whose ancestors were all English or German or Scandinavian, I can't competently address the minority experience of the race-v-class debate
But it seems to me that "class" is a useful tool for scientific social analysis, whereas "race" does really not exist at all as a scientific category, although it is apparently very real as a social category in some contexts. And it seems to me that there are different interlocking social forces involved in the construction of racism
Institutional racism, for example, as the system of laws that underpinned American antebellum slavery or Jim Crow segregation, was (I think) very closely related to the construction of a particular class society: it effectively defined a certain lumpen-proletariat by skin color, so that the designated underclass was immediately identifiable for economic exploitation. A similar institutional use of the race was used by the South African apartheid regime: a certain lumpen-proletariat was defined by visible features and class-members were then constrained by law in terms of economic role and opportunity. But in such systems, the crass economic exploitation must be disguised, in order to remain morally acceptable to the exploiters themselves, and so an elaborate racial theory, justifying the exploitation as necessary due to some supposed childlike and primitive and savage and underdeveloped "character" of the exploited "race." Such an elaborate system of irrational prejudice soothes the conscience of the exploiter, by mystifying and obscuring the exploitation, and by providing an "explanation" of the violence needed to maintain the exploitation. I consider this is a useful insight, and it helps me to understand similar phenomena today, such as "Juan Crow" -- which represents a similar irrational prejudice mystifying the economic exploitation of another lumpen-proletariat
The different social histories of varying social subgroups, of course, produces distinct subcultures -- and this cultural imprint of American slavery and of the Jim Crow era has an effect that cannot simply vanish without any trace, with the passing of slavery and Jim Crow. Indeed, it would be dishonest to hope that the imprint vanish completely: though there are some aspects of it we should be happy to see buried as quickly as possible, some cultural treasures survived that experience and we should hope not to lose them
It is, sadly, an almost universal history:
[div class="excerpt" style="border:solid 3px #000000;"]The Welsh Marches
... When Severn down to Buildwas ran
Coloured with the death of man,
Couched upon her brother’s grave
The Saxon got me on the slave ...
In my heart it has not died,
The war that sleeps on Severn side;
They cease not fighting, east and west,
On the marches of my breast ...
None will part us, none undo
The knot that makes one flesh of two,
Sick with hatred, sick with pain,
Strangling—When shall we be slain?
When shall I be dead and rid
Of the wrong my father did?
How long, how long, till spade and hearse
Put to sleep my mother’s curse?
A. E. Housman
A Shropshire Lad (1896)
http://www.bartleby.com/123/28.html
Perhaps the bottom line is that we need not hold exactly the same philosophical ideas to learn from each other and work together. And we must not forget the lessons from the past, lest we repeat old errors
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