Okay, White 'Murrica....

[The Grand Nudger]

I think that a study on poverty would be incredibly insightful, regarding racism. Poverty has been a component of racism no matter what color the recipients have been. I've often mused on the notion that poverty itself helps to establish racism (and then racism feeds back into poverty, like a sick little mobius strip), as it's easier to demean and exploit the disenfranchised. Can't take the hand of money out of big sugar (and I mean big sugar big sugar, back when it was the oil of it's day in the 1700's, the first multinational) and slavery, or the coal industry and miners strikes that replaced it just a short while later. They targeted different groups (and sometimes the same groups) but in both cases for the same reasons.....the cynic in me thinks that the color of each groups skin was only incidental and that their position on the economic totem pole had as much or more to do with both. There were black slavers, and the boogeymen were glorified semi-white (irish/scot/italian) servants themselves trying to grasp the rungs of the social ladder in whatever meager way was offered to them. Similar effect later, vis a vis rednecks, New Englanders - and the people who beat rednecks for the New Englanders.