probably. the people speaking: two women were black (1 of whom had grown up poor herself), 1 Mexican, 1 Puerto Rican, and four white women. The rest didn't say a whole lot, but they got annoyed or looked really puzzled when I said off-the-wall stuff like the fact that a capitalist economy tends toward underemployment.
The woman who hosted, the one with the picture of Che in her living room, cracked a joke about the racial jokes between her and her husband (he's black, from Mississippi and apparently mocks his poor education -- being Mississippi and all -- which came up because some of the sites discussed in the book were in Mississippi and people were amazed at how racist the state was). She said she thought that she'd be happy to pay more taxes for a training facility in the middle of the project, staffed with assistants and computers for job training and looking for work. The other woman, black, who'd grown up poor and on the edge of the projects (with relatives who still live there), elaborated on the idea in one of the conversations where people outline their ideals. Anyway, the Mexican woman said, "But you know, like I always say to my husband, 'You better bolt those computers down 'cause us Mexicans will steal anything.'"
I think people might excuse this as an instance where women of color in the room felt the need to position themselves as the "good people of color." But, in this case the pressure wasn't immediate; rather, the conversation had been moving toward a more progressive analysis. Another black woman and I were talking about Joel Kovel's book on school inequality, and how some schools have no textbooks in one neighborhood, while right next door is a school for the wealthy with two Olympic-sized pools and TV production station, etc. We were opening up space to talk about inequality... Which is when someone said, "YOu know, I'd pay more taxes if we could get rid of problems like that." brief pause "AND, if I knew that the money wasn't being wasted."
Someone in the room thought she meant something like AIG as an example of unwise spending. Someone else said something about blowing money on military spending and wars -- and no I'm not kidding, these were all women who are in or married to or connected to the marines or navy.
I almost got the sense that the person who made the AIG comment was trying to steer the convo away from a discussion of the deserving and undeserving poor, etc. But I couldn't get a read on her because, with that comment about waste, the conversation got extra-lively and animated, with people moving forward in their seat, the body language more expansive, and lots of side conversations.
The conversation went from there, with two white women telling stories of supposedly being told that they couldn't get any temporary assistance, so instead they should quit their jobs and collect "welfare". This started a cavalcade of amens from everyone saying, "Right and they told you how to screw the system, didn't they? They told you to quit your job and collect welfare, when all you wanted was some daycare assistance or a little help to tide you over."
I sat there and thought, this has all the markings of a myth, the kind of myth that goes around about Vietnam vets getting spit on. Where someone claims something happened to them, and then others say they knew of someone too. It kind of spiraled out from there, since now white women in the room had been given permission to say what they really felt, I guess. By the end, there were only me and another woman, the woman who'd attended the black sorority and majored in soc, who weren't on the magic bus.
Anyway, as I've mentioned before, this conversation happens a lot. It was hard moving here because my experience with people of color was always with progressive people of color -- radicals in fact. So, while I knew from reading that internalized racism exists, I'd just never really encountered it on a daily basis in the form of open hostility to "people in the projects", etc. At work, I wrote it off as people who just weren't especially progressive. I started reading the work of black scholars, like Dyson, who've examined the historical and contemporary dynamics of the "black middle class's war on poor blacks."
But now i'm sitting in a room with people who *are* self identified progressives, some of whom are at the GI coffee house they are *that* politicized in other progressive ways.
I want to be clear that my intent isn't to put people down. Just getting it off my chest. Sometimes, it's painful to sit in a room and listen to people say these things.