IBARW: The interaction of race and class.

[loligo]

As early as 1940, social scientists noticed that if you looked at the history of the Deep South, whenever cotton prices fell, lynchings tended to jump. The link seems to pass what one of my professors used to call "the intra-ocular trauma test" ("It hits you right between the eyes!"), but in the decades since then, the size, the meaning, and

Comments

[vom_marlowe]

Thank you for this post. I've been thinking a lot about the intersections of race and class, and the divisions, too. I really enjoyed reading it.

[silversliver]

I'm here via someone's link (I forget whose) in LJ.

It never ceases to amaze me how "allies" of people who suffer discrimination based on innate characteristics say, "We support you in the struggle for equality!" and promptly throw us into the gutter when they want the bus of public opinion to stop for them. It's taken me a long time to get over my white guilt enough to be a proper ally. It took living the experience and activism in the LG(BT) community to really open my eyes about what a jerk I had been when the shoe was on the other foot. I am an advocate of reenacting the brown eyes/blue eyes exercises of Jane Elliot for that reason. It demonstrates how arbitrary most discrimination is and how profound the effects are on members of outgroups. It's a step in disassembling the low snaking wall that criss-crosses the path of progressivism and trips up both the most well-meaning and the hardest struggling alike.

[loligo]

I think you've clarified pretty well by now that you agree that racism exists and is a bad thing, so I do hope people aren't still giving you grief over that. What I was trying to capture with that metaphor was my understanding of your larger point concerning the magnitude of racial oppression versus economic oppression, and what the relationship between them is: that the second is much greater than the first, and that eliminating the first wouldn't have much bearing on the second. My apologies if I've mischaracterized that

[serialbabbler]

One nice thing about life is that you don't actually have to stop discussing things just because awareness week is over. (But I suspect that nitpicky-ness is a chronic condition on the internet so most debates seem to break down that way no matter how long they last or how careful people try to be in their wording.)

I enjoyed reading your thoughts on the interaction of race and class. Have you ever read The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen? If not, you might check it out sometime. It's very much on topic.

My metaphorical view of things is that we've built our entire civilization on quick sand and, at the moment, a lot of us are arguing about who's living in the basement.

[krinndnz]

Here from an entry on Orcinus. Thanks for the writeup.