[WS:] Amen. I usually stay away from this subject because it usually turns into guilt tripping by some sanctimonious hollier-than-thou prick, but I would like to quote Max Weber (Economy and Society) who sums it all:
"When the number of competitors increases in relation to the profit span, the participants become interested in curbing competition. usually one group of competitors take some externally identifiable characteristic of another group of (actual or potential) competitors - race, language, religion, local or social origin, descent, residence, etc. - as a pretext for attempting their exclusion. It does not matter which characteristic is chosen in the in the individual case: whatever suggests itself most easily is seized upon.... In spite of their continued competition against one another, the jointly acting competitors now form an "interest group" toward outsiders; there is a growing tendency to set up some kind of association with rational regulations; if the monopolistic interests persist, the time comes when competitors , or another group whom they can influence (for example, a political community), establish a legal order that limits competition through formal monopolies; from then on, certain persons are available as "organs" to protect the monopolistic practices , if need be, with force. In such a case, th einterest group has developed into a "legally privileged group". Such closure, as we want to call it, is an ever-recurring process; it is the source of property in land as well as of all guild and other group of monopolies."
Two observations:
1. Weber's theory explains why the marxist pipe dream of unitary 'working class" has never materialized - workers compete against each other in the same way as any other social group, and find it more advantageous to exclude other workers from access to resources on the grounds of superficial characteristics such as race or residence than to unite against capitalists and bosses.
2. With the slow demise of race as the marker of economic exclusion in the US, new markers are being developed. Perhaps the most prominent of them is the credentialing system aka higher education. Colleges and universities are selling credentials that form the basis of exclusion. The beauty of the credentialing system is that it far more flexible than the rigid system based on ethnicity or social origin. Employers and monopolists can craft or "gerrymander" the credential requirements for access to a particular economic resources to exclude anyone they want regardless of other socio-demographic or cognitive characteristics. One can have higher education and years of experience, but if he/she does not have the exact combination of credential requirements set forth by an employer or an interest group, he or she is effectively excluded and there is little he or she can do about it, legally or otherwise.
With that in mind, guilt tripping about "white supremacy" is basically a bunch of culturalist tripe told by third rate story tellers that, as usually, misses the mark by a mile. Instead of taking about "racism" we should be talking about higher education and its credential dispensation system, which is becoming for the 21st century what ethnicity, race and slavery was for the 19th century. To put it bluntly, members of ANY socio-demographic group can go to the underclass today not because of their skin color, social orgin or "culture" - or for that matter any other socio-demographic or cognitive characteristic - but because of their lack of a proper and narrowly defined set credentials dispensed by the higher education system.
This is also why colleges and universities, which today have the physical capacity of accepting virtually anyone who applies - nonetheless maintain strict barriers of entry and a rigorous selection system enforced by ubiquitous testing *). It is not about education but about exclusion, or "club goods" in econo-lingo. Without those entry barriers enforced by testing, the credentials they dispense could not effectively exclude people from access to resources, and their credentialing business would be greatly damaged.
*) In reality it is a bit more complex. Colleges, universities, and auxiliary institutions form an elaborate credential dispensation system with elaborate rank hierarchies, referral and feeder loops, market niches, differential entry barriers and pricing, etc. which is a subject to another discussion
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."