Precisely because racism shares a nervous system with inequality in general, the same inclination to shun identification with black Americans makes it impossible for him to identify with the modest wage and salary-earners, the unemployed, and the working and disabled poor of all ancestries; in short, the bottom 99 percent of American society. It is one of the perversities of American public language that it is hard even to evoke these people—a majority of Americans, after all—without appearing to single out Afro-Americans; without, in other words, becoming entangled in racecraft.
