Ed Notes Online: Shaun King: Using 'working-class voters' as shorthand for white people is insulting and rooted in racism

Ed Notes Online: Shaun King: Using 'working-class voters' as shorthand for white people is insulting and rooted in racism:

Shaun King: Using 'working-class voters' as shorthand for white people is insulting and rooted in racism

Something ugly happens when "working class" becomes shorthand for white. It projects the very distinct impression that working people are white.  ...

Please stop saying that the Democratic Party has lost "working-class voters." It hasn't. It's an insult to the tens of millions of working-class voters of color who have voted faithfully for decades for each and every Democratic candidate thrown their way....

while I agree with the basic philosophy of Bernie Sanders that if the Democratic Party would do better by all working-class people, it could possibly begin to win back working-class white people in the process, we must not erase the fact that tens of millions of working-class voters simply are not white. Period.

Shaun King, Daily News

The false face of the working class

In my FB battles with some pro-Trump NYC teachers who are clearly immersed in racist attitudes -- like branding medicaid people as too lazy to work and ignoring the massive working poor population - many people of color -- we clearly see that kind of branding King exposes. I wonder how some of these teachers can face students who they believe don't deserve health care because their parents are poor.

I'm posting this Shaun King column as a follow-up to his recent column that I wrote about the other day: Bernie Sanders and Shaun King Savage the Dems As Matt Taibbi Questions Depth of Russia Story.

King pointed out that the Democratic Party was more unpopular than Trump. Arthur writes about that column today: Can You Teach an Old Democrat New Tricks?
  
My answer is NO. But more of that another time.

I am posting this as a preface to a follow-up for later in the day where I will explore the connections between the Dems, ed deform, the destruction of Vocational ed - here in NYC particularly as the Dems pushed the line that if you don't go to college you are nothing - a direct attack on the working class. And of course the fundamental support the AFT/UFT gave to ed deform Ed Notes Online: Shaun King: Using 'working-class voters' as shorthand for white people is insulting and rooted in racism: