Monday, January 6, 2014

Why the 1% likes us to confuse race with class

Mixing up race with class is a time-tested way for anti-worker politicians to get elected, according to an economist named Max Fraad Wolff.

Here's how it works:
It’s long been true that in a country that won’t talk about class inequality, there becomes a conflation between class and race and if we’re going to be completely honest here, the Republican Party has fairly artfully used that to make it about ‘those other people’ taking government services and handouts, trying to dodge taxes. And what that’s produced over the last 30 years is a lower middle-income white population that’s literally often excitedly voting for its own destruction and the notion that what they’re doing is preventing the undeserving poor—who, in their imaginations, are often people of color—from getting undeserved services. And this has left the higher-income echelons of the U.S. to more or less walk away with the whole pie.
Wolff was quoted by Sonali Kolhatkar, writing for TruthDig. Check out the whole thing here.