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Your comments in this thread are fascinating and I'd love to hear your take on something. In the upper middle class, largely liberal society that I'm part of, I

Your comments in this thread are fascinating and I'd love to hear your take on something. In the upper middle class, largely liberal society that I'm part of, I sometimes get an uncomfortable feeling from how people talk about racism. They believe in racial equality and tolerance, which is great. But something uglier seems mixed in too. To me it feels like a class prejudice that wants to see the poor as beneath them, and racism is the perfect ground to stake that claim on because it's so objectively vicious. So on the one hand there's a sincere wish to be tolerant and accepting, but on the other hand there's this dark side: we want to see the poor as bad (racist), because if they're bad then we're good, they deserve to be poor and we deserve to be rich. Upper classes have always seen themselves as more virtuous in this way. They just define their virtue differently now. The new definition is arguably better because racism really is bad, but it's also convenient, and since there's not much wish to look at other things that are also bad, it doesn't seem to me to come out of a true feeling for equality. It is more like a reshuffling of the social pecking order (not the top layers, of course, just the bottom ones). When I hear people talk about uncouth racists, it's easy to imagine that in past times they would have been talking about how bad the poor smell and how crude their manners were. It feels like the distinction is still on that level, only the language has shifted. I'm sensitive to this because I grew up poor, and when I hear the unempathetic and even brutal way that many seemingly nice people talk about their inferiors, I shrink away internally. It's easy to imagine that they're talking about me too, even though I belong to their class now.

scarface74 9y ago
I came from a middle class neighborhood, but I have been around poorer minorities and become more aware of the issues that poorer Whites have. I have a group of five friends that I keep in touch with from a former job. We have a private Slack channel and meet for lunch occasionally - all tech people in our mid 40s. Three White, two Black. I don't think any of them are racists, but two of them say things that show their complete ignorance of the real world. We were talking about the difference between the education system in one part of the metro area - where the school system had lost accreditation and the school systems where we live - all top ranked in an affluent part of town. Their solution was, why don’t they just move? In the part of town with the unaccredited school on the opposite side of town average rent was $650/month. On our side of town, rent is $1600 a month. On top of that; public transportation is basically non existent because the county didn’t want to connect to the metro system because it made it too easy for the “wrong element” to come up here. Not to mention they blamed the housing crisis in 2008 on “poor people getting loans they couldn’t afford”. I had to explain to them how things really worked in real estate from someone who used every trick out there to get real estate without putting any skin in the game, did “strategic defaults”, and bought a new house three years later. Poor people couldn’t do that. Last but not least, I had to explain that welfare and other benefits to the poor was such a small amount of their tax dollars it wasn’t even worth worrying about.
- akkat 9y ago
  What do you mean "welfare and other benefits of the poor was such a small amount of their tax dollars"? According to a quick Google search [1] social security and unemployment makes up about 33% of the budget and Medicare makes up about 27%. Meanwhile military is "only" 15% [1] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/ https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...
  - jogjayr 9y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK, Social Security and medicare are benefits available to everyone, rich or poor, after reaching retirement age. The amount you get out has some relation with how much you put in when you worked (it may not be perfectly linear, perhaps favors poorer people, I don't know). Unemployment benefits are for people who have lost jobs meaning they previously paid into unemployment insurance plans. So I would not consider any of these programs to constitute "welfare and benefits of the poor".
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK, Social Security and medicare are benefits available to everyone, rich or poor, after reaching retirement age. Social security is only available to people who have worked in jobs participating in Social Security. Make your living trading without ever being a regular employee, no social security (also true of some state government jobs.) But you are correct that neither it nor Medicare are means-tested, poverty-focussed programs.
      - jogjayr 9y ago
        > who have worked in jobs participating in Social Security. Ah yes. I (sort of) touched upon that when I said "the amount you get out has some relation to how much you put in". But yes, if you never contribute to Social Security, you don't get anything at all even after reaching retirement age. The point is all of those programs involve people getting money out of a system that they have contributed to themselves through their taxes. None of them are "pure" charity, where beneficiaries get something for free.
mnm1 9y ago
Racism has always been a means to an end for the rich (upper upper class aka .01% aka ruling class or whatever you want to call it) in America and elsewhere. It has always been a way to control the masses, especially the poor by dividing them and turning them on each other. It has always been perpetrated from the top down by people who know better. The people at the top count on everyone else being either disinterested (because it doesn't affect them) or too stupid to realize this or learn from history. They count on people being too stupid to see that in a racially divided society, they can never advance or have power that threatens the upper upper class. Part of this control is pretending that racism stems from the poor and uneducated, that it rises out of ignorance rather than willful planning. I suspect the upper middle class is simply trying to imitate the upper upper class in these cases.

