#wealth privilege

The worst people are talking about Hollywood Gladfly's "exposé" on Chloe Zhao's privileged background 🤡

It hardly qualifies as an exposé becos it's not as if Zhao deliberately kept her background secret. It's been up on her wikipeda page since I last checked it in 2021 when Eternals was released. Her parents are public figures in China.

And I think there could be a more productive way to talk about wealth and class privilege and how most, if not all, industries are set up in a way that only allows for wealthier individuals to take risks. There's also a way to talk about Chloe Zhao without ignoring the fact that she's a woc and how difficult it already is for Hollywood to invest in female creators of colour, much less if they are also working class. I think it's important to acknowledge that meritocracy is a myth and that money truly opens doors and offers opportunities, but I'm seeing this article used as a way to dismiss Chloe Zhao's talents as a filmmaker instead of talking about how arts and entertainment industries can do better by working class creatives. It's painful to see a woc's talents be dismissed in a way that her white counterparts of the same privileged backgrounds aren't.

Should wealth entitle you to favorable treatment under the law, to getting away with it (whatever it is), to a social system that lays laurels on your wealth and believes as an axiom of fundamental social reality that you've earned it all through your exceptionalism?

When the middle and upper classes know they can go private to get seen sooner and frequently better, they will take advantage of this

Encouraging more to become private because money can be made off it

My family considered going privately for my ADHD diagnosis but I decided it was too expensive when I could get it free but a lot of people we know went private and it was significantly quicker to go private

Someone my family knows who works with students who have dyslexia openly admits it's better for them to work private because they have better work hours and pay and it is better for the people they help to go private because they will get help sooner

People with minor physical issues will go private if they have the money because the issue they have maybe minor but it is also still an issue, and they might not get seen for months unless they go private

The NHS is overworked and understaffed so it is better for the patient to go private but this screws over other patients

It encourages more privatisation for the businesses and the workers to move to the private sector because there is money to be made and benefits to be gained

Meaning the services that are free slowly get worse as more people move away from the NHS

See it’s hard for me to believe people when they say “Being white is a privilege, but it doesn’t mean you couldn’t have had a hard life” when they go on spouting and sharing stuff like this on social media.

It’s literally counterproductive to the point you’re trying to make. You shouldn’t be having a good haha at people who are more likely than not underprivileged in other ways and telling them that the only reason that they’re, in your opinion, falling short in life is because they weren’t able to max out their white privilege and are bitter about it.

It’s easy to read through the lines. The assumption here is that life should have been easy because you’re white, and the punchline is that you haven’t accomplished much despite playing life on “easy mode” and are therefore dumb, lazy, or inept. And we’re all gonna laugh at you because of it.

Live in rural America with a chronic condition that causes you pain, greatly affecting your life and ability to accomplish your goals but not having access to care because of the rural healthcare shortage? Hahaha, you’re just stupid.

Grew up in Appalachia with less than stellar parents where you had to drop out of school early to provide for yourself so you could survive but also inadvertently stunted your ability to advance in a career later in life? Hahaha, lazy lazy white people.

Live in suburban poverty where there’s no such thing as reliable public transportation and you can’t afford a car, so your employment options are limited to the 3 mile radius of your house which are typically minimum wage jobs? Silly white people.

Living in a town abused by an industry that’s since been rendered obsolete by regulations or moved when the resource dried up, ruining your land, your health, and your community while you can’t afford to move elsewhere? Inept white people at it again.

I understand that it’s an attempt at a joke. I don’t want people being like “yOU DOn’t geT THe jokE.” Because I do. I understand why it’s supposed to be funny, but I saw this and it really rubbed me the wrong way, especially when everyone I knew personally who shared it are known to consistently and conveniently ignore class privilege when it is one of the most determining factors in quality of life and the most prevailing privilege across time and culture.

The slow COVID-19 response from leadership at the federal and state level seems to have been tailor made to suit people who earn salaries instead of hourly wages. Also, people with the ability to drive cars, who own large houses (along with their room for exercise equipment and grocery hoarding), and who have private yards for their kids to play in. 

Wealth and 'windshield perspective' have asserted their dominance once again, this time during a pandemic, privileging Americans who are best suited to wait out a long period of social distancing.

If leaders really cared about hourly-wage families who get around without cars and who live in small homes -- people who rely more heavily on the shared things like parks, playgrounds, and transit that have reduced access now -- they would have implemented strict shut-downs immediately, several weeks ago, so as not to drag this ordeal out longer. 

This longer time frame harms people who need to get back to hourly jobs, and who need to use shared spaces. We should have acted with speed and boldness. We should have had government-led delivery of groceries and more to help the neediest. We should have closed lanes to cars on streets that house low-income people in small apartments, who need a wide space for walking while distancing. 

Instead, we’ve experienced a weak, drawn-out response that escalated slowly, thus hurting the most vulnerable among us the hardest on levels of income, health, and mental wellbeing. After going through a tough experience with being shut in, many of those folks hurting the most will still suffer because of wage loss.