Well, I remember reading at one point many Australians were almost proud of the criminal background of their families and very savvy about the issue of the criminalization of poverty.
And yet . . .
Many of these same persons treated aboriginal persons like shit. And when there were a large number of aboriginals in Australian prisons, many because of heroin, the European Australians didn’t exactly see this as a criminalization of poverty issue.
Hunter-gatherers don't fare well when they run into expanding agriculturalists.
And that justifies the Australians' treatment of Aboriginals? Because if that is what you're saying, I'm sure that the moderation staff would be interested to hear you justify that point. If I misunderstood you, I apologize in advance.
Anyways, getting back to the original point, IMO if you want to get rid of "political correctness" as a topic, you have to not have the Second Great Migration go the way that it did OTL. The way that it went, you ended up having lots of impoverished people that were traumatized by the absolute heinousness that they had experienced in the South during the sharecropper system loading into overcrowded inner-city areas at exactly the time that low-skilled industrial jobs were beginning to disappear. The crime that resulted from this perfect storm shocked the Northerners that had not seen anything like that before. Nicholas Lemann did a superb job detailing this in the book
The Promised Land, which I would suggest that everybody should read.
So what I would suggest would be that immigration restrictions be imposed much earlier than they were OTL, like around the late 1890's/early 1900's when the second great wave of immigration that brought Poles, Southeast Europeans, etc. into America was happening. That way, the demand for industrial jobs in the cities that they were fulfilling would instead have gone to African-Americans migrating north, and they eventually would have been able to take the patronage jobs, city service jobs, etc. that those groups got. There would have been less competition for housing as well, and the machines in the cities would have had to lean more heavily on the African-American community. That would have brought more blacks into the industrial cities earlier, and also forced the landowners that needed their labor to, if even ever so slightly, not mistreat them as much as they did OTL. Bonus points too if the southern Democrats then push for an immigration policy that would allow them to do what was done in the Caribbean and import workers from India and East Asia, that would have lessened the need for sharecrop labor and allowed more blacks to move north and take manufacturing/patronage/city service jobs. That way, by the time cotton reaping is fully mechanized in the 1940's, you don't have a large mass of low-skill, low-educated people that don't have anywhere to go except the places in the North that people up there have designated to warehouse them.
