Tom Walker asked: > And, what lessons might be learned from >the passage of proposition 209? That, ironically enough, the more people become alike in terms of universal criteria, the more virulent discrimination will become in order to maintain a racialized hierarchy of labor? Or is it that the more whites (an interesting category) feel that they may lose political power due to their impending minority status, the more they will insist on the right to maintain prejudices "for their own"? Is this why California has been the site for both Props 187 (the attack on trabajadores sin papeles) and 209, that whites imagine themselves here as a group headed for minority status? And do whites imagine themselves in this paranoid way in no small part because census data, kept in racial categories, continuously reminds them of how they will soon be "pinced" , as best-selling immigration expert Peter Brimelow puts it, in between Blacks, Hispanics and Asians? Or is it that by creating greater and greater controversy over the racialized divisions in the workforce (lawsuits and other controversies are already proliferating over the interpretaiton of Prop 209) and distrust among workers generally (of course the Bigger Simpson spectacle has made no small contribution here), Pete Wilson has ensured that there will be little progress in the political organization of labor as a racialized majority turns on a racialized minority? Jim Devine would know the details, but Michael Reich has attempted to show a positive correlation between racial inequality and intra-white inequality. I don't know how much greater the mean income of whites is to their median but I would think it is sufficiently great to raise the question of whether we may be witnessing the emergence of two nations among "whites." Or do firms just wanted to rationalize the costs of meeting EEOC requirements and the right to resort to statistical discrimination as a way to rationalize screening costs, whenever it is convenient? Rakesh
