White working and middle-class voters accept conservative arguments that big government has contributed to declining social mobility; many upper-middle-class voters support Democrats because they think more government intervention will counter the trend of decreasing social mobility (123).
Social Class and Voting – Roskin
Native Son – 3
Bigger thinks to himself “Poor white people are stupid,” because they haven’t prospered, even though they have the social advantage of being white. His mother has given him the impression that wealthy white people like black people better than they like poor white people.
Native Son – 12
Bigger feels secure in the fact that Mrs. Dalton won’t ask him certain questions about her daughter because “She would be ashamed to let him think that something was so wrong in her family that she had to ask him, a black servant, about it.” This maintenance of distance between people that is based on race and class keeps Bigger from being suspected of his crime. It keeps him Invisible.
The idea of being ranked amongst animals brings to mind the Great Chain of Being, or the notion that all sentient beings–and, indeed, all substances on earth–are part of a hierarchy that spans from basic minerals, at the bottom, to God, who is at the top. While normally people would be situated above animals in this scheme, however, Douglass notes that he and the other enslaved black people are “ranked with horses, sheep and swine.” In the article “‘The Great Chain of Being Come Undone’ Linking Blackness and Animal Studies,” Calista McRae discusses several studies that address the overlap between depictions of blackness and depictions of animality.
This reference to white workers being “thrown out of employment” recalls Black No More, in which a white labor force is manipulated by their employers into being preoccupied with race, so that it’s possible to exploit them. George Schuyler writes “…so long as the ignorant white masses could be kept thinking of the menace of the Negro to Caucasian race purity and political control, they would give little thought to labor organization” (p. 44; Modern Library edition).