When you look up our house on Google Maps it comes up with “is on wrong corner”. Not sure what this means or who tagged our house this way, but I haven’t been able to change it. A friend suggested we just start referring to our house as “Casa Esquina Equivocada”.
I often wondered why poor white farmers in the Old South were so in favor of slavery, even willing to die for the right of wealthy plantation owners to have slaves. After all, they were supporting the competition, bigger farmers working with the advantage of free (slave) labor. To compete with slave farm labor, non-slave farmers would have to live, more or less, like slaves.
There is always talk of people who “vote against their own interests”, but I never believed this. People always support their own interests. They are just clearly getting something valuable in return, at least something valuable to them personally.
I remember when I was young asking my father why poor whites in the south (where I was raised) supported the oppression of blacks. Certainly it just lowered everyone’s wages. It made no sense to me even back then. Of course it makes no economic sense. My father explained it quite simply: (poor blacks) are the only thing between them and the bottom.
Clearly being guaranteed a buffer against being the absolute bottom of society was valuable to poor whites. They may be poor but somebody else would always be poorer. Amazingly this is enough for those willing to exploit it to gain political power.
This longish Guardian (UK) article touches on these historical ideas through US history. But nearly every place in the world has similar structures. Those in power exploiting the poorest with racist arguments of their own value over The Other.
Steven A. Guccione 