Dana, I agree with much that you say. To me, it seem a question of the chicken or the egg. Do minorities have unequal access to education, the professions and health care because of prejudice against them? Does prejudice result in poverty or is poverty responsible for prejudices of one class toward another? It's all interconnected and all the more insiduous because so many in the US refuse to acknowledge that prejudice - whether it be against minorities or the poor - does not impact people's lives to the extant that it truelly does. A neocon will tell you that a black man is poor because he is too lazy to better himself; a working mother who brings home a wage that keeps her family below the poverty line is responsible for own poor choices (she should have KNOWN that the husband she fled was an abuser or had 6 other wives before she married him and deserves what she gets). Native Americans are poor because they'd rather drink than work; black Americans in the ghetto are poor because they are happy dealing drugs amd living on welfare. On and on.
Last night we had stopped for gas, and a frightened looking woman with a baby on her hip and another child tightly clutching her skirt approached me to ask for money for food for her children. I'm pretty hip to the street scene, and I could see that this woman was not just using her kids to help her score spare change for booze or drugs. Mike, too, looked at her and said to me, "She's telling the truth." She said she'd lost her job, and made her land lord a partial payment on her rent. The payment wasn't enough, and she and her children and belongings were thrown on the street. She lost almost everything she had, and had scraped together her last bit of money for a motel room for her and her kids. There was none left for to buy the kids supper. Tomorrow, she'd ride the bus to the food bank (if she had the bus fare, otherwise she'd walk), but tonight there was nowhere she could get food. I gave her what money I could spare. She thanked me, grabbed her toddler tightly by the hand and hurried quickly across the street in the cold night air and disappeared into one of the rooms of a shabby run, down motel.
Watch the conservatives of this board jump all over this story and then tell me there's no such thing as class warfare here in the States!
