t once the pressure of the exploitation of the working class by the dominant class became bad enough, revolution would follow. That is the essence of the conflict theory of stratification in which some people have the "power and willingness to exploit others" (Shepard 195). In this situation the dominant class does whatever it takes to convince the dominated of the truth of an ideology that will keep the subject classes content and--above all--keep them from questioning the power of the upper. One primary aspect of the creation of false consciousness is the old technique of 'divide and conquer.'
The heart of the American problem is located by Lind who quotes a Washington Post Op-ed article in which James K. Glassman argued against raising the minimum wage, saying that this move would do very little for the average American worker faced with declining real wages. According to Glassman, "the ultimate answer lies with workers themselves . . . Government can help a bit through tax breaks for education, but ultimately the cure for low working wages may be nothing more mysterious than high personal diligence" (quoted in Lind 39). This is what is called blaming the victim. It calls on the prevailing belief that, in America, "an individual with enough gumption can pull himself up by his bootstraps, especially with a little hard work and a good education" (Heath 51). But the implication that accompanies this notion is that, since no one could possibly want to be poor, there must be something wrong with those who are poor.
The fact, therefore, that African Americans and Hispanics constitute such a disproportionately large part of the American underclass "can only be explained," according to the dominant classes' logic, "not by [their own] extrinsic advantages but by [the] intrinsic defects" of the underclass (Lind 37). Thus, while the American media and politicians distract their constituencies with non-issues such as a constituti...