. Class is the true oppression
eliminate racism.” The point of the opening parable is that class and race are deeply intertwined. Even if Mr. Rich White stopped exploiting Mr. Poor White we would still be left with racism. Peoples of Color who occupy the same class position as White people are still experiencing racism. DiAngelo (2006) speaks to this in her personal narrative of growing up poor and White:
From an early age I had the sense of being an outsider; I was acutely aware that I was poor, that I was dirty, that I was not normal and that there was something “wrong” with me. But I also knew that I was not black. We were at the lower rungs of society but there was always someone on the periphery, just below us. I knew that “colored” people existed and that they should be avoided. I can remember many occasions when I reached for candy or uneaten food laying on the street and was admonished by my grandmother not to touch it because a “colored person” may have touched it. The message was clear to me; if a colored person touched something it became dirty. The irony here is that the marks of poverty were clearly visible on me: poor hygiene, torn clothes, homelessness, hunger. Yet through comments such as my grandmother’s, a racial Other was formed in my consciousness; an Other through whom I became clean. Race was the one identity which aligned me with the middle class girls in my school. As I reflect back on the early messages I received about being poor and being white, I now realize that my grandmother and I needed people of color to cleanse and realign us with the dominant white culture that our poverty had separated us from (pp. 51–53).
Poor Whites are most often in closest proximity to people of Color because they tend to share poverty (hooks, 2000). Consider the term white trash. It is not without significance that this is one of the few expressions in which race is named for Whites. This may be because poor urban Whites are more likely to live in proximity to peoples of Color. Thus race is named for poor Whites because of their closeness to peoples of Color. In a racist society, this closeness both highlights—and pollutes—whiteness. Owning-class people also have peoples of Color near them because the latter are often their domestics and gardeners—in other words, their servants. But they do not interact with them socially in the same way that poor Whites do. Middle-class Whites are generally the furthest away from peoples of Color. They are the most likely to say that, “there were no people of Color in my neighborhood or school. I didn’t meet a Black person until I went to college” (often adding, “so I was lucky because I didn’t learn anything about racism”). Focusing attention solely on class