JOAMETTE GIL

This is a wonderful critique of our social institutions, particularly the failing tactics they employ against poverty everyday: our educators and welfare providers are under that false impression that the key difference between the lower and middle classes is values.

The real difference: money.

You’d think the people governing would get that.

http://elizabitchez.blogspot.com/2009/07/middle-class-values-dont-solve-poverty.html

My one qualm with the opinions expressed therein is the (what I believe to be false) dichotomy of poor students vs. gifted and AP students in schools. As I can only speak based on my personal experience, growing up I was always surrounded by children and young adults just as poverty-stricken as I was in all of my classes, which were always gifted, honors, AP, and Baccalaureate classes. The dichotomy was only false, however, because I grew up in Miami, FL, whose population is comprised almost entirely of immigrant people of color. It could still be argued that a stark divide does in fact exist between students placed in advanced classes and students who come to school every day from an impoverished household in neighborhoods and cities living under the national norm of white supremacist patriarchy.

Just keep in mind that bubbles of non-white supremacy do exist here and there in the United States, although they may be few and far between (not to mention examples of the oppressed mimicking their oppressors).

-Joamette Gil