I want to make this brief, but maybe I'll get carried away. Poor White America is invisible to the black politics of liberation. The level playing field is lumpy for everyone.
For a long time I beleived that policy perscriptions for blackfolks were necessarily different than those for whitefolks. This was primarily because I recognized the geographical differences in availability to mainstream resources made simple advice more complex. "Get a job" doesn't work where there are no jobs, structurally. Furthermore, I understand that many blackfolks want more from politics than just that which simple enlightened self-interest would demand. Given a choice between the man who pushes the button of economic empowerment and the one who does so employing the rhetoric of black uplift, blacks will choose the latter, and sometimes they will do so even if he doesn't push the button.
These beliefs are in contradiction to my desire for mainstream integration. It is ghettoes that hold back blackfolks, get out of the ghetto and the playing field is leveled. That doesn't mean that the injuries don't linger but it does mean that the number one priority is leaving the ghetto. Some think going the opposite direction is appropriate, making the individual so strong that they can survive the ghetto and thereby romanticizing the ghetto, survival in the streets, thug life and all that lowbrow rot.
The continuing myth of black vs white without consideration of class (I'll coin a term in due time), ignores the disadvantages of poor whites in the level playing field. Part of the problem is that nobody can quantify exactly what advantage ghetto whites have over ghetto blacks in the mainstream. Some would have you believe it is negligable, for others, insurmoutable.
I come to look at this in consideration of the discounting of the 'level playing field' in discussions on integration and affirmative action, but also in consideration of the white strawman. This white strawman does a lot of heavy lifting for hard afrocentrists, especially when they waltz into the arms of organized labor and other grassroots activists engaged in battles against, oh say Wal-Mart.
I suggest that the integration strategies of contemporary white immigrants as well as identifyable 'bohunks' from the white Sticks, be considered in more practical ways by black liberation politics. After all, they're the ones buying Jay-Z and DMX.