Inequality in America

I'm starting to understand why Americans are so pre-occupied with race. It's often said that race is to Americans what class is to the British. That's roughly true and becomes very obvious when they use the colour-words associated with races to denote class-based stereotypes.

But now I see that poverty really does show up along racial lines. Indiana is not a rich state but I just assumed it was the rural nature of Bloomington that meant that there were so few minorities in my uni classes (except the international students). I think the rest of the town is similar to the undergrads, mostly caucasian. Now I'm teaching in a summer program for disadvantaged high school students they're coming out of the woodwork! Of 40 students, I have 2-3 Hispanics and the rest are African-American (if we count the 2-3 mixed race kids, which all Americans would). Looking at the whole program (including students not in my classes) it's about the same.

I'm proud to be participating in a program that's going to help them but it's scary to see how racially homogeneous the poorest level of American society is. I live in an area where one race is a small minority but selecting for income and education makes them the overwhelming majority. Maybe there are other selection biases going on here but I'm sure that there's a strong correlation.

A large proportion of the staff for the program are also African-American. I was talking to a couple after a meeting last night and one mentioned that there was a caucasian girl finding it a little hard to fit in (I think there's only one caucasian in the whole program, if you don't count mixed-race kids). But the thing was that her idea of trying to learn about African-American culture was "eating fried chicken and listening to rap music." Of course these staff members were disgusted by the stereotyping, blaming it on the parents, but hopefully this will be a good chance for that student to get past the stereotypes.