the benefit of the elites.