I started this as a comment to Chris’s
Getting Low Income Voters to the Polls but then it got way toooo long…
There are some good points that Chris has made particulary that when “low Income” people vote they usually vote Democratic. However, if you look on closer inspection you would find a greater percentage of lower income Black vote Democratically and a higher percentage of lower income whites vote Republican.
That is where our agreement ends.
Short history of Democratic Presidential elections:
It amazes me that everyone is soooo perplexed. It is easy to see if you open your eyes…The moral of this story is:
- 2000: First time, voting for a Democrat that won’t protect my vote, …shame on them
- 2004: Second time, voting for a Democrat that won’t protect my vote, …shame on me
- 2008: Third time, I will not vote for a Democrat that won’t protect my vote, …and keep my butt at home
Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc:
the income gap between the electorate and the nation as a whole shot way up before “third way” or centrists organizations within the Democratic Party ever came into being, and in no way seems to have been exacerbated by Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 campaigns.
That is because you are looking at the wrong data…
To get to the bottom of this debacle which will only get worse in 2008 the blame must be placed squarly on the shoulders of the DLC and the anti-low income ie Black folk and anti-job policies instituted by Bill Clinton.
“post-1976 increase also took place because”
Because Jesse Jackson had an incredible GOTV campaign in 84 and 88 which swelled the ranks of the “low income” people on the Demcoratic rolls which inturn sacred the poop out of the Zell Millers and the leftover Klansmen in the Democratic Party.
The DLC, formed in the mid-1980s to suppress the voices of Blacks and labor in the party – and
as a direct reaction to the hugely successful Black voter registration drives that accompanied Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns – is determined to keep organized Black America at arms length, and broke. Should Kerry win, traditional Black leadership will be declared irrelevant.
…
“The Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Leadership Council will crow that their dubious strategies were in fact brilliant. Their claims should not go unchallenged.”
a
“rump faction” of white Democrats founded the DLC in the mid-Eighties as a reaction to “the 1984 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, in which the black candidate received a percentage of the vote considerably higher than the proportion of black votes in several states, and sparked a
significant expansion of the party’s base constituencies among minorities, labor, and even some white rural voters. The Democratic Party was actually growing – but in the wrong direction to suit the `rump faction’ centered in the white South.” The corporate-bankrolled DLC gained national power with the election of Bill Clinton,
Here is where the start of the real split of the Democratic party took place and the real decline of the Democratic majority… funny now ever mentions how the rise of the DLC is parallel to the demise of the Democratic party… funny that…
“Low Income” I guess is the politically correct way of saying “Black folks”… as the entire world saw all those Low income people in NOLA.
Contrary to popular CW…
Winning the South = Winning the Black Vote and Low Income Vote…who make up the majority of the south: Blacks, Poor Black and Poor Whites.
Black and Bruised:
Some Democratic strategists say that the party might be smart to write off not just South Carolina but the whole South (except Florida) and concentrate on states more demonstrably in play. It is less commonly noted that writing off the South, home to 55 percent of the country’s black population, symbolically means writing off African-Americans as well.
… Cobb-Hunter, like every African-American I spoke with, has not forgotten that in 2000 the party pulled virtually everything out of the South to concentrate on Florida, then refused to see beyond hanging chads and go to the mat over the tens of thousands of voters, the majority black and Hispanic, said to have been improperly labeled felons and stripped from the rolls. ”Any message that the Democratic Party wanted to send, they sent in 2000, and ’04 is just a continuation of that message,” she said. ”It’s up to the Democratic Party whether they want to change the story. Because if they don’t, we will not carry one Southern state. Let me just add that if the Democratic Party is not serious about dealing with the issues of race and class that are so prevalent in this country but particularly in the South, then they may as well write it off, because there’s no point in coming in here with cosmetics.”
The DLC/CLINTON policies forgot about real people WHO WORK!!!
