[joshuamorton]

Both are an issue. Trying to reframe all racial issues as only class issues is as dumb as trying to claim all class issues are racial in nature.

Few people who think about racism deny class has impact though. An intersectional analysis would suggest that a rich black, rich white, poor black, and poor white experience would all be different.

> Walk into a trailer park in Appalachia and talk about white privilege. See what they think.

Right, I can't tell if your argument here is that you don't think a poor Appalachian person would be up on the intersectional lingo, or you think that they can't critically analyze different kinds of privilege, or you think that they think that there's some kind of moral argument that poor white people can't also have advantages over black people and I'd feel bad talking to them about that? In any case, you're wrong.

Also you realize that Appalachia has a significant black population right, its 10% of Appalachia vs. 12% of the US population. Appalachia includes large swaths of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. (also it includes major metro areas in Pennsylvania, so trying to paint "Appalachia" as a rural-white-poor thing is dumb and misrepresentative of Appalachia).

[JPKab]

Look I'm not going to quibble about what is and is not Appalachia. My definition of Appalachia part of the South that was inaccessible to rivers and navigable waterways and had poor soil and was therefore not remotely of interest for plantation owners. Therefore there were no native populations of slaves when the civil war ended.

My point is that a plurality of people in the United States who live below the poverty line happen to be white. And when you talk about class have you ever seen Google or any tech company talk about making sure they are hiring from a diverse set of classes? Of course not.

Show me a bunch of googlers and I'll show you a bunch of people whose parents were college-educated no matter what their skin color is.

All of this is just laziness at it's core. Treating humans differently because of their group membership in person-to-person interactions is the epitome of bigotry. It's not acceptable when cops do it and it's not acceptable for you to give passes to people of certain colors who have become bigots despite probably never experiencing extreme racism themselves. My cousin was murdered in Virginia Beach by a man who happened to be black in 2006. It would be inexcusable for me to hold that against other people that share that man's ethnicity. But if the colors were reversed you would have no problem giving me a pass because you have low expectations for people that don't look like you.