The shift to companionate marriage in South Asia and elsewhere is widely read as a move from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ resulting in an expansion of individual agency, especially for women. This paper critically examines the narratives of urban middle-class women in Sri Lanka spanning three generations to illustrate that rather than indicating a radical shift in the way they negotiated between individual desires and social norms, the emphasis on ‘choice’ signals a shift in the narrative devices used in the (...) presentation of the ‘self’. The paper illustrates how young women's narratives about marriage appear to suggest ‘modernity’ as inevitable—that its processes are reconstituting the person who, less constrained by ‘tradition’ and collective expectations, is now experiencing greater freedom in the domain of marriage. However, it also shows how urban middle-class families in Sri Lanka have collectively invested in the narrative of choice through which ‘a choosing person’ is consciously created as a mark of the family's modernity and progress. Rather than signalling freedom, these narratives about choice reveal how women are often burdened with the risks and responsibility of agency. The paper illustrates that the ‘choosing person’ is produced through narratives that emphasise agency as a responsibility that must be exercised with caution because women are expected by and obligated to their families to make the ‘right’ choices. Hence, a closer look at the individualised ‘choosing person’ reveals a less unitary, relational self with permeable boundaries embedded within and accountable to family and kinship. (shrink)

"You have to come to my wedding," Kavita told me, turning to face me where I sat next to her on the couch. "You can come with the other people from the street. You will get everything you need for your *research* there." "I will come, I will come!" I replied enthusiastically. I had only met Kavita and her two younger sisters, Arthi and Deepti (see Figure 2.1), mere minutes before this invitation was extended. I had initially come to Pulan (...) that day in October 2012 to meet another woman, Heena, whose family rents a room on the third story of Kavita's family's home. Heena and I had been sitting in the furniture refurbishing store she operates with her husband on the main street of Pulan when Deepti, Kavita's youngest sister, passed by. Heena introduced us and told me to go with Deepti to meet her family. When we reached the family's three-story house-the largest in the gali-Deepti led me past the empty rooms on the ground floor, which I would eventually begin renting, to the second-story living room. There, we found Kavita and Arthi organizing clothing and jewelry they had purchased earlier in the day for the upcoming wedding festivities. Kavita made room for me to sit next to her on the couch and began asking me about myself. I immediately warmed to her because of her open, friendly smile and sharp, staccato Hindi, which I delighted in being able to understand. I explained that I had come to India to study how women's lives are different in rural and urban areas, and Kavita assured me that she and her family could help. She noted that her parents had come to Udaipur from Ram Nagar, a large village thirty-five kilometers north of the city, and that the family would be returning for her and her older brother Krishna's weddings the following month. Their weddings would be held five days apart to help reduce the difficulties of family members traveling from outside Udaipur. Prompted by the description of my research, Kavita commented on differences that she recognized between the village and the city. The biggest difference, she suggested, was the experience of caste, namely that in the village, people from different jatis live separately, whereas in the city, people are "mixed." As I would come to learn when visiting Ram Nagar for various functions, there is a fair amount of caste and religious diversity in the village. Although spatial and ritual segregation was rather strictly maintained during religious observances, it is likely more flexible in everyday life. The segregation during ritual functions-the occasions for which Kavita also traveled to the village-likely informed her sense of a lack of "mixing" in the village as. The majority of residents in the area of Ram Nagar where the family maintains a home were also from the Mali (lit: gardener) jati, although Mali was not a majority jati in Pulan. (shrink)

The growing Chinese middle class and their accumulation of wealth and economic capital have seen an increasing number of Chinese students pursuing their education in the West. Due to this growing number, motivations behind their decision to study abroad warrant scholarly treatment. This article discusses the motives of Chinese middle-class families and their children in seeking studying abroad. The paper reports on a recent study of 166 students on American campuses from 2017 to 2018. It uses Bourdieusian concepts of (...) capital, habitus, and the idea of social mobility and social reproduction, to understand Chinese middle-class families’ strategic decisions around studying overseas in relation to employability, labour market competitiveness, and family support. Studying abroad, therefore, is construed by Chinese middle class families as a way of pursuing and preserving their social status and social mobility. (shrink)