‘‘The Democrats lost the White House because they forgot the street, the corner, the people who put them in office,” George R. Dean, who owns a clothing business in town, offered soon after Aiken said he’d have an opinion or two for me. A member of the Chamber of Commerce, he made a straight-up Keynesian argument for investment in infrastructure, education, the environment, small-business relief, ”the needs of the people”: ‘‘The divide in America ain’t black and white; it’s the haves and the have-nots, and that’s the truth, darling. Until we start disbursing this stuff, as we say in the Deep South, us’en in a heap of trouble.”
The “By standard Mentality”…?
Cobb-Hunter winced when I recounted this and remembered the day
a maid led a group of girls into her Statehouse office. ”They’re in training,” the maid told her. ”And I just got so depressed, because they were young, 19, 20, early 20’s, and they were training to become janitors. That to me just suggests that we — meaning those of us in leadership positions — we have really failed our community. We are raising a generation who believes there is no hope, and we can’t put the total blame on white folk. Because we aren’t any different from white officials once we get in there. <cough>
Obama: How to sell out with
not looking like you are selling out </cough> We are selfish — and there are exceptions to every rule — but in general people of color tend to act just like white folk when they get into power. They’re very selective about who they share it with; they’re selective about who they bring into the inner circle; and they’re interested in taking care of themselves and their own and not much beyond that.”
It ain’t just in NOLA… there are poor people across this nation.
I’d heard this kind of thing throughout Orangeburg: the Democratic Party is reactive, ”spinally challenged,” populist only intermittently while the people sink. More than 27 percent of the county’s households survive on $15,000 a year or less, a condition of persistent poverty that ensnares so much of the South, especially the rural Black Belt. For some, the drug business is a way out, and Cheeseboro can spot the ”movin’ on up” homes that drugs bought. But more are caught than lucky, particularly if they’re black. African-Americans make up 30 percent of South Carolina’s population but 70 percent of its prisoners. Officially, one out of 13 black men in South Carolina is barred from voting because he is in prison, on probation or on parole; nationwide the rate is one in 8. And everyone says it: the poor have been written off. The poor, the state, the South. Who’s next?
Is this the Demcratic party that speaks for Blacks and poor. People are just waking up to the fact that the DLC has been kicking people out of the boat for a long time. No one said anything when Clinton pushed out the Blacks, working class and the poor… now that the DLC is hitting too close to home with women, gays and anti-war crowd… finally the Dem base if getting a clue.
Separately, each woman noted that the former state party chairman, Dick Harpootlian, who is white, had once quipped, ”I don’t want to buy the black vote; I just want to rent it for a day.” That was in 1986, he told me, an offhand joke that no one takes seriously, adding that as a state and a country, ”we’ve got to get beyond racial division, and we can’t seem to do that.” Memories are long; the three women were not the first to mention his quotation to me. Nor were they the first to assert that white Democrats would jump party (and have) before accepting black leadership. Or to say they’d felt used by the former Democratic governor, Jim Hodges, who was elected in 1998 with the help of black party activists and who then, some say, ignored black, poor and working-class voters.
Bill Clinton the first Black President: NOT
Bill Clinton was supposed to have made up for all that. ”He had the moves,” Cobb-Hunter said. Her voice had a weariness. ”He’d been around black folk, and he had that cadence; he knew how to speak the language.” People do like ”Bill.” In Elloree they have warm hearts for ”Hillary” too. Yet assessing the Clinton program — with its signature triangulation, mollifying the base while co-opting Republican themes — Cobb-Hunter said, ”I’m a realist, honey; I’m not snowed by much.’‘ Still, Aiken insisted, ”it was a happier time”; nearly 74,000 jobs have been lost statewide since 2000. ”You can’t lay that all on George Bush,” Cheeseboro argued. ”You can’t blame Bush for Nafta” or, as others attested, for ”ending welfare as we know it” while cutting other social spending. ”There wasn’t a war,” Aiken said. And to that I heard amens all around. It seems the war, and the death of three young Orangeburg men in Iraq, has concentrated attention on issues that Clinton’s personality once papered over.
