Midway

Midway, a neighborhood in St. Paul that borders us, has a great facebook forum that is unintentionally documenting what looks to be several guilty white liberals', and their racist code word using "the neighborhood's gone to hell" conservative counterparts, first real encounters with the lumpenproletariat. They switch traditional race roles on this, actually. The liberal response is often the "colorblindness" championed by people fighting against things like affirmative action, and the conservative quickly points out that race is an issue. Of course, a comment or two in, racism becomes the sole focus of a robbery, even if people don't know the race of the robber, who was much less interested in skin pigment than iphones and wallets. No where to be found is poverty, much less the causes of poverty and why it hits certain population segments harder than others. At this point it'd be refreshing to talk about culture vs. structural poverty, as I think there's some common ground. (Where do people think culture comes from if it's not a reflection of your material conditions? Generational, structural poverty will certainly affect at least your localized culture to some degree.) Our "working class" (ie, poor) neighborhood has the same problems, and has for years, but the lower income level for all, even whites, means the lumpens are more diverse. Which is a win for the left neoliberal identity folks I guess?