I am now doing maintenance on industrial packaging equipment at a company that uses a lot of temp workers on the assembly lines. The temp workers are either under-educated and lacking in experience (not necessarily that group's fault in most cases here), welfare moms, hispanics of very questionable origin (the company has 'plausible deniablility' since they are all temps) dope-dealing ghetto boyz, people who's criminal records prevent them from working anywhere else and some miscellaneous other types.
I get along with nearly everyone there and have no qualms with them on a professional (if you can call it that) level so this isn't some angry 'white guy' bullsh*t.
The blacks who work there are in the lower socio-economic strata but don't seem to want for anything. The women get their 'checks', live in their Section 8's, get all the black market DVD's (and God knows what else) they want on the cheap, drive nice cars, never seem to run out of food to bring to work, are mostly overweight, party their asses off and terribly ignorant about the world outside of their BET/Hollywood influenced lives. The 'men' party their asses off, deal dope, drive nice cars and go to the women's Section 8's to watch bootleg DVDs on the Prime-Time Rentals 648" TV, you get the picture.
My honest opinion based on knowing who I know now and being exposed to their lifestyle is that the anger and resentment comes from not being able to 'roll' like those idiots that they idolize in popular media (sorry, not gonna say culture) and it's 'The Man's' fault in some way or another by their twisted way of thinking. Nevermind that the white guy sitting next to them on the assembly line doesn't wear the latest 'urban' fashion (damn I didn't even hit on that one yet) and rides the bus to work and eats from the vending machine because he is paying full rent on an apartment and utilities on line-worker pay alone.
This is what I'm seeing from my perspective.
Sorry if it sounds like I'm stereotyping, but I'm damn close.
The people I'm writing about here are nice people (for the most part), I just think that the lifestyle they lead has evolved from generations of dependency on 'the plantation' so often mentioned on this forum.
There's also personal choice. Their supervisor is a black man who is ex-Navy, educated and a good all-around supervisor who only speaks about 1% ebonics. (I'm not saying this to be a wise-ass, it's just the truth.) He made some personal choices and escaped a life of dependency and crime.
Like I read here on FR once regarding race relations: "It's not the race, it's the culture."
I grew up in the type of town that outsiders were afraid to drive through. Whenever I met people outside the town, and I would tell them where I was from, their reaction was often a wide-eyed: "You live WHERE? Really? OMG." The eastside of town was largely black, Italian, Spanish-speaking, in that order, and that's where I lived. (I fell in the second group.) The westside was largely white. And both ends of town were equally as scary... lol. (Oh, the stories I could tell...) Here's what I noticed: At both ends of the town, most of the people - white, black, whatever - who created their own problems had a victim mentality.