We can make impoverished minority ghettos into livable, viable communities in a few years of class-based action and infrastructure initiatives.

It will take you generations to eliminate cultural racism, and in that time the capitalist classes will use race resentment to derail any and all economic reform that could uplift the working class as a whole.

Ask people in the southside of Chicago would they rather have jobs, a strong middle-class community, the money to have real political power (large scale economic and political power chips away at institutional racism, btw) OR eliminate all racism first with no economic change in their neighborhoods. Eliminating racism is not going to fix the problems they face today more than giving people jobs, education and access would.

It's a privileged view to think poor, and disenfranchised people don't want a better economic life that gives them power first over a utopian ideal of eliminating cultural racism over generations.

Having the economic power to have a community at all, is the first step in eliminating institutional racist modes of thought.

Addressing class issues, gives all disenfranchised people the tools to eliminate institutional discrimination and create their own communities.

I am not disagreeing that race is a real issue, I am saying that economic and class justice is what gives people the power to eliminate other injustices.

Do you think there would have been a civil rights movement without the large number of Black GI's returning home from WW2 and Korea with technical and trade skills, education, and new personal connections to help give them the power to organize and form the seeds that would become the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's?

Economic justice is what gives power to every other social cause.