the evolution of a charge: from white privilege to white supremacist

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29. But how much of that is about poverty and not about race?

It's really hard to disentangle the two, because skin color is so often used as an easy marker of socioeconomic status. But a lot of what gets categorized as racism seems to boil down to middle class people being afraid of the working class, suspecting that anyone in their own neighborhood who looks like an outsider is there to rob them, and worrying that their children will be in danger if they're forced to attend school in poor neighborhoods.

This certainly gets tangled up with race. The nature of white privilege is such that poor white people can "pass" as non-poor if they put on their best clothes and mind their manners, while even affluent black people are likely to be tagged as poor and accused of stealing their own cars or attempting to break into their own homes.

But I suspect that racial tensions would be far more subdued if the middle class didn't feel quite as vulnerable to the loss of income and status -- and if long-established black neighborhoods weren't as actively threatened by gentrification and the elimination of accessible jobs.

And that's not even mentioning the disparities between wealthy communities and poorer ones which affect everything from the funding of public education to the pressure on police departments to extract as much as possible from residents in the form of fines and fees.

It's all very well to demand that Bernie focus on racial justice as well as economic justice. But we can never deal with racial disparities if we don't address the economic disparities. And if we deal with the economic disparities, the racial issues will become far more manageable.