madmark.myfastforum.org

Mark · Site Admin Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 1052

Poor whites are being conned

http://www.miamiherald.com/living...s/leonard_pitts/story/544738.html

Excerpt:

...The white poor have been victims of a con job going back at least as far as the Civil War, when poor white men were used as cannon fodder for the right of rich white men -- I repeat: rich white men -- to keep slaves. They were told they fought for state's rights.

From then till now, the white poor have often been the front line of white supremacy. You think people with college degrees and six-figure salaries are out there marching around under pointy white hoods, burning crosses? Hardly.

My point is that race has often been used as a means of distracting and diverting the white poor. They had little in life, nor any realistic expectation of having more.

But the one thing they did have -- or so the con went -- was whiteness itself. Which meant they had someone to be better than. Someone to look down upon.