It’s Not Race, It’s Class…And Other Stories Folks Now Tell
I have been studying race, racism and its damaging effects for most of my adult life. And I have witnessed the “racial fatigue” of people who don’t have to consciously deal with race. They tell me that we are now. “post-racial” or “colorblind” (primarily because we elected and re-elected a man who is other than White to be president). So now the explanation for disparity and inequality is “class.”
Perhaps it is class in some other countries but in the US, race still matters and it matters a lot. I’ve just started reading Daira Roithmayr’s Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock in White Advantage where she argues cogently that racial advantage is inscribed in our society and it is virtually impossible to eradicate. For example, she points out that a high income African American has less net wealth than a middle income White person. “As of 2009, Blacks had a median net worth (excluding homes) of $2.200, the lowest recorded for the last thirty years, where Whites’ median wealth registered $97,900, 44.5 times the median wealth for Blacks” (Roithmayr, p.3). The problem, according to Roithmayr is that the racial wealth advantage is passed from generation to generation and the “little things” we do help it to continue. For example, when a White person is asked to recommend someone for a job they recommend someone they know who is more likely to be White. The business, professional, and social networks we inhabit are often quite segregated.
Although the statistics are compelling I think it is the personal narrative that adds flesh to the bare bones of the numbers. In my own case I would have to say I have been “middle class” for more than forty years. Although I grew up in a working class household with a mother who was a clerk (high school graduate) and a father who was a laborer (3rd grade education), once I graduated from college and began teaching I entered the middle class. According to American social mobility mythology I have essentially “made it.” But, have I?
One evening after teaching my UNIVERSITY course (at a research intensive institution) I was waiting at the corner to cross the street to the parking lot. Suddenly a car of college-aged students sped around the corner and one yelled, “Go back to Africa!” My “middle class” status as a university professor did not stop that from happening. They did not yell at me because of my class status. The presumed insult (actually having been to empathyeducates – It’s Not Race, It’s Class…And Other Stories Folks Now Tell:
