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The poem ties class and race together by naming small everyday hells where industrial waste and denied work harden into a social boundary.

"Middle Class Color Line" suggests that respectability is built on someone else's poisoned ground, and the racial slur lands as evidence of how casually that order speaks about the people it harms. The closing contrast between oil waste, town, and the right to work makes exclusion feel both environmental and economic.

'Middle Class Color Line': 'All those little pockets of hell' whose 'transformations are out of a time / When oil waste ment nigger town, / and not the right to work...'

The poem binds race and class into one boundary line and locates it in industrial residue - oil waste is what marks the geography of exclusion. 'Little pockets of hell' miniaturizes the harm into specific, nameable places rather than a national abstraction, and the dropped final clause, 'not the right to work', makes economic denial the second half of the same sentence as the slur. The retained slur and the source spelling 'ment' are kept because the poem is quoting the era's own casual speech as evidence; softening it would erase what is being indicted. The closing ellipsis lets the wrong trail off unfinished, as if still ongoing.