One thing that's odd about that thread is the idea many of them seem to have that shoeshining was somehow invented just to create a demeaning job for blacks - something that white people could lord over them in a "power dynamic".
In larger cities, with perhaps the exceptions of centralized areas like train stations and uptown shopping areas, shoeshining was performed by by whatever ethnicity was common to the area. In Italian neighborhoods it was done by Italian "shoeshine boys", in Irish areas it was the Irish, in Chinatown the Chinese, and so forth.
In smaller towns blacks did more shoeshining because they did more menial jobs in general. Field work, ditch digging, common labor, etc. In the Sixties as more and more jobs opened up to Blacks they moved out of those positions into better opportunities and more lower-educated whites began to fill the vacuum. In 1970 I began picking tobacco in the summer, a job that was almost exclusively relegated to blacks a decade before. Blacks did it not because of some conspiracy among white farmers to demean them, but because that was all that was available and they were willing to work cheap. My white friends and I did it because we wanted to earn some money over the summer. Too bad we didn't have some well-fed Northern liberal to tell us how "demeaning" the job was that we were doing simply because Blacks were the main ones doing it before.
The point is, there is no honest, wholesome work that is in and of itself demeaning. It's the person that demeans, not the work. I'd be willing to bet that some of the more well-heeled DUmmy womyn have no problem at all going into a spa and letting Conchita pedicure their stinky, fungus-nailed feet. ****ing hypocrites.