Fire Next Time:
Some 260,000 eligible black voters in South Carolina aren’t registered. Added to registered no-shows, that means half a million or so African-Americans are ”missing voters,” a group sizable enough to turn any statewide election for the Democrats — if they saw a reason to. But everyone I met who’s doing voter registration in town, on campus or in the countryside said they’re up against it. Cheeseboro recalled that two years ago, ”folks actually ran me out their yard. They’d say: ‘Get out! I’m not voting. I don’t want anything to do with it. Ain’t nothin’ gonna change.’ I have heard that over and over again.”
I imagine the Democratic party being lead by the OH SO RELEVANT DLC will continue to stick it’s head in the sand and lose in 2008… if they can’t mount a defense for Roberts at the lowest moment in time of this admistration then I can not see what they will challenge the GOP with in 2008 …what the motto will be “We are a little bit better than they are”
Why do so many with so much information and knowledge look to a political party for relief and remedy? As your essay clearly shows, dependence on a party, rather than a coalition of the affected, does not remedy the disparity between those “haves” and “have nots”.
You clean house you still have the house – the structure hasn’t changed. Might be time to build a new one.
I think a lot of people here are on board with the idea of building something new, but that’s a task so much easier said than done. Even the saying, actually, is quite difficult once you try to load any detail into it. Audre Lorde was not wrong when she wrote that, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” and her metaphor can be truthfully extended to, “The master’s tools will never build anything aside from the master’s house.”
In other words, we have what we have for reasons, and if we don’t understand those reasons, then it doesn’t matter if we tear it all down and/or try to build something else to replace it — the next thing we build will, necessarily, either be or rapidly become so very much like what we already have such that we may as well not have bothered.
(None of which is to say that Ani DiFranco doesn’t have a point when she sings, “Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.” Resistance is crucial and when it comes to defense you just have to use what you have. Building something new, however, is much more like offense than defense.)
I don’t agree with all that you say – particularly focusing on the DLC as a deliberate attempt to disenfrancise Black and poor persons. (I think they took poor and Black people for granted and did not think about them, rather than doing what they did deliberately.).
And the problem far outweighs the South. I live in Detroit, the poorest American City, and the most segregated region in the U. S. Anyone who says racism and anti-poor policies are strictly a Southern problem is ignoring Detroit, East St. Louis, Roxbury, Gary, Indiana, Watts,. . . etc. I just don’t let Northerners get away with a bunch of crap about Southerners being the only significant infestation of racism in this country.
I certainly do think much of the Democratic party, especially at the national level, has de facto written off African Americans. In my state, for example, if the registered African Americans all voted, our state would likely never elected a Republican governor. Yet only a small percentage vote. Their representatives are chosen through an entrenched machine, that does not given Detroit or poor persons their rightful dues. And slowly, bit by bit, the Right is chipping away at the African American vote, especially through their religious campaign. This is also an effective way to work with poor white persons.
However, I strongly agree that the democratic party, at least at the national level, has moved away from any public advocacy on behalf of the poor, on behalf of African Americans, and especially on behalf of anyone who is both poor and a member of a minority group. I remember the first time I heard the “middle class relief” mantra. I thought, ok, I’m middle class. I certainly wish I were paying fewer taxes, but look, what I have is so great compared to the poor in this country, how can my party be spouting off about my class needing relief and nothing is being said about poor people?
And how can any white person say that our minority citizens don’t suffer because of racism? Oh, I see, yes, you just have to stay where you don’t see poverty, or persons who don’t look like you. (I hope you understand, Parker, I’m being snarky not to you, but to those folks who have told me “I’ve never seen any evidence of discrimination here.”
