On Tuesday, NPR reported on a Pew Research Center/NPR poll that indicates that the end may in fact, be near. The study, that looked at perceptions of issues of race among Blacks, Whites and Hispanics found that some 37% of the Blacks who responded indicated that Blacks could no longer be seen as one "race." We have talked before about how there is no such thing as physical race, but this poll is important because it talked about whether there is still a social race that predominates among people who share similar phenotypic traits.
We may indeed be at a tipping point in which values are more associated with class status than with traditional notions of race. This is important because the NPR story that analyzed the survey indicated that white and black values are in fact, becoming more similar as the gulf between lower-class blacks and middle to upper-class blacks grows. The gulf may be widening as people of higher socio-economic classes begin to try to shed the stereotypical images that seem to predominate the media’s airwaves. Or perhaps the Gulf is a result of the simple economic truth that education and access to money have a profound effect on an individual’s values.
For those of us interested in issues of diversity it means that perhaps it is time to re-examine the assumptions we make about race. Instead, maybe t is time for us all to take a long hard look at the class issues that are at the heart of the problems we all face.
