Quite the nation, this USA. People of USA dislike their fellow citizen so much that they would not grand them the most basic rights or care. A nice portrayal of why multiculturalism is a bad model for society. What does bind these people together as a nation? Not race, not ethnicity, not history collectively, not anything at all. The only unified quality of the people living in USA is that they live in USA. Nations are supposed to be founded on historical ethno-cultural basis for a very good reason. Or else we have a situation like this where overly individualist greed dominates the society where people do not have any interests in common or decency for eachother as a national group.

Psh, its not like some vast nation-wide conspiracy 100 years ago existed to keep black people economically disadvantaged while white people profited from their labor to an astronomical degree. Oh wait, there WAS? Oh well I can't see how that has any bearing on THE PRESENT that was a century ago! & besides, black people can vote, they've been able to do that for...well, for less than 50 years...but...uh...I don't see...uh...

Shit.

Kevin Phillips, former Nixon strategist: "From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats"

Reagan recycled the strategy repeatedly, most famously in his Welfare Queen speech, pulling out the bouquet of negative black stereotypes to erode poor whites' support of Democrats. Graham, who's never been the brightest bulb in the marquee, is replaying the same stategy, but without the slightest trace of subtlety.

Still, stepping outside of the political circus ring, I think it's even more dangerous to discuss race as though it had nothing to do with class, especially when it comes to matters such as public health. Virtually all of the social ills that wear a black face in the cultural narrative are demonstrably related to the concentration and persistence of poverty. But this fact - obvious to sociologists, but not so much to the masses - is obscured by the tendency to report statistics with the race variable in isolation.

This was posted on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog (http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/there_are_no_poor_white_people.php) a few days back and had some really good comments/discussion as well as an insightful accompanying post. To quote:

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Yglesias highlighted this the other day, and I ignored it because I thought it was a slip of the tongue. But here's Lindsey Graham, again, equating poor people with black people, or some such. A charitable interpretation says that Graham, in his discussion of Medicaid, is citing his state's black population because we tend to be disproportionately poor. But this would be like discussing Medicare by citing your state's sweater-knitting population because they tend to be disproportionately old.

It's probably much worse--most sweater-knitters may well be on Medicare, but most black people aren't actually poor or on Medicaid. And so what your left with, again charitably, is a kind of mental laziness, and weak, mealy-mouthed, factually wrong conflation of black people and the poor. A lot of bourgeois Negroes, like myself, spend too much time being offended by this kind of conflation. In fact the people who should be offended are the white people Lindsey Graham represents.

The charitable interpretation rests on the invisibility of white suffering. It rests on the erasure of Clay County. It rests on the notion that the white poor are not merely the white poor, but white trash. It's a formula makes an anchor of black America, straps it to a larger population of poor white Americans and then drops them in the Mississippi. It's a con that asks large swaths of white folks to suffer poverty in shame and silence.

No black person can end this alone, nor should we have to. The NAACP shouldn't say a word to Lindsey Graham. We can not purify people. We can't stop those who are set on blinding themselves. Ignorance is the burden of the ignorant. You learn this when you live black--or you learn the penal system. It's time to spread the glorious news.

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This is one of those double-edged swords that not only hurts black people by making them 'others' and further compartmentalizing them, but it also hurts poor white people, because they become invisible. As noted elsewhere, Malcolm X was on to something when he made the point that it wasn't about black vs white anymore it was about poor vs rich. Poor white people were fighting for a lot of the same things poor black people were, and the ability of the rich to separate the two made it that much easier to marginalize them.

Here's another interesting thing to think about. What is the difference between a poor white person, a hard-working blue collar American, and a middle class white person who's just down on his or her luck? One is what they are, one is what politicians call them to try to get their vote, and one is what they think of themselves as.

I always get a twinge in the back of my head when I hear people talking about policies that will help Middle Class America. What about policies that helps Lower Class America? I don't want to fracture efforts to help them both because frankly they're closer to each other than they've ever been to Upper Class America, but holy crap do we shame the living shit out of the poor in this country.

It also leaves out other groups of people that are likely to be poor, like disabled people.

Yes.

I grew up in Utah and approx 65%, if not more, of the homeless population in Salt Lake City was white...because Utah is predominantly white, with a large Mexican-American minority, assorted populations from other Latin American Countries, then it gets into smaller minorities such as people from India and East Asia.

There is a very high poverty rate among the Native Americans, but a large percentage live on reservations and thus wouldn't be counted in SLC's homeless population.

The following is a comment from the post linked to by ptp. Interesting comment, and interesting racialization of whiteness. Now, is PhoenixRising a supremacist, or just a white guy conscious of his whiteness---i.e. it's not invisible to him. He is either a bad guy, or the colloquial extension of an ideal espoused by critical intellectuals throughout America today. Since he isn't talking about whether one group is better, it's bloody hard to tell.

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Disclaimer: Yeah, Senator Graham oughta be ashamed of himself and he's an embarrassment to the race.

Speaking as a white person whose people came from Clay County, key word in that clause being 'from', I'd like to offer you another perspective. I've been related to poor white folks all my life and have worked with poor, disadvantaged Americans of all colors--from my own people whose grandpas never left southeast Kentucky to immigrant SE Asians.

And the most intractable poverty I've ever seen is in white Appalachia. Intractable because, if you and your ancestors had all the advantages that merely being born white in this country give a person, and you didn't get out, there is a reason. Multigenerational ignorance transmitted in leaky schools with few books, malnutrition, poor health care, no dentistry--it all adds up.

White poverty, at least in the place I know best, is a trap that my parents had to be willing to gnaw off a leg to get out of. (And I'm damn glad they did. Yes, I miss the richness of being connected to my dad's 13 siblings and their families, but I'd miss not having a toothache for 12 years the other way. Or more accurately, I wouldn't know what it feels like not to have my teeth hurt.)

I'm not ashamed that some of my people are in the dire straits that Appalachia is in. But I know very, very few white people in other parts of the US who both 1) know it's there and 2) don't fear falling into it so deeply that they can't think straight about the meaning of 'poor'.

"Senator Lindsey Graham explains that health care reform will be bad because it will require his state to subsidize health care for poor people… AND black people" [emphasis mine]

The weird thing is that there's any "and" here at all. Health care isn't going to subsidize Michael Jordan, so the only group under consideration is "poor". Either you think it's ok to subsidize the poor, or you don't, and once you make that decision, who cares if the poor are white or black or green?