Every identifiable group of people maintains power by identifying the groups that represent a threat to their establishment and shrewdly manipulating them, depending on their perceived ability to maintain group solidarity. Whether by "divide and conquer," legalistic maneuvering, media discrediting, or simply ignoring their existence, the various groups are marginalized, usually with their complicity, into non-relevance. If that doesn't work, the best and the brightest are co-opted, thus reducing the movement to perpetual insignificance.

The entire concept of "black" didn't enter the entire conversation until the advantage that this set of racial characteristics provided for workers in the heat were gradually discovered, therefore economic considerations and the fragmentary nature of African slave culture allowed the concept to take hold. indeed, some of Jefferson's early writings provide a startling portrait of an educated bigot.

That the country was founded on weak idealistic propaganda provided by a self-serving plutocracy isn't even in question here. Of course they had to label and disaprage every defianble group vying for power, the earlier, the better. If only there weren't so many pesky idealists among their children seeking to educate the masses out of ignorance!

The acceptance of inferiority status among blacks depended on the deviousness of those within the clergy to convince the Southern ignoramuses that Africans were not humans, therefore not subject to Locke's Natural Rights. To do so, Southern schools had to exclude blacks, particularly those who would eventually be able to challenge the basic assumptions with which the racial caste system was maintained. That exclusion led toward the type of race-based segregation that could not have occurred had authoritarian churches not held so much sway. Certainly, underfunding would perpetuate the progation of ignorance through hatred, and those educated blacks who hold such debilitating attitudes are perhaps more likely now to be the products of the disadvantged schools and the scurrilous caste system initiated by the "house nigger" class and maintained throughout Jim Crow as these were the lightest (whitest?) and first to be educated (some were already, albeit furtively).

That a class of blacks would accept this secondary role, thus creating a segregated, stratified black bourgeoisie is both cause for celebration and contempt. The dissolution of the Washington D.C. "strivers" was partly a result of the success of Civil Rights in achieving integration, thus depriving them of their exclusive power base.

It's always been about money in this country, and Booker T. Washington noted that successful black businessmen were treated with the same deference as their white counterparts, thus butressing his argument that only through education and hard work could black make lasting inroads into the ruling elite. Certainly, the Tulsa race riots proved his position not entirely tenable, but the abject failure of the subculture that grew up from slavery's "field niggers" (I use those terms only in the context of historical perception) to embrace education as a means to shed the political shackles created a society where far too few controlled the fate of too many. Democracy can only work when there is group participation, and the historical tendency of blacks to base their political persuasion on the oral abilities of their Baptist clergy gives us the Reverend Poverty Pimps we have now.

Urban blacks ARE overtly more racist than whites, but the white, largely unspoken version of racism replete with its "code" words that lead to de facto segregation suggest a degree of complicity that still exists to maintain status quo, thereby producing another undereducated class of citizens.

It's not going to all go away until we start telling more truth, first to ourselves, then to each other. An open society reduces the deviousness necessary for political machinations to remain effective. An educated, participatory populace reduces the ability of corporate America to deceive the lower classes through carefully chosen wordplay and racist demographics. That we continue arguing over an agenda set by those seeking to maintain power rather than those seeking to share it assures the success of the red herring tossers.