This article about running out of work, money, and luck is really interesting. Note the presumption of access to health insurance and a car.

And this: "Meanwhile they were finding out why some recipients have taken to calling the assistance program “Torture and Abuse of Needy Families.” From the start, the experience has been “humiliating,” Kristen said. The caseworkers “treat you like a bum — they act like every dollar you get is coming out of their own paychecks." " - I get the feeling welfare/jobs caseworkers in the US and UK treat people about exactly the same.

The UK assumption of the classes people are in being permanent is interesting to me. And the Parentes would have considered themselves middle class, as do I. But I think that I could just as easily slip into the same situation in two years as they have - out of work, no place to live, being treated like a scrounger by the government. My only saving grace is that I don't have to take care of any children. But I don't see myself having enough money saved up to keep this from happening, and God knows I would have no one to turn to to bail me out. My only hope is to just keep working and hope I stay employed.

Meanwhile back in the US of A, we've got a great article about how Americans see race ... and Obama.

God, I want him to win. I want him to be president of my country, so I can be proud about my president again. And, you know, I'm sure I'll be disappointed in him in the end, but ... I want to hear the end of stuff like these quotes from the article.

Anyway, here's the article from the New York Times. Who's got time to fuss about what class you define as when race is what's driving my society? Some quotes:

“He’s neither-nor,” said Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter who works at a factory north of Mobile, while standing in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store just north of here. “He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.”

Whether Mr. Obama is black, half-black or half-white often seemed to overshadow the question of his exact stand on particular issues, and rough-edged comments on the subject flowed easily even from voters who said race should not be an issue in the campaign. Many voters seemed to have no difficulty criticizing the mixing of the races — and thus the product of such mixtures — even as they indignantly said a candidate’s color held no importance for them.

“I would think of him as I would of another of mixed race,” said Glenn Reynolds, 74, a retired textile worker in Martinsville, Va., and a former supervisor at a Goodyear plant. “God taught the children of Israel not to intermarry. You should be proud of what you are, and not intermarry.”

Mr. Reynolds, standing outside a Kroger grocery store, described Mr. Obama as a “real charismatic person, in that he’s the type of person you can’t really hate, but you don’t really trust.”

Other voters swept past such ambiguities into old-fashioned racist gibes.

“He’s going to tear up the rose bushes and plant a watermelon patch,” said James Halsey, chuckling, while standing in the Wal-Mart parking lot with fellow workers in the environmental cleanup business. “I just don’t think we’ll ever have a black president.”

There is nothing unusual about mixed-race people in the South, although in decades past there was no ambiguity about the subject. Legally and socially, a person with any black blood was considered black when segregation was the law.
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For those who care, I don't think most Americans see Obama as biracial, because most people don't even know the word. He looks like an American "black" (an "African American," which is kind of funny because Obama is very much African and American, while Africans who've moved to America define themselves as Africans and not as American blacks - see this great article by Charles Mudede for clarity - so Obama looks like what people in America call black, which is a culture of mixed race people, even though he doesn't come from that culture), and thus people see him as black. And that, I hope, is how I hope he looks to the rest of the world, and to black Americans - as a representative of America's black community.

And I want him to be the face of America to the rest of the world. I would be happy of him and proud, for the first time in nearly a decade, of my country.

Oh yeah, my ballot came in the mail two days ago. Time to mail it off and get this man in the White House.

PS: I have a hard time using the word African Americans at all these days, because after living among so many African immigrants in Seattle, it seemed like not really the right term to define native born Americans with a history of 150 - 200 years in the US. Thus I use "black," even though I know it doesn't mean the same thing in the UK as it does in the US.

A few of you have talked with me about class in America and the difference between class perception and identity in the US and the UK. I've found it a very intersting topic: for example, no one in the US ever uses the phrase "middle class guilt," as far as I know, and I think if I tried to explain it, my American friends would dissolve in giggles.

A report has come out that's generated two major news stories in the last week and addresses some of the assertions I've made rather directly. First, do Americans really feel like they can "work their way out of poverty?" Per this report, 60 percent of people born to what I think they call the "working class" here (but we call "the poor" in America, or more often these days "the working poor") move into the middle class. To me, that means there is in fact a great deal of mobility, so my belief that people think they can go up if they want to is not so much based on being fed a line but on actual reality.

The sad thing is that one of the very best ways of pulling your butt out of the trailer park is education, and a college degree is becoming increasingly difficult for the poorest people to get. (Is there a correlation between rise in the cost of college prices here?) The study also showed a strong correlation between your race and your ability to graduate from college, or, for that matter, start going in the first place. The good news is if you're [white] trash like me and graduate from college, you have "a 19 percent chance of joining the highest fifth of earners in adulthood and a 62 percent chance of joining the middle class or better." (BTW a big callout to my sister for joining me in clawing our way out.)

So good public education can make a difference, but ... hearing that "[t]he small fraction of poor children who earn college degrees are likely to rise well above their parents’ status" is not much consolation when so many other people are out there who won't. And head in the sand morons are saying that the poor aren't really poor because they are able to spend beyond their means. I still say class identity in the US is weak, but reading this article makes me want to quit my job and go work as a high school guidance counselor. "Studies show that many poor but bright children do not receive good advice about applying for college and scholarships, or do not receive help after starting college," and I think that has a lot to do with why they don't graduate. I wonder how I could make a difference?