Dave Neiwert has a good post on some -- well, one of the factors in race issues in the US: class. He builds off this post from Pam Spaulding, particularly Pam's response to a comment by Dagon:
What the driver (and Chris Rock) are conveying are class distinctions. Not all black folks are poor, under-educated criminals. Now the above comments by Rock and the bus driver conveniently skirt the issue of the underclass and the cycle of poverty that foments the pathologies of gang culture, disdain for educational achievement and other negative stereotypes that are a reality in those segments of the minority community. But Chris Rock speaks for a number of blacks who shake their heads every time they see a thug perp walk that inevitably will be seen by whites as representative of all black people.
This is actually something that I resolved for myself quite some time ago: Since I left home to go to university, I've associated with a broad range of people from different races and different ethnic backgrounds: Blacks, Latinos, first-generation Lithuanian immigrants, Asians, American Indians, Chicago's own brand of white ethnics. The key factor in -- I won't say whether we can get along, but whether we can understand each other at all has been class. I don't really understand poor whites any better than I understand poor blacks. I was raised as a middle-class white boy, but it's the middle-class part that stuck most firmly.
Neiwert sums it up pretty nicely:
And that really is the problem, isn't it: That whites will take a narrow spectrum of behaviors by black people and assume that they come to reflect the entire black community -- and black people hate that shit. As well they should.
To come at it from a slightly different direction, let's talk about "the hommaseksual lifestyle." This is simply another case of someone taking a few members of the class -- twinky gay party queens who are all hormones and no brains -- and using them to denote all gay men, when of course they are no more representative of gay men than Mark Foley or Ted Haggard are (without getting into nuances of terminology -- Foley identifies himself as gay; Haggard does not -- at least not yet -- and there is a certain validity to Haggard's take: "gay"is as much an identity as part of a community as a synonym for a particular sexual orientation -- more so, actually -- so Haggard, until he identifies himself with that culture, is not gay.) I can, however, identify with the party queens because we have an overriding element of our identities in common, and we share a view of the world that I don't share with straight people who may be much closer to my class, simply because the party queens and I share a culture that is much more fundamentally a part of my identity than any culture I share with my straight friends. Frankly, I find the party queens pretty boring, I'm sure as much as they do me, because that basic cultural identity is about all we share, but that's a key element. Perhaps that's why I get so pissed off at the Dobson Gang and their smug assertions about the "lifestyle" -- although these are people I don't generally associate with by choice, I don't blame them for giving us a bad name, unlike some of my fellows in the community: Dobson and his ilk would have invented them if they didn't already exist, and as far as I'm concerned they can live their lives as they wish. If anything, I fault the PC elements of the gay community for even acknowledging the Dobson Gang's slant. I differ here from a lot of the reaction in much of the gay community, and I would suspect that it's a strong analog to the reaction among middle-class blacks to the behavior of poor blacks, who have their own subculture that is sharply at odds with mainstream culture.
I live near Chicago's Uptown, which has been for years, if not generations, a chancy part of town (not so much now as in the past, but I remember when it was really scary). There are lots of poor people, many of them from the South. There are people on the streets who should be in institutions, except the institutions can't afford to keep them all any more; there are drugs, and drug dealers, and a fair amount of crime. And I've noticed that there is a less racial animosity on the street than elsewhere in the city (not that there is overt hostility most places, but Uptown seems to have less tension and a lot more interracial couples).
What I'm wandering around is simply that, while I'm sure there are people who consider skin color as a reason for discrimination (even if not consciously), I suspect very strongly that it's much more a matter of class than race.
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