scarface74 9y ago

I came from a middle class neighborhood, but I have been around poorer minorities and become more aware of the issues that poorer Whites have. I have a group of five friends that I keep in touch with from a former job. We have a private Slack channel and meet for lunch occasionally - all tech people in our mid 40s. Three White, two Black. I don't think any of them are racists, but two of them say things that show their complete ignorance of the real world. We were talking about the difference between the education system in one part of the metro area - where the school system had lost accreditation and the school systems where we live - all top ranked in an affluent part of town. Their solution was, why don’t they just move? In the part of town with the unaccredited school on the opposite side of town average rent was $650/month. On our side of town, rent is $1600 a month. On top of that; public transportation is basically non existent because the county didn’t want to connect to the metro system because it made it too easy for the “wrong element” to come up here. Not to mention they blamed the housing crisis in 2008 on “poor people getting loans they couldn’t afford”. I had to explain to them how things really worked in real estate from someone who used every trick out there to get real estate without putting any skin in the game, did “strategic defaults”, and bought a new house three years later. Poor people couldn’t do that. Last but not least, I had to explain that welfare and other benefits to the poor was such a small amount of their tax dollars it wasn’t even worth worrying about.

akkat 9y ago
What do you mean "welfare and other benefits of the poor was such a small amount of their tax dollars"? According to a quick Google search [1] social security and unemployment makes up about 33% of the budget and Medicare makes up about 27%. Meanwhile military is "only" 15% [1] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/ https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...
- jogjayr 9y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK, Social Security and medicare are benefits available to everyone, rich or poor, after reaching retirement age. The amount you get out has some relation with how much you put in when you worked (it may not be perfectly linear, perhaps favors poorer people, I don't know). Unemployment benefits are for people who have lost jobs meaning they previously paid into unemployment insurance plans. So I would not consider any of these programs to constitute "welfare and benefits of the poor".
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK, Social Security and medicare are benefits available to everyone, rich or poor, after reaching retirement age. Social security is only available to people who have worked in jobs participating in Social Security. Make your living trading without ever being a regular employee, no social security (also true of some state government jobs.) But you are correct that neither it nor Medicare are means-tested, poverty-focussed programs.
    - jogjayr 9y ago
      > who have worked in jobs participating in Social Security. Ah yes. I (sort of) touched upon that when I said "the amount you get out has some relation to how much you put in". But yes, if you never contribute to Social Security, you don't get anything at all even after reaching retirement age. The point is all of those programs involve people getting money out of a system that they have contributed to themselves through their taxes. None of them are "pure" charity, where beneficiaries get something for free.

mnm1 9y ago

Racism has always been a means to an end for the rich (upper upper class aka .01% aka ruling class or whatever you want to call it) in America and elsewhere. It has always been a way to control the masses, especially the poor by dividing them and turning them on each other. It has always been perpetrated from the top down by people who know better. The people at the top count on everyone else being either disinterested (because it doesn't affect them) or too stupid to realize this or learn from history. They count on people being too stupid to see that in a racially divided society, they can never advance or have power that threatens the upper upper class. Part of this control is pretending that racism stems from the poor and uneducated, that it rises out of ignorance rather than willful planning. I suspect the upper middle class is simply trying to imitate the upper upper class in these cases.