And how can any white person say that our minority citizens don’t suffer because of racism? Oh, I see, yes, you just have to stay where you don’t see poverty, or persons who don’t look like you.
Or, in the case of my sister’s boyfriend, you have to grow up a white boy in the rural south so damn poor you sleep on the floor because there aren’t enough beds to go around. You don’t get enough to eat, you don’t get decent clothing, your primary schools are crap, you don’t have money to travel anywhere else. Your neighborhood is racially diverse, and at least half of your lifelong friends are black. You don’t think you’re a racist and neither do they.
And then when your black friends get college funding and you don’t, you freak the fuck right on out because you don’t even begin to have the framework to understand why that’s happening. In your little territory, blacks are not a numerical minority and there are plenty of poor whites and blacks, and you don’t know anything else. Fox News tells you the college money thing is reverse racism perpetrated by dirty liberals, and you feel trapped in your circumstances because of the color of your skin. So you start voting for Republicans.
You also sign up for the National Guard to pay for college because you’ve been told that if white people want to get anywhere, they have to “take personal responsibility”. This seems true to you, based on your experiences. And when you help elect Republicans, they pull you out of college and send you off to war. And in order to keep from blowing your own fucking head off, you keep right on believing that you haven’t made the worst choice of your life about who you should trust to help you sort the world out.
(And Kidspeak, similar disclaimer as yours applies: my sentences are full of the word “you” as a literary device, not to personalize anything toward anyone here. I just wrote this b/c I think we liberal politically active folks have to find a way to communicate with people like my sister’s boyfriend. I should probably also add that I am not defending his views and/or choices.)
If neither party represents the disaffected, then I think you start by building multi-issue coalitions (economic democracy?). The beginnings of a foundation. If or when other like-minded groups form with overlapping interests, it is possible to start constructing a framework. Other parties exist with platforms more closely aligned to a “progressive” agenda than the dems. (29 @ UMich.)
I think your sister and her boyfriend would understand and support a living wage, universal health care, and equitable taxation (as examples). But only if they were invited to participate, and listened to instead of being lectured. Communication means a conversation, not a speech.
I think you’re misunderstanding where I’m coming from about the structural problems. I think we have structural problems because there are problems in the building blocks. I think that unless we change the building blocks, we’re going to keep having structural problems. Let the Greens get a little bigger and older and they’ll have the same fissures and chasms everyone else has. I hope I’m wrong about that, but I doubt it.
As far as my sister and her boyfriend, it would seem like they’d support a living wage and universal healthcare, etc., but they don’t. They say the market has to determine wages and that government shouldn’t be in the business of healthcare and that if we keep the Republicans in charge of Congress then taxation will be fair. I’ve had many conversations with my sister about all of this. I can’t get through the wall of conservative messaging systems.
We progressives have to figure out how to change their preconceptions, how to get them to see that their interpretations of causation about these things are wrong, and we have to do it in a simple, concise manner. The messages from the conservatives are very simple, very good commercials that are easy to understand and that make “common sense” to people who aren’t exceptionally analytic or tending toward a broad overview. Liberal messages must compete with this messaging system, and we are currently getting our ass handed to us at that game.
The biggest obstacle to universal health coverage are the insurance companies.
Then go on to explain that so much of the money spent on health care is for the massive industry that sells health care.
And she totally agrees that no one should get rich off cancer patients, which gives me hope. She does have ethics. But then she reverts back to the kind of market-worship that many youngish libertarian-leaning conservatives seem to share. It’s almost faith-based — without having anything she can really point to as concrete evidence, she nonetheless still seems to think that if the liberals would stop trying to control the market, it would simply correct itself, and thus wages would rise and healthcare would become affordable.
Of course, I think that’s straight-up fiction, but I’m a philosopher not an economist and the boyfriend was a Finance major, so that’s one of the things we go around and around about.
She does hate BushCo and everything for which they stand, though, and a few months ago she told me she was sick of parties altogether and was changing her R to an indy. So I think I’m getting somewhere with her, even if not yet with the boyfriend.
I’m not big on the whole “framing” thing, but that guy does have a point about people buying into or not buying into a theory because it somehow resonates with their already existing beliefs. So I keep trying to appeal to what I know she already believes, but the whole task is complicated when she hears such a collective, cohesive message from conservatives, and not nearly enough effective countering from liberal groups. It is like battling a cult.
What Duranta said. I believe breaking through the conservative message can be as simple as presenting facts. But you’re right about getting those facts out in a way they can be accepted. I think our institutional memory is being successfully erased, leaving the public with no sense of history.
Early wage laws meant that anyone willing to work for a living would not want for food, clothing, and shelter. Should we repeal those laws? How about just shitcanning OSHA? Boy, those good ol days. Remember the Triangle fire, the chicken fire (not that long ago), Ludlow, the Pullman Strike, half the country starving in the ’30’s?
Hey, those were the good old days when conservatives ruled. You bet, let’s just turn back the clock to those halcyon days of dead children in factories and mines. WTF, there’s more where they came from. We don’t need no stinking medical insurance, that’s why we have charity hospitals. Damn, I’m ready.
Remember the Dixiecrats, Robber Barons, Ford in Detroit, sharecroppers starving in tents on highways in Missouri (30’s)? Maybe they’re right. Next time I build a house I’ll just cruise down to the corner and get some illegals, pay ’em 6 bux an hour cash. Cool. No taxes or bullshit, don’t have to deal with real carpenters, and if they get hurt, let ’em go back where they came from. WTF there’s more where they came from.
On a roll now bubba. I’ll save it ALL for me. I can send my design to freakin’ India and build everything in a factory for 10 cents on the dollar. Import ’em back here, and sell ’em for the same price as the other guy. Sheesh. All I need is an office and a phone. Whoa, that’ll work. As soon as the next SHAFTA goes through, I can REALLY cut costs by moving it all to Mexico.
Reality and a sense of history. It ain’t rocket science. Just fragmented, and that’s also part of their plan. Used to joke that the boss is drivin’ a caddy, I got a beater, but he can’t afford to give me a nickel an hour more.
I’ve said things just like that to her. 🙂
In my reply to duranta, you can see I’m making progress, it’s just v..e..r..y s..l..o..w. And like I keep saying, I suspect it’s such a tough row to hoe because I’m not getting any backup from an opposition party.
[Read your comment below]
Then what or who to get the message out? I’ve seen MoveOn’s new ad [playing in L.A. of all places]. Great for a campaign, but no context, just “GW sucks” kind of thing. As I was writing those “discussion points” I was seeing them in video. Online is cheapest, but that could be preaching to the choir to place them.
So far the dems have enough of a swing for ’06, but I never count these guys out until after the election. Burn me twice….
I’m sorry, I’m becoming rapidly unable to deal with this thread. Maybe we can pick this conversation up again in another time and place. I like your ideas.
your black friends get college funding and you don’t
Are they going to college with all those wefare queens…Sorry not buying it…
I am always amazed at this type of ruckus. Like how white contractors scream bloody murder of have a 10% allocation of gov’t contract for minority businesses… I guess 90% is not enough for them.
Are they going to college with all those wefare queens…Sorry not buying it…
Well, you can not buy it all you want, but people have experiences like the one I described and that’s a fact.
Look, here’s a short story version of what happened to me. I was thrown out of my mother’s house for being queer when I was 16 and she arranged things such that I couldn’t stay with family or close friends. I had to start my own life ready or not. (I was so not ready.) I dropped out of high school, slept in a park, aced my GED, got a shit job at a pizzeria, crashed on a new friend’s floor for a while to save money, got my own hole-in-the-wall apartment, and starting looking at college. Community college, of course, given the circumstances, even though I’d have been a shoe-in for Ivy League scholarship if things hadn’t gone the way they did.
