| curl-6 said: Nobody in the modern developed world is "oppressed". People have free will, your position in life is foremost the result of your own choices and actions. |
This is definitely not true in all countriesmaybe only in a few that have genuinely achieved social equality for the vast majority of their population, like Norway or perhaps even Australia
For the rest of the world, most of the outcomes in your life are determined the moment you're born
Accepting this doesn't mean resigning yourself to defeat or falling into despair. It simply means acknowledging that, for the vast majority of people, they will end up in the same social class as their parents or even worse... This might be somewhat acceptable if your parents are middle class, but if they're poor, the situation becomes much more grim
It goes without saying that some "developed" countries don't seem all that developed when you consider their levels of perceived economic disparity. In the case of the United States, this disparity is heavily correlated with racial issues, as the country remains deeply racially segregated. The majority of people living below the poverty line in the USA are Hispanic (mainly Latin American immigrants and their descendants), followed by Black Americans who, only a few decades ago, were still fighting for the same basic rights as white citizens
Of course, there are poor and working-class white people in the USA, and they absolutely shouldn't be ignored from social programs
However, that doesn't change the fact that there is a strong racial component to economic inequality. American communities can be surprisingly segregated, with poorer (read: majority-Black or Latin) neighborhoods facing underfunded schools and significantly higher crime rates. This creates a self-fulfilling profecy: people are poor because everyone around them who shares their ethnicity is also poor. And because these communities are historically underserved by the government, they struggle to escape generational poverty, unlike many white communities that have had more support and opportunities
I don't really understand why so many middle- and working-class white Americans are reluctant to acknowledge that structural racism (such as historical segregation and longstanding economic disparities) is one of the root causes of social inequality in the USA and absolutely deserved to be addressed
