This point dramatizes the total interconnection of race and gender with *class* interests. As a number of posts on this list and and in left publications have pointed out, the substitution of workfare for welfare is a growing disaster for all workers, holding down almost everyone's wages. And the attack on women (all women) which the attack on welfare represents took ideological energy from racism. When the battle was on for ERA, delegations of women from various localities went to Springfield to lobby legislators (following Max's "sane politics" rather than my nutty one of raising hell -- which is how ERA was gotten through Congress) -- any how, the State Senator from this area responded to them by attacking black women in Chicago. The technique worked to some extent by simply taking up the time the delegation spent in his office.
This is also why I objected so to Kevin LaPalme's statement that he would decide on the importance of race on the basis of the local situation. For every locality in the U.S. is embedded in the issue of race in some way.
Carrol
P.S. Class interests are at stake also in the specific case of Mumia, the war on crime, and the prison-industrial complex. Anyone seriously interested in the condition of "labor in general" in the U.S. ought to be aggresively interested in the Mumia case -- and probably ought to be subscribing to that magnificent journal (edited from prison cells in the State of Washington), *Prison Legal News*.