Stop saying “uneducated” when you mean bigoted. Stop saying “uneducated” when you mean racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist. Stop saying “uneducated” when you mean that somebody holds regressive beliefs. You can find bigots in mansions, trailer parks, suburbs, houses, and apartments. You can find bigots in ivy league universities, liberal arts colleges, vocational programs, and jobs. Bigotry of all kinds exists at all levels of our society and to pass off our structural inequalities and learned intolerances as simply a matter of poor education is to imply that the wealthy are more compassionate, more egalitarian, more valuable people.
You can find bigotry everywhere, but the question is, how likelyare you to?
According to exit polls,61 percent of non-college-educated white voters cast their ballots for Republicans while just 45 percent of college-educated white voters did so. Meanwhile 53 percent of college-educated white voters cast their votes for Democrats compared with 37 percent of those without a degree.
The diploma divide, as it’s often called, is not occurring across the electorate; it is primarily a phenomenon among white voters. It’s an unprecedented divide, and is in fact a complete departure from the diploma divide of the past. Non-college-educated white voters used to solidly belong to Democrats, and college-educated white voters to Republicans. Several events over the past six decades have caused these allegiances to switch, the most recent being the candidacy, election, and presidency of Donald Trump.
The education voting gap is real and decides elections because college education helps to combat racism among whites. Why do you think Republican media spends so much time denigrating college education and mocking liberal arts degrees as useless? To be sure, there is no rule that non-educated whites automatically vote Trump and college-educated whites automatically don’t. But it’s not a stretch to say that if college tuition were free across the board, Trump would not now be president. So while it’s not all up to universities, education plays a significant role in combating bigotry, a role that we should not dismiss.
Finally, while it is easier for the wealthy to obtain college degrees, we should remember that a lot of the upper middle class and moderately wealthy white Boomers that form Trump’s voting bloc did not need a college education to accrue wealth, especially since college degrees were much less common and it was easier for them to get a high-paying job without one. In fact as recently as 30 years ago the wealth gap between college and non-college educated whites was almost non-existent. So equating college education with high social class when it comes to bigotry isn’t as helpful as you might think.
Keep thinking about this. It means that the people who receive SSDI can literally NEVER be a part of the group legislating the program. I feel genuinely sick to my stomach…because like…that’s the formal structure. We’ve all accepted this??????????
Highlights include:
People are not told beforehand these positions would put their benefits at risk.
Positions “in office” include things like being on your kids’ school board.
You can lose benefits even if the position is only a few hours a month type responsibility because it shows the decision makers you “can work”.
It’s decided on a case by case basis, which means it is basically up to the whims of the person looking at the case, so some people will skirt by and make others think they can too only to be penalized later.
Everything about us, without us in the US. :/
[image: tweet by Sarah Blahovec: “I am passionate about my job, but the absolute worst part of it is having to deliver the news to a disabled person on SSDI that they can’t run for office (usually an unpaid local office) without losing their benefits. Today it was to a disabled veteran. #CripTheVote”]
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farther in the Twitter thread is this link to a blog post by a disability rights organization with the text of what the Social Security Administration says about how running for office might affect one’s benefits. this link is not to the SSA website because this information is not on the SSA website.
some of you may’ve heard about that fancy “bionic reading” typefont thats supposed to be easier for neurodivergent people to read (if you’re unfamiliar, it bolds the first few letters of each word to make it easier to follow)
well guess what, its locked behind a $500 a month API to write in because fuck you!
introducing, Not Bionic Reading! it is literally just the bionic reading typefont but for free. god bless neocities
“[I]t is actually more expensive to be poor than not poor. If you can’t afford the first month’s rent and security deposit you need in order to rent an apartment, you may get stuck in an overpriced residential motel. If you don’t have a kitchen or even a refrigerator and microwave, you will find yourself falling back on convenience store food, which — in addition to its nutritional deficits — is also alarmingly overpriced. If you need a loan, as most poor people eventually do, you will end up paying an interest rate many times more than what a more affluent borrower would be charged. To be poor — especially with children to support and care for — is a perpetual high-wire act.”
Knowledge is power, but power can corrupt. White institutions teach a select class of Asians to adopt elitism and gatekeeping in order to harm their community and deny lived experiences.
