_Our Kids_: Interlude I; Introducing "White Status" and "White Skew"

As I annotated my copy of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, I thought about many of its findings and precents related to constructs of white privilege and white superiority. Two specific ideas for new(?) terms formulated, or swirled roughly in and out of tangibility, as I read. Given the economic opportunity gaps between the poor and the rich -- within and across races -- why aren't more academics and activists focusing on a poverty-first or socioeconomic equity-first social justice agenda that encapsulates race and gender rather than focus specifically on race? Even in the weeks since I completed my reading, there is evidence of these "race vs class" tensions in policy problem-solving and analyzing current events. The BlackLivesMatter movement has helped Bernie Sanders reframe his talk on financial reform as one in which economic and race issues run as parallels, for example. This new position could constitute kowtowing, given Sanders seems to know that many race issues are rooted in economics first. 

But why do Americans have so much trouble acknowledging that virtually all oppression in American society, certainly in contemporary American capitalism, is economic-based, from slavery to assimilation to manifest destiny to anti-desegregation, anti-suffrage, and anti-gay marriage efforts?

I offer two terms from my inchoate-made-almost-palpable to help explain it. The terms reside below white superiority, or, since I *do* see issues as economics-based first, just Superiority, and are possible subsets of white privilege. Please offer me feedback if other authors have already named these constructs. They're more formulating than formulaic right now, as I continue to learn and grow my own social justice agenda rooted in mobility inequality. 

1. "White Status" -- a construct residing between white supremacy and white privilege, but in a spectral, trickster sense. White status can be observed living in language via phrases like "That's mighty white of you" and "Thank God I'm white!" even when used ironically or to draw attention to white privilege. Most acutely, white status is the sense of class and race superiority that poor, working-, and lower-middle class whites might have which keeps them separate from, "above" or more fortunate than (in their own minds) POC. White status is a specter, a folly of a false ghost, because for the majority of those who might claim it, it offers negligible benefits at best and actually reinforces wedges between groups of people who have much in common regarding socioeconomic inequities, thereby serving white supremacy/socioeconomic stratification by ensuring that POC and poorer whites do no work together as much or as well as they could to bring about economic revolution. So, white status may appear to be a blessing to poor whites, but it actually serves the Economic Masters.

2. "White Skew" -- whereas white status might be a construct most apparent among poorer whites, White Skew may be more apparent among POC and especially prevalent among well-off whites. White skew is the notion that because of white supremacy or white privilege,or, worse, because of whiteness itself, white people can't really be poor. Intensified by growing socioeconomic segregation in housing, schooling and other cultural and social constructs, white skew is racism when coming from POC but also reveals a hidden racism toward POC from well-off whites. Whiteness equates to privilege, to access to success. So, if a white person is poor, it must be *their* fault and their fault alone because whites can't be poor because they are white. Regarding segregation, white skew might reveal itself when whites of a certain socioeconomic class assume they are the baseline for all of the white experience and simply do not believe that there are white under-classes or white people who struggle with poverty. Regarding racism toward POC, inherent in white skew mindset is that only POC can be poor, so white skew is part of the very worst ways in which white supremacy can be defined. Ironically, white skew might be found most among whites who identify as liberal and be so embedded that it only rears its head when said liberals actualize race-based activist efforts at the expense of all-inclusive socioeconomic equity activism, working for the lesser races who because of their lesser races (usually brown races or ethnicities) can't help themselves.

So, am I on to something? Do analogues of these constructs already exist in critical race theory, social justice theories, etc.?