but, i want to draw attention to this specifically.

nobody is talking about preventing "underrepresented groups" from competing and succeeding in "high wage" labour. in fact, our system is pretty focused on helping marginalized groups succeed. we have a different set of systemic biases, here.

but, the governing party sees it fit to specifically exclude "non-underrepresented groups"...which i guess means white people...from walking into the space opened up by pulling back on imported slave labour.

it is legitimately and specifically and explicitly insisting that low-wage work should be racialized.

in the budget...

i guess you're expecting me to be upset by the obvious exclusion of whites, but that's not actually what they're doing here. i mean, they are. but, it's not because they're secretly muslims or something. no. they're upholding a concept of white supremacism by stealth. they're assigning the low-wage labour as being below the white person. this is racializing low-wage labour, and placing it at the bottom of a hierarchy.

for all their attempts to appeal to a kind of plastic left through hollow appeals to diversity, they fuck up on this kind of thing every once in a while, and expose where their real biases are. so, when i periodically accuse them of being brutally racist by stealth, and pushing down the programs they do because they're racist rather than in spite of it, come back to this post to see what i mean.

and, i've argued in the past that this kind of thinking is actually widespread on the left, even (perhaps especially) amongst activists. what all of those anti-oppression workshops were really doing was inserting a racial hierarchy into your brain and normalizing it in ways you hadn't even previously thought of...