Asian Americans have the largest wealth gap of any U.S. racial group. Elitist Asians are a small percentage, yet they’re purposely given the largest AsAm platforms and resources in order to perpetuate the Model Minority myth and downplay anti-Asian racism. (for more info, see my Monomyth comic)
To be clear, higher education isn’t inherently bad. It’s like any other tool—it can enlighten and empower, or be misused. There are many Asian academics, educators and journalists who resist white supremacy and fight for their communities. But we’re talking about the ones who don’t.
These elitist tokens claim to fight for the most marginalized. In reality, they want to be the only Asian at the white table—the voice for the “voiceless.” White supremacist institutions are happy to seat them there, since tokens don’t dismantle the system but reinforce it.
Netflix’s show The Chair inadvertently captures this dynamic. It was widely touted as positive Asian rep, yet Sandra Oh’s character protected and prioritized a white male colleague/lover from accountability while treating marginalized students and her Black colleague as obstacles. When I saw prominent Asians and other POC gush about feeling seen by Sandra Oh’s The Chair character, I was disappointed—but not surprised. It speaks to their lack of self-awareness and how accustomed they are to trampling over their own people that they don’t think it’s wrong.
This is the major disconnect. We supposedly understand how structural racism works and that higher education—like every other industry in the U.S.—perpetuates white supremacy. Yet POC who get accepted to ivy leagues are not only celebrated, but viewed as automatic leaders.
The truth is, these institutions would never allow POC to matriculate if there was a real threat of them dismantling their bigoted systems. The token’s purpose is to insulate these institutions from accusations of bigotry, promote bootstrap narratives, and keep other POC out. Asian tokens know that to keep these prestigious positions of power, they must avoid being seen as a threat by white people. So, despite making outward claims of dismantling the Model Minority myth, they internalize it as fact—to the point of adopting white guilt as their own.
Tokens mask their gaslighting, bullying, and abuse by over-intellectualizing racism—the way white people taught them to. We’re seeing this with anti-Asian hate crimes, and how tokens police language and emotions while creating a hierarchy of which victims matter and which ones don’t.
This includes the thorny but necessary conversation of holding other POC accountable for anti-Asian violence—especially the Black community. Even though white people commit the majority of anti-Asian hate crimes, there’s also a significant pattern of Black people doing it too.
But according to elitist Asians tokens, that pattern isn’t relevant, and Asians shouldn’t be upset or talking about it. This is because, in internalizing the Model Minority myth, elitist Asians see themselves as above other POC and think accountability is anti-Black. It’s not.
Let’s be clear: assaulting Asians for being Asian is violent racism. The attacker’s race doesn’t change this. While we should be sensitive to the context of white supremacy when holding Black people and other POC accountable, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discuss it at all.
Yet elitist Asian tokens sabotage efforts towards solidarity, healing, and progress because they project their class privilege onto a community that is larger and far more vulnerable than them. Meanwhile, white people are happy to let tensions between Asians and Black people remain.
The situation is frustrating and sad. How much violence could we have prevented if our communities did a better job of educating and tackling difficult conversations head-on instead of avoiding them? How much solidarity is lost because we’re at the whims of tokens who don’t care?
It’s ironic that the ones who supposedly understand the power of education the best are using it the worst. But that’s exactly what white supremacy wants: violence, division, and ignorance. That’s why it’s up to all of us to speak up and spark these conversations—so we can learn.
(Please don’t repost or edit my art. Reblogs are always appreciated.)
If you enjoy my comics, please pledge to my Patreon or donate to my Paypal. I lost my publisher for trying to publish these strips, so your support keeps me going until I can find a new publisher/lit agent
![taraljc: bae-in-maine:fullpraxisnow:“[I]t is actually more expensive to be poor than not poor. I](https://64.media.tumblr.com/32436d1a13418f10d77da87329dc68d4/tumblr_pc6cf3lLFd1qexjbwo1_640.jpg "taraljc: bae-in-maine:fullpraxisnow:“[I]t is actually more expensive to be poor than not poor. I")
![taraljc: bae-in-maine:fullpraxisnow:“[I]t is actually more expensive to be poor than not poor. I](https://64.media.tumblr.com/6f9bf4c7603f08c4dbd2a4f64e14690c/tumblr_pc6cf3lLFd1qexjbwo2_r1_640.jpg "taraljc: bae-in-maine:fullpraxisnow:“[I]t is actually more expensive to be poor than not poor. I")
