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Ellis Cose wrote a book called "the Rage of a Privileged Class" about how upward mobility often induces even greater anger in black people because it puts them in sustained contact with a milieu that subjects them to small daily humiliations they would not otherwise encounter
A few years later, he wrote a book called "an End to Anger" saying that was all chilling out.
As with any macro-trend, not really possible for the change to have happened so quickly
As with any macro-trend, not really possible for the change to have happened so quickly
This is a class phenomenon that ends up "intersecting" with race in ways that both "queers" and exacerbates the experience both internally and externally -- because uncertainty about which framework to use is itself a stressor
To pass from one social milieu to another always involves a period that amounts to a kind of hazing, whether anyone intends to treat you in this way or not, (often they do), as you habituate yourself to new norms and expectations
Working class whites and first generation college students all experience this.
You oscillate between the desire to judge yourself unworthy and striving to meet the new standards, and condemning those standards as corrupt
Eventually, you reach a modus vivendi with your new life, find friends that you respect who accept you, and take up your place -- or you don't
Assimilation is a psychic ordeal and can be experienced as a trauma by some. Others simply arrive with a disposition -- socially labile, winning, adaptable, that makes it easy for them.
In between, you have the great mass of people who recognize that the world is indeed seeded with social booby traps and that race adds a burden of such traps -- but who are mostly resilient enough to deal with them well enough
That's why society has become increasingly more integrated and less racist over time as people discover that they can indeed work together in cooperative enterprises, even when there are underlying tensions
Part of what helps people bridge these awkward gaps in experience is laughter and the freedom to be candid with one another that is a precondition of fruitful exchange and mutual growth
There have of course always been people for whom their experience was trauma and who think that humor and candor are the things that have to be stamped out in order for progress to be made
These people are in the ascendancy today and on the cusp of having unchecked power to institute their preferred solutions.
My hope is that despite their best efforts most ordinary people will persist in the ways of friendly regard and not seek domination.
My hope is that despite their best efforts most ordinary people will persist in the ways of friendly regard and not seek domination.
This domination will be like other forms of domination in being ultimately hurtful to the interests of the dominating and dominated alike
I wrote about micro-aggression at greater length in my Tablet column https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/microagressions
