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RaceVClass 15 - 09 Apr 2012 - Main.KippMueller
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| | I realize this is going to be a pretty damn controversial post, but I feel compelled to speak on the subject. I sometimes become concerned that classism becomes too easily conflated with racism in our world.
There's many draws to calling a certain policy racist: | | | I think that the responses (and accusations) that your original post provoked support this view. Like you, I'm trying to figure out how to be noncomplicit about injustice, but it's discouraging when you have to defend your good intentions.
-- MichelleLuo - 08 Apr 2012 | |
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> | Totally agreed, thanks Michelle. Just to be clear, I really had no intentions with this post to even allude to the poor white population. I just wanted to try to isolate issues that affect the poor population, absent race, but also point out that race is so inextricably linked with class that it's hard to distinguish the two. In San Francisco, I remember multiple bus raids where police would stop the bus and check everyone's tickets. I doubt they raided offices without warrants in the financial district often for illegal behavior. And while these raids certainly disproportionately affected minorities, they were absolutely blatant in their classism. And I wish we'd point to them and say that yes, it very well could have been influenced by racism, but the classism is written on the wall!
But classism isn't really conceptually important, it seems. We don't really take apart policies for their classism very often. When we discussed literacy tests in Con Law, we talked about whether they had disparate impact based on race and could therefore be found unconstitutional. I talked with Professor Greene after class, asking whether one could argue that they were unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause because they unfairly discriminated against people based on class (education level). He said that just wasn't a concept really cared about by our legal system. That's really what I'm reacting to. Anyways, talking everyone's ears off. I'll let it be. Thanks for comments, all!
-- KippMueller - 08 Apr 2012 |
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