I want it, I need it, I gotta have it

In the past week I have noticed a trend emerging from our readings and our videos, and I mostly noticed it when we were watching the Tim Wise video and he talked about this idea of divide and conquer by the “elite” of this nation more specifically in relation to the lower ninth ward and St. Bernard Perish, Shawmut.  When he said that those two communities had much more in common than they realized, but the whites in Shawmut blamed the blacks of the lower ninth ward for their problems I realized that most of the history of racism correlates with the history of poverty. When Time Wise said that “the whiteness, and the allure of whiteness has tricked these have nothing in their bank account white people into believe that they have more in common with the rich white folks in St. Charles avenue that didn’t lose anything in that flooding, than they have in common with the black working folks who live about 500 yards away” is such a great line because it isn’t just poor white people that feel that way it is how many poor minority groups feel. 

Even though blacks, Latinos , Asians, Native Americans, Middle Easterners, and pretty much every other poor ethnic group that lives in the United States has been discriminated against many times they refuse to associate with one another because it has been imbedded in their minds that even though they have all been treated equally as crappy by rich people, who are mostly white (even though there are minorities that are very wealthy), they refuse to believe that they have something in common with each other.  It’s just like the first Bonilla-Silva article we read where he discussed racism in Brazil and how even though dark skin is very prevalent there is still discrimination based on how light and how dark the skin is.  And the lightness of skin has created a class structure in Brazil where light skinned Brazilians are much more privileged than the dark skinned ones and that is true for most Latin American countries.

From an economic standpoint white seems to be the only color that matters, and it greatly affects how you are treated in the United States.  In Chicago, which is probably the most racially segregated city many neighborhoods are divided primarily by ethnic groups although there are neighborhoods like Pilsen that have become more ethnically diverse.  Segregation begins when a certain economic level is attained and the powers that be, which are mostly white, want to keep it that way.   It is no longer acceptable to be blatantly racist but there exist other forms of keeping certain groups of people out of a community mostly through Political manipulation and economic manipulation.  For example a community could be economically deprived by not allowing it to receive as much funding as other neighborhoods in order to maintain and exert control over the population, which is what happened in Shawmut, but it occurs in many other areas throughout the United States.