At 12:33 PM 8/16/99 -0400, Yoshie wrote: >That said, it was and is not inevitable that class antagonism gets deformed >into a racist form. All workers make sacrifices on the job (and in fact >black workers generally make bigger sacrifices than whites under the same >employers), but not all workers translate such resentment into racism and >the scapegoating of blacks on welfare. But looking at it from another angle, it could be a sign of a certain progress. Fifty or so years ago, the presence of a social ill (poverty, inability to support oneself) would lead to a summary stereotyping of an antire ethnic group - as it was the case of not only blacks, but also eastern and southern euroepans (cf. the notorious polish, jewish or italian jokes). Today, however, such stereotyoping is strongly qualified by restricting it to a _segment_ of an ethnic group (e.g. welfare recipients). Even most conservatives (save for a few kkk and neo-nazi crackpots) would not extend that stereotype to an entire ethnic group - which theoy would rountinely do not so long ago. Based on my own observations, scapegoating welfare is a backdoor that allows at least some blue collar workers to escape racism. I heard more than once blue collar workers (both black and white) denoucing housing projects and welfare, and at the same time vigorously denying claims of being racist. Unlike the lit-crit crowd that leads protected lives in the shadow of ivory towers of academe, these people deal with social ills produced by poverty on the daily basis. So the fact that they attribute those effects to a socially constructed phenomenon (welfare) instead of natural one (ethnicity) is quite remarkable - and puts them on a par, if not ahead, of the lit-crit crowd. wojtek
