Whiteness

 We have the classic race vs. class debate going on in the comments. I have also received (and not published) a mind-boggingly absurd comment arguing that slavery was not a fundamentally racist institution.  Let me say first that in my view it really isn ' t possible in the United States to separate the issues of class and race. The basic reason why we have never developed an effective workers ' party and had a relatively weak labor movement and a very limited socialist tradition compared to most of western Europe is because the working class has been divided by race. Yes, there have been attempts to organize along class lines and across racial lines, from the CIO to ACORN. As a former ACORN organizer, I can tell you that the racism of poor white people is absolutely vicious and it is agonizingly difficult to get them to see past it. I ' m talking Philadelphia here, not Birmingham, by the way. Yes,  there are exceptions and there are occasional cases of the scales falling from people ' s eyes, but at a large scale this is really the fundamental problem of U.S. society. It should go without saying that class also correlates with race, albeit far from perfectly.As for the history of racism, that is actually interesting and may come as a surprise to many people. The concept of a white race or white racial identity is fairly modern. In an important essay in The Guardian,Robert P. Baird lays out the history of whiteness.Still, with only slightly exaggerated pre...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs