> The US is not homogeneous and the people within the US most likely to regard race as an all important immutable inherited characteristic are also largely those least likely to accept self-identity of gender.
Personally I've seen two correlations in different directions.
Race is important to the swastika-tattoo crowd on the far right, no doubt.
Meanwhile on the left, a lot of people acknowledge a widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs that can support a family without a degree. That even though the median family's situation has been improving for decades, a lot of people haven't shared in the benefits. To me this is obviously a matter of class.
But I look at American analysis and discussion, and 95% of the time they ignore class, and instead analyse it through a racial lens - reinterpreting the widening gap between rich and poor as a widening gap between white and black. The along comes Trump, and he gains a load of support from the white working class simply by acknowledging that yes, they are struggling.
So I can certainly see what graemep is getting at.
Blame the likes of Murdoch and his predecessors, they've mastered the art of using rags and tabloids to eliminate nuance in the US public sphere.
Significant US analysis, that with any meat, looks to race, class , and income to quintile the US demographic and examine the prospects of each rank and the mobility across groups.
Recent years have seen books such as Paul Fussell, CLASS: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983), Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), and a host between.
The difficulty for the US has been the dumbing down of public discourse, that was the condition that permitted a Trump to sweep through on a popularists platform.
I love Isabel Wilkerson's book. It was that (through the comparison with caste) that gave me a clearer idea of the difference between what race is in American culture.
Personally I've seen two correlations in different directions.
Race is important to the swastika-tattoo crowd on the far right, no doubt.
Meanwhile on the left, a lot of people acknowledge a widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs that can support a family without a degree. That even though the median family's situation has been improving for decades, a lot of people haven't shared in the benefits. To me this is obviously a matter of class.
But I look at American analysis and discussion, and 95% of the time they ignore class, and instead analyse it through a racial lens - reinterpreting the widening gap between rich and poor as a widening gap between white and black. The along comes Trump, and he gains a load of support from the white working class simply by acknowledging that yes, they are struggling.
So I can certainly see what graemep is getting at.