Interestingly enough, there is growing poverty in the suburbs and the ranks of the middle classes is being decimated by poverty. The Black middle clssses, even when making salaries comparable to their white contemporaries, are less likely (thanks to centuries of racial caste) to have the intergenerational accumulation of wealth or capital as do their white peers. They have thus lost even more ground financially than have white middle classes (which have also been damaged by economic crises). I grew up in the poverty of the ghettoes of East Baltimore, and I am now a university professor and homeowner. Aside from love, I inherited nothing from my family because they had nothing else. When my dad (formerly a rural laborer from North Carolina) was dying, he said to an old friend: "I came here with nothing and I'm gonna leave with nothing. But my son is a professor, and my little girl is a nurse. And they're doing OK. So, I guess it was worth it." I recall that when I think of all those white fellow students at Vanderbilt who talked about their trips to Cancun or the Riviera; or their complaints about daddy being too busy with his accumulated properties, professions and businesses. I've no capital or accumulated wealth inherited as do many of my white peers. Hence the racial-economic inequality continues even when our salary individual salary gaps begin to shrink. But I've better sense than to assume, as white racists have long done and many bourgeois and petty bourgeois blacks are increasingly doing, that the problems of the poor is mainly their own "misconduct " or pathologies of their own making. The problem lies deeply in a pathological social order, a racist and plutocratic social order committed to racial and economic inequality and oppression, and which has never been able to understand a simple humanistic truth---that a single human life is worth more than all the gold in Fort Knox.
-Savant
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There's no place in the world--or precious few places--in which the majority of people--black, white or other--are well educated members of society. And "productive " of what. Increasingly, capitalist societies hardly produce at all. Wall Street pirates getting wealth by wheeling and dealing, and the sector of the economy they dominate, has been displacing manufacturing where at least SOMETHING (occasionally something worthwhile) was actually produced. And what has any of this to do with how people speak? What we call "standard English" is mainly the standard of the professional, business and intellectual classes--not of the common people of any race or ethnicity.
-Savant
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Don't forget that marvelous film "Salt of the Earth." "Matewan " was superb. Saw it years ago and would like to see it again. Even "Harlin County", regarding the coal miners, had black workers involved. Indeed, I think that the Black working class (75% of Black America) has received far less credit than it deserves in both the labor movement and the Black freedom movement of the 60s. Double whammy: to belong to an oppressed class and an oppressed race. I know. My mama was a factory worker. It sucks: pay is lousy and working conditions miserable. And then there's the racism. A blade in the throat of oppression!
-Savant
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Hello. I'm in the middle of finals, and graduating seniors have to have their grades in TODAY. So, I can offer at present only a brief response (a more well thought out one later). America is clearly a CLASS society as well as a racialized one. Not surprisingly, the lion share of the wealth (including intergenerational inheritance) is the privilege of the plutocracy, an elite class of capitalists. However, one finds even among the working classes of whites that there was a degree of flexibility (come call it mobility) often denied to blacks of the working class, and severely limited even for member of the black middle class. For example, it has always been easier for whites -even many working class whites-- to become homeowners, a home sometimes being the one form a property a white commoner could have. And more whites than Blacks have at least that much intergenerational wealth. Mere peanuts compared to the resources of the privileged classes of industrialists and bankers, but peanuts more accessible to whites than to Blacks, Moroever, even Blacks of the middle and upper classes have often lost wealth that might have accumulated had they either not been blocked, or had their resources destroyed or taken from them. Think about what happened to the "Black Wall Street" in Tulsa as just one example. The entire business community devastated, and a relative stable working class dislocated. Of course, that's just ONE example and I'm skimming the surface; but that's the best I can do for the moment. There an entire history what we need to know about. And without that knowledge we cannot understand how we came to be where we are today, nor even very clearly where we are today.
-Savant
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Peut-etre, le prochaine fois que vous visitez au Baltimore je vous introduit un eglise Afro-Americain. Comme Richard Wright, je n'est pas tres religieux main l'eglise noir c'est the plus grand institution a L'Amerique Noir. C'est la raison pour quo un grande number des chefs du Mouvement etait preachers. (Meme les peres de Huey P. Newton, Malcolm X et Cornel West etait religious ministers). Aussi peut-etre tu aime un nouvel livre par le philosophy noir Lewis Gordon qui s'appel WHAT FANON SAID. Est-ce que tu lis les ecrits de Frantz Fanon? Vous avez l'avantage par qu'il a ecrit en Francais. And even in English translation Fanon is a powerful writer.
-Savant
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