An enduring question in the cultural study of psychological experience concerns how emotion may play a role in shaping moral aspects of children’s lives as they are mentored into socially preferred ways of understanding and responding to the world at hand. This article brings together approaches from psychological and linguistic anthropology to explore how cultural schemas of normativity are communicated, embodied, and enacted as children participate in day-to-day family activities and routines. Illustrative examples emanate from a videotaped corpus of naturalistic (...) interactional data that document the daily lives of 32 ethnically diverse U.S. middle-class families who reside in the Los Angeles, California metropolitan region. The article employs discourse and narrative analysis to examine how children are apprenticed into perceiving, appraising, and reacting to the emotions of self and others as culturally shaped indicators for proper comportment. Data analysis emphasizes how implicit components of caregivers’ interactions with children (i.e., gesture, gaze, facial expression) intertwine with explicit, verbal communication to constitute intricately layered affective messages that shape the evaluative frames through which children interpret, display, and respond to emotions. The article identifies two culturally salient childrearing practices, “pep talks” and “time outs,” that apprentice children into moral accountable relationships with others by encouraging them to manage their emotions in culturally preferred ways. Study findings suggest that parental communications conveying praise and approval—or conversely indexing disapproval—towards children are emotionally resonant motivational practices in this cultural milieu as children are mentored into culturally meaningful emotional management techniques. The article highlights how children actively employ semiotic socio-communicative resources and it closely traces their sense-making processes in tandem with their discursive contributions to the moment-by-moment interaction. It argues that emotion, morality, and interpersonal relations are critical in shaping children’s acquisition of consensually validated ways of perceiving, feeling, and responding to the phenomena they encounter in their day-to-day lives. This perspective aims towards contextualized understandings that render plausible connections between local contexts of everyday action and broader macro-level discourses and master narratives, such as those associated with a neo-liberal emphasis on cultivating citizens who learn to regulate their emotions on behalf of self and others. (shrink)

In recent decades, urban agriculture has drawn practitioners seeking ways to increase both environmental sustainability and social equity in their cities. The practice has also drawn criticism for the ways it reproduces inequalities based on differences of class and race. In this paper, I argue contestations around urban agriculture are part of ongoing yet shifting processes of class formation intersecting with racial differentiation, in particular the emergence of green middle-class identity. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in (...) a small city in Michigan, USA, I examine urban agriculture as a historic spatial and aesthetic practice, drawing on examples of chicken-keeping, permaculture-style gardening, and concerns with neatness and blight. By positioning urban agriculture within historical narratives of landscape aesthetics and land use policy, I demonstrate how this practice becomes bound up in the ongoing production of class distinctions and inequalities. Throughout, I draw attention to how processes of class formation unfold in ways that diverge from, or are in excess of, local gardeners’ and agriculturalists’ intentions. In conclusion, I gesture to the ways the instability and dynamism of class formation via urban agriculture presents opportunities for addressing the reproduction of race- and class-based inequalities and for nurturing more equitable and sustainable forms of urban agriculture practice. (shrink)

In this article, I use radiation-shielding maternity clothes as a window to explore motherhood and reproductive uncertainty in urban China. By engaging with literature on scientific uncertainty and intensive mothering, I argue that the scientific uncertainty over the possible negative impact of electromagnetic radiation on pregnancy has led to a situation in which uncertainty is being socially reproduced by experts, markets, and policy makers through different media channels. Middle-class mothers do not fully believe that the cloak is scientifically trustworthy. (...) But under the influence of social networks and the ambient awareness of the reproductive crisis related to environmental pollution and the pressures of modern life, middle-class mothers still choose to wear the clothes for a variable period of pregnancy for psychological feelings of safety. In the end, they choose to cloak their pregnancies but immediately claim their suspicions of the cloak. (shrink)

In the contemporary context of increasing inequality and various forms of segregation, this volume analyzes the transition to neoliberal politics in Santiago de Chile. Using an innovative methodological approach that combines georeferenced data and multi-stage cluster analysis, Méndez and Gayo study the old and new mechanisms of social reproduction among the upper middle class. In so doing, they not only capture the interconnections between macro- and microsocial dimensions such as urban dynamics, schooling demands, cultural repertoires and socio-spatial trajectories, but (...) also offer a detailed account of elite formation, intergenerational accumulation, and economic, cultural, and social inheritance dynamics. (shrink)

Informed by s socio-historical theory, this paper will report on a study that sought to document the literacy and numeracy outcomes for children living in low socio-economic circumstances in a region south-east of Melbourne, Australia. The research focused on children in preschool and child care centres in the year prior to beginning school, and was designed to map literacy and numeracy experiences of children in the home and in the early childhood centre. In this paper an analysis of the cultural (...) tools that families were intentionally developing in the context of their homes and communities is featured. A socio-historical analysis of the data revealed children’s active engagement in the funds of knowledge (Moll and Greenberg 1990, Moll, 1990, and Moll, 2000) available within the community, the situated nature of learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991) within their communities, and the challenge for families transcending the constraints of ‘everyday learning’ to engage with ‘schooled learning’ (Hedegaard, 1998). The study also revealed the institutional barriers to learning the landscape of schooling (Greeno, 1991) and the deficit positioning evident for children and their families within the official script of middle class early childhood discourse (Fleer, 2003). (shrink)

Using in-depth interviews with women in the Puerto Rican community of Chicago, this article explores how migration emerged as a strategy for families across class backgrounds and how gender relations within the family mediate the migration of married working-class and middle-class Puerto Rican women. The women who followed their husbands to Chicago participated in another form of labor migration, since some wives joined their husbands in the paid economy and those who did not contributed with the reproductive work that (...) supported their husbands and families. This article also explores how Puerto Rican women confront the basic duality of reproductive and productive work. (shrink)

Based on data collected from a representative-sample survey conducted in five Chinese cities (Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu, and Hangzhou) in the middle of 2008, this study examines the behavioral orientations of Chinese middle class toward the local elections which are held in urban areas, and the attitudinal orientations of Chinese middle class toward the current regime. The results indicate that there is a strong division within the group of the middle class, especially along the lines of the relationship with (...) the state. Therefore, this study suggests that the Chinese middle class is a class without a shared class identity. (shrink)

This discussion focuses on two important trends in American childbirth that have emerged in the past 30 years, the demand for a perfect baby and the desire for a perfect birth. These two trends are particularly important in the subgroup of middle-class women who have decided on delayed childbearing. Tremendous technological innovations, such as ultra-sound, prenatal genetic analysis, and fetal monitoring, have promoted the perception that physicians can control the prenatal environment and predict the pregnancy outcome. This expectation may lead (...) to bitterness and anger in the event of an adverse pregnancy outcome. In contrast, women and their families have also come to desire more control over the birth experience. If the parents’ birth plan is not achieved and their expectations not fulfilled, many parents feel they have not performed well. When the physician acts as a guide in the birth process, parents and physicians together may transcend the conflict to achieve a more satisfactory birth experience. (shrink)

Low-carbon innovation is usually depicted as an exemplar of pursuit of the common good, in both mainstream policy discussion and the emerging orthodoxy of transition studies. Yet it may emerge as a key means of intensifying inequality. We analyse low-carbon innovation as a social and political process through the prism of differential risk-classes, focusing on the pivotal global case of emergence of the Chinese middle-class in seaboard megacities, especially regarding the profound challenges of urban e-mobility transition. This approach shows (...) emergence of this still-forming sociopolitical grouping as tightly and complementarily coupled with the assembling of innovations that meaningfully tackle global risks, such as climate change, while also intensifying existing inequalities. Misrecognition of the duality of low-carbon innovations as both moral technologies and as relatively expensive consumer products has the potentiality to be a key mechanism of this process, thereby serving to reproduce, constitute and legitimize inequalities in novel and unexpected ways. (shrink)

Globalization of the Indian economy has dramatically influenced social life in India. The expansion of the middle class is said to have occurred as a consequence of this process. Based on ethnographic research among lower-middle-class families in West Bengal, India, the author examines the apparent paradox between women's positive perceptions of empowerment and the overall negative impact of structural adjustment policies on women. Many scholars argue that globalization has been detrimental to women due to growing structural gender inequalities, but (...) many respondents identify greater opportunities to challenge preexisting patriarchal norms through the role models available in the globalized media. While there are increasing inequalities for households, women do not consider these to be gender disadvantages, emphasizing instead the opportunities for greater independence. The author pays particular attention to the confluence of the prowomen consumer discourses of the global market with earlier developmentalist notions of the public role of women. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Scenario 1: The World According to Adam Swift Scenario 2: The World According to Plato Scenario 3: The World According to Adam Smith Conclusion: The Three Fs Notes References.

The media is aglow with reports of the booming economy and rising prosperity in the United States since the early 1990s. Indeed, the run-up in stock prices between 1995 and the end of 1999 has created the impression that all families are doing well in terms of income and wealth. This, however, is certainly not the case. As I shall demonstrate, most American families have seen their level of well-being stagnate over the last quarter-century.

Many scholars have done research that suggests that too many poor black and Latino families have child-rearing strategies and home environments that are inconsistent with school achievement. This book reports on an effort to intervene in the home life of a group of non-white parents and grandparents who have low-performing children where each family is asked to adopt the characteristics of middle-class families.

A new construction of a certain conceptual space is presented. Elements of this conceptual space correspond to concept elements of reality, which potentially comprise an infinite number of qualities. This construction of a conceptual space solves a problem stated by Dietz and his co-authors in 2013 in the context of Voronoi diagrams. The fractal construction of the conceptual space is that this problem simply does not pose itself. The concept of convexity is discussed in this new conceptual space. Moreover, the (...) meaning of convexity is discussed in full generality, for example when space is deprived of it, its substitutes for concept domains are considered. (shrink)

BackgroundIndividuals with early phase cognitive impairment are frequently affected by existential distress, social avoidance and associated health issues. The demand for efficient psychological support is crucial from both an individual and a societal perspective. We have developed a novel psychological intervention manual for providing a non-medical path to enhanced psychological health in the cognitively impaired population. The current article provides specific information on the randomized controlled trial -design and methods. The main hypothesis is that participants receiving PIPCI will increase their (...) psychological flexibility compared to participants in the active control group and the waiting list control group. The secondary hypotheses are that participants receiving PIPCI will improve psychological health compared to participants in the active control group and the waiting list control group.Materials and MethodsThis three-arm RCT will recruit participants from the cognitive centers at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm and randomize approximately 120 individuals in the early phase of cognitive impairment to either an experimental group, an active control group or a waiting list control group. Intervention outcome will be evaluated with self-report questionnaires on physical and psychological aspects of health, cognitive assessment, biological markers and health care costs. Assessments will be performed at pre- and post-intervention, as well as at a 6-month follow-up.DiscussionThe development of a potentially feasible and effective psychological intervention tailored for early phase cognitive impairment has the potential to advance the non-pharmacological intervention field. This is especially important given the extensive burden for many affected individuals and their families and the current lack of effective treatments. If the psychological intervention discussed here shows feasibility and efficacy, there is potential for far-reaching healthcare implications for patients with early cognitive impairment at risk of developing dementia.Clinical Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov: NCT04356924. Date of registration: April 22, 2020. URL: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04356924. (shrink)