I applied for financial aid when I was 18 and had to fight the system because they still considered me a dependent of my parents. I flipped out, wrote letters, demanded to be treated as emancipated since in fact I had been for two years, got it. Still got denied. When I asked why, the counselor told me straight out to my face, “The single thing that kept you from qualifying is your race. If you weren’t white, you’d have college money.” That was a simple fact of the system where I was.
Can you imagine how angry an 18 yo is in those circumstances? I was super pissed. I’m a critical thinker who’s very well read, though, and I figured out a lot of things about institutionalized racism on my own, and just how and why I somehow got screwed by it even though I was white. I understood that the way in which I was screwed was far less severe than the way in which not-white people in general — and particularly black people — were being screwed. So I did not become a person who thinks like my sister’s boyfriend.
But I am, as it is widely acknowledged, not normal, and we ignore people my sister’s boyfriend at our own peril. He wasn’t born a racist, you know, and his specific kind of racism is exactly the kind we can fucking fix, if we take him seriously.
Oh please… I have worked in college admissions… tht person was pulling your leg.
In fact, the majority of universities it is the Black students who are subsidizing white students education. The basketball and football games shown on air brings in millions of dollars to universities…
I remember the haydays of Coach Thompson at Georgetown and Partick Ewing , someone was trying to make the same crack you are… about these Black kids getting “a free ride”… the administration shut them up quickly… because those kids were bringing in more money than the rockafellers…
…but I don’t think this college counselor told you that…
Parker, you don’t know me from Eve so don’t you dare insinuate that I’m making some sort of “crack” about black people or about racism. You also don’t know shit about where I went to school, or what the race/class demographics were like in that place and time. Further, if you were giving my posts any remotely kind of careful read, you’d see that I have crafted sentences that specifically cut off the interpretation you’re choosing to make.
I am speaking honestly and directly from my own experience. Just because you don’t know anything about it from your own experience doesn’t make it bullshit. I am not deprecating your experience, and I’d appreciate it if you’d resist the temptation to deprecate mine. Please speak to me respectfully or don’t speak to me at all.
Just as a reminder, I’m not the one in this thread who’s talking about free rides and welfare queens. I don’t even think in those kinds of fictional and gravely insulting terms, let alone speak in code to reference them. I’m talking about how poor white people get the impression that their problems have more to do with race than class, which is a fucking fact and an enormous problem in society way outside of election strategy. And I’m trying to find a way to fix that problem, which liberals desperately need to do, and which we can only do by talking about it. God knows no one else will ever bother.
And the point I made is that Black Atheletes subsidize white students and colleges… a point that your college counselor forgot to tell you.
con’t…
yet to this day to believe this and I have seen you write this same story on other blogs
“The single thing that kept you from qualifying is your race. If you weren’t white, you’d have college money.” That was a simple fact of the system where I was.
I’m sorry, but WTF are you talking about? Are you reading my posts at all? Did you read where I talked about how this was the way I learned on my own about institutionalized racism and how poor whites are far less screwed by it than non-whites? It was precisely that experience with that counselor that moved me to dig for more information about the whole thing.
Also, yes, I have posted about the events of my life on other blogs…just like everybody else does. I’ve said it here already but I’ll say it as clearly as I can: MY AGENDA IS TO ERADICATE RACISM. What’s your point by saying I’ve posted about this experience on other blogs — or that I continue to believe that the events of my life are actually true events? Do you have me confused with someone else or something? I’m to the left of Michael Moore and Ralph Nader, for Christ’s sake, and I’m not a fucking racist.
Holy shit, if you’d read the post you’d know it was community college, hence, no money from athletics. Also, if you knew any damned thing about my life at all you’d know this happened in a place where the minority student population was predominantly Hispanic, not black, thus your point is doubly irrelvant as well as unnecessarily insulting.
is to detract us from the true issue, which is class. Whites, blacks, hispanics all getting screwed depending on income level.
