Not long ago there was an incident in Boston in which a well-dressed black man hailed a taxi and directed the driver to take him to his home in Roxbury, a black district. The black man turned out to be a city councilman. The case was unusual only in that it made the papers. Either America is a very democratic country, where cabdrivers beat up city councilmen with impunity, or the privileges of whiteness reach far down into the ranks of the laboring class. A lot of this has changed.
Various programs faciliate the recomposition.
ESL programs, one of the chief vehicles for allowing immigrants to leap over black Americans, are not restricted to Europeans. It identifies personal reference networks, which bypass the open market, as the key. The result, for example, is that less than three percent of all workers in New York City's garment industry are black Americans. In this country, existing social relations are compatible with democratic forms only so long as the privileges of race embrace most of the population. So the language of racial oppression needs to be modified in order to preserve its content.