intersections, part I

I was reading the new College English yesterday and finding Jill Swiencicki's "The Rhetoric of Awareness of Narratives" tremendouly interesting. Yet I was also wondering why Swiencicki glosses the race-class intersection. Writing about stories of coming to (race) consciousness, she quotes an internet discussion in which a participant says: "Nothing is going to change so long as white people feel they can evade the real issues with tangents about class and blithe proclamations about how they're certainly not racist..." What I find puzzling is that Swiencicki doesn't engage with this statement, nor with the whole race-class intersection.

Instead, she uses that quotation to posit the "tangents" as being somehow opposed to "self ... experience ... authentic antiracist work." Huh? Class as a tangent?

There's much that's useful in the article. Swiencicki analyzes the limits of "liberal antiracism" and "liberal social projects" (and the attendant tropes of guilt and shame--tropes which provide a kind of comfort and catharsis, but don't affect change). But I think she misses an opportunity, I think, namely the possibility that a critical, working-class consciousness can sometimes mediate the same limits she speaks of.
The shame/guilt tropes can provide a productive starting point, Swiencicki writes, when they lead to "self consciousness of how one's notion of self is contingent upon others in a power dynamic."

Yes, and understanding power through the lens of class (understanding class AS power) can aid in that consciousness.