<< Justin, you claimed originally that we should not speak for the working
class. This suggests to me that you don't consider yourself working class.
[or wojtek, or me or anyone on this list i guess]. you're wrong because
you don't know anything about me and you don't appear to realize that there
are a few working class people on this list--at least as you seem to
suggest. i presume when you say that you'd agree that the white working
class has racist attitudes, then you are talking about low level service
labor, manual laborers. what you gave me was evidence that whites are
racist. that wasn't in dispute. what was in dispute was that one section
of them, "the working class" was more racist than another segment of them,
namely i guess people such as yourself. there is very little evidence for
such a claim >>
I'm Jewish and I don't presume to speak for the Jews. I don't care if you are a secretary in an office or a welder in a plant, you are not authorized to speak for the working class. Who nominated you? You can speak as a working class person, which is not the same thing. Me, I'm a petty-bourgeois professional. I work for wages and own no productive assets, but that just goes to show the limits of a merely objective definition of class.
As to the comparative point, whether white workers are more racist than middle class professionals, I didn't say that and don't believe it--not, however, because it would be snobbish or offensive to say it, but because the data do not support it. White workers are just about as racist as white professionals. "Everybody knows" that the white suburbs are filled with people who don't want their kids to go to school with Blacks, and it's quite true too.
However, as people of the left, we are not in the business of organizing white suburbanites. The GOP does a very nice job of that, thank, you. But if we don't recognize that there is a lot of racism among white workers, we are not going to get off the ground in organizing an important part of our own professioned constituency.
--jks