I am not speaking of 'secret' in the sense that no one knows this, but in the sense of the phrase 'open secret' where no one wants to talk about something that is known and true, but makes people uncomfortable. Kind of like the 'crazy aunt' that lived in a room in the finished attic. Everyone knew she was there, but no one wanted to talk about her being there.
Well, the open secret about race relations in the USA, is that all of us working class folks have been used against each other by the elite from the earliest history of this country. When Anglo/Scot workers in Northern factories got uppity and wanted better working conditions, the factory owners would bring in the Irish to replace them. When the Irish started getting uppity about 20 years later after the Civil War, the factory owners started bringing in the white trash from the South, and when we were too much trouble they started bringing in blacks in the early half of the 1900's.
Now blacks are getting uppity and are being replaced by immigrants, legal and illegal, and others who can claim 'minority status' one way or another. Hispanics are taking the jobs that lower class blacks and whites would take to work up into the middle class. Asians are going into the black community and establishing stores. Minority set asides are going to white businesses where the former male owner 'sold' the business to his wife, etc.
The continuing theme to all of this is that working class wages keep getting undercut by new additions to the labor force pool, at the expense of those who just got in one generation before. So really, the elite in our country are not rracists, they would exploit anyone of any race. What is interesting about it all is how they keep doing the same thing and no one seems to ever learn their game and take a winning strategy against it.
Here is another little 'open secret'; each community is given a designated elite that the white elite work through in order to control that community. This intermediary elite would be given leadership positions, treated by the elite with respect, and allowed to accumulate wealth at a personal level. But it was all contingent on that intermediary remaining in his place and loyal to the elite. This was long done on an ethnic basis, and now is being done on an inter-racial basis too. In the white community, the churches, and the fraternity/lodge system was created to provide an intermediary between the elite and unwashed working class of the group in question. The same churches and fraternities exist in the black community as are in the white community, and they all serve the interests of the elite, with a few exceptions. Most of the black elite are of mixed race, and the whites they tended to be mixed with was the white elite. So the house slaves were seperated from the field slaves because the white elite were simply showing preference to those who partly shared their blood. Is it any different today? Is this partly why the white elite would rather deal with Jesse Jackson than Roy Innis? Why they dont mind Thurgood Marshall on the SCOTUS, but despise Clarence Thomas?
So what? Well, it just amazes me when I see working class blacks blame working class whites for all their problems when they should be looking a little closer to home. The typical working white guy has done zero to keep blacks down, and in fact, wants the system to be fair to blacks, because when you guys start getting robbed in some new fashion, we know we need to start keeping our heads up too.
But in whose interest does it serve for blacks and white workers to blame each other for what they see as the problems in their communities? Who benefits from our being divided against each other on the basis of race? I think we all know.
When we start thinking rationally and try to have and use the real economic facts instead of centuries old mythology and pie-in-the-sky windfall lawsuits, then maybe one day things can improve for all of us whose ancestors broke the soil in 19th century America.
Till then we are just being useful idiots to the American elite, which is just a branch off of the European elite. And speaking as a descendant of European lower class folks, that is not a good thing for any working whites or blacks, I promise.