Arms inspectors vote on BBC

Thomas Seay entheogens at yahoo.com
Thu Feb 13 10:28:01 PST 2003


--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:

I am sick and tired of cashiers,
> waitresses, and other
> service workers making faces when their hear
> accented English.
>

Well, even though I have argued against "generalization", I do think it is important to recognize what you are saying. So in your experience, do you find that working class folk, "blue collar" are more racist, xenophobic, war-worshipping than other folks? What causes them to be so?

I grew up in a coal mining community in West Virginia. I knew many people who went to war and they had different reactions to it. Obviously if you go to war, you can either come back hating it and the people who sent you to war, OR you can try to justify it some way in your own mind and, as a result, be hostile towards those who did not have to go through such hell. One can imagine that after having been forced to go through such a horror, your reactions would be stronger than someone who had just talked about it from a distance. Since working class people are inevitably the group that largely gets sent to war, it seems reasonable that their emotions would run deeper either way.

I dont know much about the roots of racism or xenophobia. However, if you are unemployed and rightly or wrongly think that a certain "group" is taking jobs away from you, your reaction will be much stronger than someone who just has to think about racism from a somewhat removed position. Of course, in the era of globalization this problem has spread beyond the working class to the middle classes and their reaction in certain cases has been no less, and probably more, hateful than the so-called "working classes".

Are working-class people more violent than others? Perhaps. I dont know. Where I grew up, I, like other boys, got into a lot of fights growing up. I was surprized to discover, when the question has come up, that many of my friends raised in the suburbs had never been in a fist fight. I almost laughed when I heard that. Is it true or is my experience unique? If it is true, why is one group more violent, racist, xenophobic than the other?

Well, I am sure that there are others on this list more qualified than I to speak to that question. But if your point is that we shouldn't have any romantic notions about the American working class, or any "working class" for that matter, then I agree with you.

-Thomas

===== <<Be like me! The Primal Mother, eternally creative, eternally impelling into life,

eternally drawing satisfaction from the ceaseless flux of phenomena.>>

-Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy"

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