Families of children with mental health challenges may have been particularly vulnerable to emotional distress during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-sectional study surveyed 81 parents of children ages 6–17 years receiving mental health treatment in an outpatient clinic during the pandemic. We sought to characterize the impact of the pandemic on family relationships and parental well-being. Additionally, regression and ANCOVA models examined associations between four potentially protective factors—parents’ psychological resilience, perceived social support, positive family experiences during the pandemic, and (...) children’s use of cognitive or behavioral coping strategies—with family relationships and parental well-being. Findings suggest that families of children with mental health conditions experienced remarkable challenges to family relationships, parental well-being, and parents’ perceived capacity to support their children’s mental health. Nearly 80% of parents reported a negative impact of the pandemic on their own well-being, and 60% reported reduced ability to support their children’s mental health. Simultaneously, protective factors appeared to mitigate the negative impact of the pandemic. Particularly, support within the family and from external sources were associated with better self-reported well-being for parents and their capacity to support their children. Children’s use of coping tools, likely enhanced by mental health treatment, was also positively related to better family relationships and parental ability to support children with mental health challenges. Our findings highlight the need for enhancing supports for families at multiple levels including individual skill-building, family-based/parenting support, and community-based support. (shrink)

In the evaluation of genomic high-throughput technologies, the idea of “utility” plays an important role. The “clinical utility” of genomic data refers to the improvement of healthcare outcomes, its “personal utility” to benefits that go beyond healthcare purposes. Both concepts are contested. Moreover, there are only few empirical insights regarding their interpretation by those professionally involved or personally affected. Our paper presents results from qualitative research (20 semi-structured interviews) regarding professionals’ and personally affected people’s views on the utility of genomic (...) information. We find that the discussion of clinical utility is the domain of professionals who primarily consider aspects of test validity and clinical outcomes. By contrast, personal utility plays a prominent role in affected persons’ discussions. Four different aspects are addressed: (a) life and family planning, (b) relief and justification, (c) self-knowledge and self-determination, and (d) entertainment. These differences have important implications for informed consent and counseling in the context of genomic high-throughput technologies. (shrink)

In contemporary debates on euthanasia, physician assisted suicide and withholding and withdrawing life prolonging treatments, besides commonly used reasons, which are based on presumption of freedom and avoidance of pain, there is also an idea of a duty to die. Given that individuals are also members of society, and that they have families and loved ones, it is necessary to discuss cases when illness causes severe burdens for lives of loved ones. We consider that patient’s just assessment of duty (...) to die can be legitimate candidate for justification of procedure of acceleration of death, taken care of necessary conditions of justified social support for patients and necessary aliment from family and society. In this paper we examine main features of duty to die thesis, extract objections, and offer guidelines for continued discussion. We also want to express the importance of establishing social circumstances and preconditions for protecting the individuals.U suvremenim raspravama o eutanaziji i liječnički potpomognutom samoubojstvu, te odustajanju od tretmana, osim uobičajenih razloga koji se temelje na slobodi i izbjegavanju patnje osobe koja traži ubrzavanje smrti, postoji i teza o dužnosti umiranja. S obzirom na to da je pojedinac ujedno i član zajednice, odnosno da ima obitelj i voljene, nužno je raspraviti o slučajevima kada bolest izaziva značajne teškoće za život njegovih bližnjih. Smatramo kako i pacijentova pravedna prosudba o dužnosti umiranja može biti legitiman kandidat za opravdanje postupaka ubrzavanja smrti, uz nužne preduvjete pravedne društvene podrške pacijentu i dužne skrbi od strane obitelji i društva. U ovom tekstu razlažemo osnovne značajke teze o dužnosti umiranja, izdvajamo prigovore i dajemo smjernice za nastavak rasprave te izražavamo važnost ustanovljavanja društvenih okolnosti i preduvjete za zaštitu pojedinaca. (shrink)

In Bangladesh, due to economic growth and greater access to education, more girls and women are veiling, even as they are also more likely to be in school or employed. Some scholars identify this trend of women appearing both “more modern” and “more religious” as paradoxical. On the basis of 114 in-depth interviews with Bangladeshi migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Singapore, and South Korea and their wives in rural Bangladesh, I claim that Muslim women in middle-class Bengali families (...) who veil are cultivating symbolic boundaries guided by an accountability structure of middle-class religiosity and gender conservatism. The increasing tendency of middle-class Muslim women to appear both “more modern” and “more religious” can be explained by examining the role that veiling plays in signaling class status through conspicuous consumption, moral superiority, and respectable femininity, differentiating them from lower class women. I conclude that “doing gender” through veiling must be understood as also “doing middle-class difference” in Bengali Muslim families in rural Bangladesh. (shrink)

When a professor from Middle Europe teaches Computer Ethics in the Middle East using a textbook from the US, cultural differences become apparent. A main challenge lies in avoiding cultural imperialism during teaching. In order to meet this challenge, personal portfolios have been used for course work. The course design as well as portfolio tasks are presented and experiences are discussed. Based on our experiences we recommend applying this approach to equally overcome effects of group dynamics in similar courses as (...) well as to bridge the generational gap that normally exists between students and professors. (shrink)

Physically frail, badly educated girls, brought up to lead useless lives as idle gentlewomen, married to dominant husbands, and relegated to "separate spheres" of life—these phrases have often been used to describe Victorian upper-middle-class women. M. Jeanne Peterson rejects such formulations and the received wisdom they embody in favor of a careful examination of Victorian ladies and their lives. Focusing on a network of urban professional families over three generations, this book examines the scope and quality of gentlewomen's (...) education, their physical lives, their relationship to money, their experience of family illness and death, and their relationships to men (brothers and friends as well as fathers and husbands). Peterson also examines the prominent place of work in the lives of these "leisured" Victorian ladies, both single and married. Far from idle, the mothers, wives, and daughters of Victorian clergymen, doctors, lawyers, university dons, and others were accomplished and productive members of society who made substantial public and private contributions to virtually every sphere of Victorian life. (shrink)

Commemorating the life and work of Dr John Bennett; his lifelong contribution to Early Childhood Education and Care, and his ongoing influence on policy, research and practice in this field, In Search of Social Justice is a tribute to a preeminent scholar and his vision for an equitable and high-quality start for all children. Working tirelessly to raise the profile of Early Childhood Education and Care, and prioritise the rights and well-being of children and families in national and international (...) policy, John Bennet played an invaluable role in improving the position of young children globally. In Search of Social Justice takes John's legacy as a starting point for critical examination of the changing discourse on Early Childhood Education, and argues for the continued relevance of his approach. Drawing on personal reflections, vignettes and testimonials from eminent authors who shared their professional lives with him, the book foregrounds John's insistence that we must continue to shape policy and provision through inquiry, high-quality evidence, passion and persistence, improving the early experiences of all young children. As much a celebration of John's work and achievements, as a call to collective action towards achieving his vision for equitable, quality early childhood education and care, this is a fascinating read for students, researchers and activists in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care. (shrink)

Nationalism has become a contested construct because scholars doubt its ideological authenticity and global migratory consciousness, which promotes transcultural / transnational identity, and problematizes its raison d’être. Though Abouet and Oubrerie’s graphic novel could be read as a portrayal of the emerging urban center and its postmodern identities, this study rather investigates how Aya de Yopougon galvanizes juvenile nationalistic consciousness through age-long African communal identity. Using the postcolonial theory, the paper argues that the epistemology of nationalism, as a forerunner (...) of nationhood, has been inherently encapsulated in African communal identity as manifested in the lives of middle-class dwellers of Yopougon, a suburb of Abidjan. It further deconstructs the symbolic Eurocentric paradigms of nationalism because nationalistic consciousness is located in the African definition of “family” and “community” revealed in the setting of Yopougon which contrasts with other spaces that bear the emblem of nationhood in the novel. Yopougon is not Anderson’s “imagined community”; its inhabitants reflect African communal identity that is located in gender complementarities and civic interdependence. The paper concludes that communalism could be an African brand of modern nationalism, used to develop the nationalistic and communalistic consciousness of the Ivorian youths who are faced with crude realities of a postcolonial society. (shrink)

Hatred As A Sign Of Life. We've seen a lot of this in the last year, in the last four to five years, in fact. So much hatred that people were willing to risk their lives rather than wear a mask to protect themselves (and others) from COVID-19.So much hatred against them... against the other... against those others.If nothing else, this past year made strikingly visible the divides that exist in the United States, and yet the nature of the major (...) divide remained unspoken.It is not race; it is socioeconomic class.Race is the smoke and mirrors used to hide the class disparities that exist. The truth is really very simple. For every black, urban member of the poor, there are several white members of the rural poor who are wondering why they are not getting as much attention. Members of the (predominantly white and middle- to upper-class) intelligentsia are so focused on not being racist that they don't see how prejudiced they are against the poor. We see a black student and think “Poor kid! All the prejudice he or she has faced!” We fail to see the poverty in a white face. We also fail to see wealth in a black face.I once had a black student come to my office in a fury. A professor had told her that she wrote well, “all things considered,” which she took to mean that she wrote very well for a black student. I believe her interpretation was correct. Why was she upset? Because both of her parents were lawyers. Of course, she knew how to write! One assumes that all children of lawyers know how to write—regardless of skin color. Apparently, there was doubt about the existence of black lawyers.Furthermore, we shouldn't talk about white privilege. As many whites will point out, they're white, but they're not privileged. This term is part of why Clinton failed so miserably in 2016. The truth is that it's wealth privilege. You may disagree with this. But it's the inability to see the suffering of poverty in rural white communities that led to the creation of Trump supporters. I know that middle-class and wealthy people (black and white) also supported Trump, but not for the same reasons as the white rural poor. The white rural poor had had enough.Moreover, when you make the comparison by the right measures, you find that blacks and whites of the same socioeconomic class have the same rates of college graduation, the same rates of employment, and the same leverage of wealth and class. A black kid from West Philly has nothing in common with the black wealthy elites that summer at Oaks Bluff on Martha's Vineyard. That black kid has more in common with the poor “white trash” kid from Alabama who also can't afford the opportunity costs that go with attending college.Until we own up to the problem of socioeconomic class, we will face continued trouble in the United States. Let us be honest with ourselves. The “problem of race” in the United States is about economics. The notion of reparations is about money. The idea that most black families have not acquired as much wealth as some white families is a matter of money. It's not a “problem of race” per se. It's the problem that your skin color may be making it hard for you to make money. Well and good. But being white does not ipso facto help you to make money either. I hate to break it to people, but not all white people are wealthy. White privilege gives off the impression that they are.For every force, there is an equal and opposite force. For every BLM protester, there is somewhere in the hinterland a Proud Boy. For every window smashed by looters, evidence increased that the Capitol needed to be retaken from the powers that be because they were leading our nation astray. For every black person shot illegitimately by police, the white rural poor could name a white person shot for equally illegitimate reasons. I've often wondered why the black urban poor get so much attention. I think it's because they are closer to the TV stations that create our reality.Hatred is usually a product of fear. If whites fear blacks, it's because they fear that blacks will do unto them what they did unto blacks. But they are also jealous—another primeval source of hatred. Why is their poverty and pain being ignored? Was it only made visible by the opioid epidemic?Johnson's “War on Poverty” was never won. Urban renewal renewed nothing. But race is the cause célèbre du jour. Perhaps by this time next year, it won't be. But the fear will remain. Fear of the Other. Jealousy of the Other. Hatred toward the Other. Such hatred can turn into violence at the drop of a hat. Ask the Russians. Ask the Chinese. We don't want a race war, if only because blacks are easier to pick out in a crowd than Jews. It would end very badly. If you want to prevent the race war, solve the poverty problem. Then peace and justice can—even if only in a limited sense—prevail. This is a better kind of life than one based on hatred. We must ignore the dog whistle of race. Instead, we must focus on the numbing reality of poverty. Everybody's poverty. (shrink)