¶ … Inequality, Race, and Remedy" and "People Like Us" The steps Jenkins offers focus on removing "race-based barriers to opportunity" (4). One step involves granting access to non-whites to job-training programs that ready individuals from low-income regions for working in the global economy. Another step involves helping low-wage workers to better organize against racial exclusion and permanent low-income caps so that they can climb out of their poverty status. A third step is helping immigrants to become citizens by offering them better wages and labor protection against racism and exploitation. A fourth step includes removing financial obstacles to college for these people by employing the private sector to grant scholarships for this group. Another step is to provide affordable health care for this group. And a last step is to redesign urban areas so that they are more accommodating to the housing, health, and transportation needs of these groups.

I do not feel that his reasoning is logical: it essentially boils down to more "free" stuff for people who cannot afford it and simply shifts the burden on to others. Does it address the issue of WASP racism that drives the inequality? No. Does it address the idea that the system is set up to drain wealth from low and middle classes? No. Why should college or health care be so expensive in the first place? Instead of finding someone else to pay for it, these cartels...

Race and poverty are interrelated because it has always been the WASP agenda to keep minorities burdened by debt and shackled by poverty. Jenkins' argument is legitimate: minorities have been hurdled into urban jungles and WASP elites pretend that slavery has ended -- it has not: it has simply devised new ways for it to occur. The prison farm systems, for instance, are like the new plantations, where blacks and other minorities are kept and put to work for corporations at dollar-a-day wages, just like the bowl-of-rice-a-day wages that the slaves in Asia are given for their work for companies like Apple. Race and poverty are linked because the elites want to exploit the labor of these people so that they can get richer.
3. As Brooks notes, "The dream of diversity is like the dream of equality. Both are based on ideals we celebrate even as we undermine them daily" (8). That is, people naturally tend to segregate themselves (at least in the U.S.) over time. Whether it's Boulder, Colorado, where mountain bikers have taken over the community or the fact that SoHo attracts certain types of people and not others -- life is all about establishing a niche. Diversity is talked about and wanted but not all in one place. People want pockets of differences but they don't want one big melting…