This is an article that attempts to draw conclusions about race and class relationships in America from Ferguson and Park Slope, both of which (for those of you not from America) are extreme outliers --- the former being an artifact of overt, systematic, institutionalized and organized racism (St. Louis redlining and white-flight turned them into a sort of equivalent of Paris'
banlieues), and the latter being a haven for the economically elite of America's most prosperous city.
Had the author spent time in the Ozarks, in mid-sized rural midwestern cities, in predominantly white manufacturing suburbs in the rust belt, or for that matter in most US cities other than New York, their conclusions would have been different.
Race is certainly an issue in the US! I just doubt we have much to learn about it from the fact that white corporate lawyers living in Park Slope are willing to have Jamaicans be nannies. It is not in fact that case that middle and upper-middle class families throughout the US tend to have black nannies, the way corporations in Dubai tend to have south asians as construction workers.
Had the author spent time in the Ozarks, in mid-sized rural midwestern cities, in predominantly white manufacturing suburbs in the rust belt, or for that matter in most US cities other than New York, their conclusions would have been different.
Race is certainly an issue in the US! I just doubt we have much to learn about it from the fact that white corporate lawyers living in Park Slope are willing to have Jamaicans be nannies. It is not in fact that case that middle and upper-middle class families throughout the US tend to have black nannies, the way corporations in Dubai tend to have south asians as construction workers.