I think you're out of touch and actually being an example of what the author was talking about.

No. To Lin, people living in poverty focus on parts of life Lin isn't interested in. It just so happens that in this world, white people happen to be less affected by poverty. White people in poverty and in war are in exactly the same boat and Lin doesn't suggest otherwise.

No, you cant be here in 2014 and say "it just so happens white people are less affected by poverty." I believe I spent the majority of my primary school education learning about how white people were going around the planet conquering shit and setting up society as we know it for the past 1000 years. How to a black kid in the South Bronx [or any other poor urban area] surrounded by real poverty turns on a TV to see images of white people living in the suburbs and all the cool toys have white people and rarely anyone that looks like me. How every image of "wealth" and "middle class" is peddled to you as white suburbia and the main goal of your life is to attain their lifestyle.

Lin's theory has nothing to do with this. Lin's theory is that people associate race with certain issues and Lin doesn't want to muddle up the themes of his writing by having readers trying to continue applying those associations. He doesn't make his character the "default" of white in order to do this, he simply doesn't apply any race to his characters. The author of this article seems to think Lin's characters are white for some reason.

His characters are white because white is the default and removing any sign of ethnicity or non white culture makes it safe to assume white. Look at the response to the casting of certain characters for movies in recent years. Characters with no predefined cultural identity were simply assumed to be white. Even in my own mind, I struggle to read a book and not automatically assume the character is white solely based on the actions being undertaken and the description of their lifestyle falling in line with what I was shown to be "white."

So there are only blacks, Hispanics, and whites? If you exclude blacks and Hispanics you also somehow automatically exclude Asians and native Americans?

Yes, that's what the narrative of this country says and thats the context in which it is used. How you even deny that when Fox News and "right wing conservative media machine" exists, I do not know.

No, he wants to be accepted into street culture. He DOES want to be accepted into drug culture. It's not 'black culture' when people of every race who grow up in those environments end up behaving that way or because poverty affects people of color more significantly in this country, it just seems like another example of the author of the article's focus on race biasing his experience of the world.

It would seem in my life experiences and news reports that I've consumed over the past 25 years that America has been spending quite some time associating street culture today with degenerate black and hispanic peoples. Rarely is the light shown on the degeneracy of poor white folk, which is a shame because they may really be the 2nd most abused group of people in America behind the white baby boomer population [ the people who this giant fear apparatus was built on]

Parts that resonated with me the most:

White culture steals because it has no soul of its own. White people are fleeing Whiteness because they do not have a way to exist apart from their history of oppression. But in fleeing, they continue that history, continuing to be blind to the largest remaining system that reinforces inequality. One which they continue to benefit from. The Default. The idea that white people are ‘regular’ and everyone else is something different. Admiring that “something different” as better is still reinforcing the fact that it is adjacent to the real thing.

When Dunham falls back on expressing just her personal experience, she is denying that her personal experience is an experience of whiteness. She has been duped into believing that her whiteness is background, that it is just “regular,” that it’s default. Only The Default could exist apart from any system of oppression. Only The Default is outside, with an objective view of race. And if you see yourself as The Default, a No. 1, you certainly are contributing to systems of inequality. And in supporting a system where the same stories are told from the same points of view you continue to support The Default and you benefit from it.

Dunham is correct that as an artist she has to write what she knows. But if what she knows is that white existence is a neutral, non-racial experience, she needs to learn something different. “What we achieve inwardly will change our outer reality,” wrote Plutarch.

White liberals, on the other hand, are so afraid of claiming any white identity (for terror of feeling white pride or appearing to deny their white privilege) that they also reinforce the idea that whiteness is empty, nothing — that it’s a default. They act like they have no particular identity. And if you act like you don’t have any particular identity, you are “regular.” But white liberals end up feeling that pain of a lack of identity and they have to look to other cultures to find meaning. This is why white American culture co-opts meaning from everyone else, from African-Americans (Elvis, Alien, Britney Spears) and Native-Americans (spirituality) and Asian-Americans (zen, Martial Arts) and India (Yoga, Meditation).

How does a white Jewish woman share her genuine pain over her large nose and her curly hair without being punched in the face by a black woman? How do white people fight for freedom for their spiritual selves and legitimacy for their external experience when the world is still so racist and they benefit from their whiteness?

If Person A is actively supporting and benefiting from a system that oppresses Person B, it is very hard for Person B to hear Person A say, “But I’m hurt too!” However, if Person A is actively working to dismantle the system they benefit from but which oppresses Person B, then Person B is finally seen — and Person A’s pain can be embraced. In order to see a person you must see the truth of their pain. If you deny their pain, you refuse to see them. This is what makes black people invisible. And black invisibility is what makes white pain invisible to black people.

It’s scary to focus on white people in any way and have sympathy for white pain, when everything, everything, is already by, for, and about white people (The Default is why we all laugh when some idiot asks why there isn’t a White History Month). It’s scary because brown people are seen as continuing the problem of racial division implicitly just by existing, or by daring to be dissatisfied with obvious inequality. Or by seeming to deny white people’s joy over progress towards racial equality (Obama) by ungratefully continuing to feel pain and point to pain.