I’m not saying racism doesn’ t exist. IT does. But I think, as in the Willie Horton incident, racist undertones are deliberately stirred to divide the populace and detract from the economic issues.
I agree very much that racism is often purposefully stirred up and used to pit people against one another. I think Kidspeak did an excellent encapsulation downthread, actually, about what I’ve been trying to say w/r/t how this is used to manipulate poor white populations, specifically.
I also think that feminist theorists such as bell hooks & Patricia Hill Collins are right when they make arguments that critical analyses should take both race and class into consideration together, since often oppressions work together. But their arguments are long, I’m tired, and you may already be familiar with them so I won’t repeat them here. If you haven’t read them yet, though, I recommend bell hooks, from whom I’ve learned a lot about these issues.
What is see is two incidents you are pointing out about so-called “Reverse racsim” in education the first happening to your sisters boyfriend and your own personal experience.
Perhaps I did not get the part where you refuted this claim.
This is how they stir up racism…..
….
The ultra rightwing Republican is white (very),…
The East Tennessee Republican says that when he was told that he could not join the Black Caucus because he is white, he thought, “What? Whoa!”
…
Black Caucus Chairman, Rep. Johnny Shaw put it mildly when he said, “Stacey Campfield is a strange guy. That’s the best I can say.”
It’s anybody’s guess what goes on in what passes for Campfield’s mind. Perhaps he will soon be asking to join the women’s caucus.
Campfield implies in several media accounts that he might pursue the membership again in the future.
Perhaps I did not get the part where you refuted this claim.
Yes, this was indeed the problem. You did not read closely. I made that clear several times, including in my very first post about the issue. I’m sure as hell not going to do it again today.
I apologize for losing my patience. Perhaps you should apologize for continually insisting that I hold racist views when I made it clear repeatedly that I don’t. At the very least, you probably ought consider it your responsibility to read more carefully, especially about sensitive issues, and especially when you are being told that the conclusions you’re drawing about someone else’s belief system are wrong.
The real irony here is that I think I’ve agreed with almost everything I’ve ever seen you post. Politically, you and I have much in common; we agree on almost all the issues and even some of the less popular strategies. Which made yesterday exceptionally bizarre and unpleasant from my pov.
Don’t be so sure the person was pulling her leg. Frankly, that sounds like you are discounting her difficulties. If the counselor were joking, and funds were actually available, or were generally not available, you would expect her/him to follow up the “joke” with the truth, and that did not happen.
The “counselor” may actually believe that is the case. And in some situations, counselors have individual power over who gets aid and who does not. As a college prof who has sat on an aid committee, I’ve seen a lot of different (and both good and abusive) practices followed. It is the case that some funds are earmarked for minority students, which does not bother me. However, there are not similar special funds available for poor students in general who have special needs, regardless of minority/majority status.
What certainly and indisputably is real is that students are considered attached to their parents for purposes of financial aid without exception, unless they present extraordinary levels of proof to the contrary. Even with proof, e.g. being married to a non student (now there’s a nice prejudicial issue) there can still be difficulties based in the individual financial counselor’s and local institutional practices.
Thank you so much for your understanding. I was able to arrange a workable package at a university in another state some 6 or 7 years later, and I enjoyed college quite a bit once I finally got in.
I agree with you, and actually, I should have said that the persons who can live without seeing poor folks are mostly in places where the poor people have to live somewhere far from middle class and wealthier folks in order to afford housing.
In the South, blacks and white are more likely to live somewhat closer together, at least outside the big cities. That often means that people know who gets perks like scholarships, and who doesn’t. And poorer white people in the South (and elsewhere) have been carefully taught to turn on minorities rather than turning on the wealthy establishment when they feel wronged, or left out, or unequally treated. It helps keep any powerful coalitions from forming, which would be dangerous.