There's a difference between starting from zero and starting from -10 and working your way up. If someone comes here from another country with "nothing", but they aren't starting off with a negative, that's a lot different than starting out with negatives on your score card.
Sure, slavery happened many years ago, but segregation and Jim Crow weren't all that long ago, and the effects still linger. It's a given that people who start off as working class have a harder time getting ahead and jumping up in the class framework because they not only start with less money, but less connections, less institutionalized knowledge about how to network, and so on. All those things apply to working class Blacks, AND they also bear the negatives of racial stereotypes about them, assumptions that they can't speak proper English, and so on.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-10 07:25 pm (UTC)Sure, slavery happened many years ago, but segregation and Jim Crow weren't all that long ago, and the effects still linger. It's a given that people who start off as working class have a harder time getting ahead and jumping up in the class framework because they not only start with less money, but less connections, less institutionalized knowledge about how to network, and so on. All those things apply to working class Blacks, AND they also bear the negatives of racial stereotypes about them, assumptions that they can't speak proper English, and so on.