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If you know the history of the whole concept of whiteness, if you know the history of the whole concept of the white race, where it came from and for what reason, you know that it was a trick, and it has worked brilliantly.
See, prior to the mid to late 1600s in the colonies that would become the United States, there was no such thing as the white race. Those of us of European descent did not refer to ourselves by that term really ever before then. In fact, in the old countries of Europe, we had spent most of our time killing each other. We didn't love each other; we weren't one big happy family. The side of my family that comes from Scotland, hell, they didn't even worry about fighting people outside of Scotland. Highlanders and lowlanders just fought the hell out of each other.
So, there was no white race. But in the colonies of what would become the United States, what did we see in the 1660s and 1670s? We began to see that Africans of indentured servant status, many of them not enslaved yet, were not necessarily permanently enslaved. Some were; others were indentured like many poor Europeans for periods of 7 to 11 years. They could work off their indenture and then they would be free labor, technically realized, as did the white indentured servants, the Europeans who hadn't even been called white yet.
They had a lot of things in common, like the fact that they were all getting their clock cleaned by the elite. So, they would get together more than our history books taught us to ferment rebellion against the elite to try to get a better deal for themselves on the basis of economic necessity and economic justice.
What did the elite do? When you see that you're outnumbered by black and white folks who are penniless, landless peasants, you have to do one of two things. You either have to kill them all, but you can't do that because who's going to work? Rich folks weren't going to. They had to get poor people to work. The whole point was to be a person of leisure back in those days. That was the goal—not to work.
So, you can't kill them, but you can co-opt them. The elite in Virginia, for example, began to give certain carrots to people of European descent, saying things like, "You know, we're going to let you own a little land—not much, but just a little. We're going to get rid of indentured servitude. Now you're free labor, and by the way, once you're free labor, you get 50 acres of land just because you're free labor."
See, we're going to cut you in on this deal. We're going to let you enter into contracts, we're going to let you testify in court, and here's the best of all: we're going to put you on the slave patrol to keep those people in line.
The idea was you're still going to get your clock cleaned. We still don't like you; we still aren't going to really empower you or change your economic subordination. But we're going to make you honorary members of this team, and you're going to help us keep those other people down.
So, they got a little taste of power, and it did effectively divide and conquer. Those coalitions, those rebellions began to stop almost instantly.
Fast forward to the Civil War era. You have rich white folks in the South, where I come from, standing up and openly admitting that the reason they're prepared to secede from the Union—and the only reason they ever articulated publicly—was to maintain and extend slavery and white supremacy. Not only where it already existed, but into the newly acquired, that is to say, stolen territories from Mexico to the West. That was what they said.
Now we lie about it. We say it wasn't about slavery, that it was about states' rights. Yes, the right of the states to keep and maintain slaves, exactly. But back then, they had no shame, so they didn't try to cover it up; they openly said it.
But once again, the rich didn't want to go do the work. Are you kidding? No, they're going to get poor people to go fight for them. And the poor folks didn't even own slaves.
Now think: how do you get poor people who don't even own the shirt on their back, let alone slaves, to go fight to keep your slaves for you? You've got to convince them that their skin is more important than their economic interest.
Because think about it: if I am a farmer who has to charge you a dollar a day or two dollars a week to work on your farm and harvest that tobacco or pick that cotton, but you can get a black person to do it for free because you own them, who's going to get the job? Not me.
In other words, slavery actually undermined the wages and the wage-based economic floor of the typical white working class or low-income person. But they were told, "If these people are freed, they're going to take your job." No, fool, they got your job—that's the point.
So, at some level, again, working-class white people were being harmed by white privilege. Relatively being advantaged, right? Being given a leg up, being given membership to the club, but in absolute terms being kept economically subordinated by the very thing that gave them a sense of superiority.
How's that for irony?
Then in the present era, this hasn't stopped. This is not ancient history. Now we have people running around insisting that we should close the border with Mexico because if we don't, the wages of working-class people will continue to fall. The implication being that the only reason workers are paid like crap in this country is because the border is open.
But if you believe that, you would actually have to believe that if that border were closed, all these owners of capital and industry would just say, "Oh well, you figured us out. Here’s a raise."
Do we believe that the only thing keeping bosses from paying people more is the presence of low-wage, medium-skilled labor from south of this artificial border? Is that really what we believe?
We know that if that border is closed, it isn't going to be closed to capital. It isn't going to be closed to goods. If you have a border that can be crossed by capital looking for the highest return on investment or goods looking for the highest price, but labor is chained to its country of origin, how is that going to work to the benefit of working people?
By definition, it doesn't. By definition, it emulates the working class divide and conquer.
But the best example of all, perhaps in the contemporary era, is in the greater New Orleans area after Katrina. Here you have two communities that were the most hard hit: Lower Ninth Ward, a mostly black community, 94% African American, with about a 40% official poverty rate—a heavy working-class community.
And right across the canal, St. Bernard Parish, 95% white, also working class, with high levels of poverty—economically very similar.
At the end of the day, in those first few days of September 2005, they were more similar than they probably would have realized. Because when those levees broke, they all got their stuff jacked; they all got their stuff destroyed.
But if you had asked white folks in St. Bernard Parish—and I've done it—who was the cause of the problems in the greater New Orleans area prior to that flooding, they would have pointed across that canal. Those black folks—they wouldn't have called them black folks—and would have said, "There, that's the problem."
Seventy percent of the white folks in St. Bernard Parish voted for David Duke, a white supremacist, neo-Nazi, former head of the largest Ku Klux Klan group in the United States, when he ran for governor in 1991. Seven out of ten gladly voted for him because he was blaming black folks for all of their problems, and they bought it.
What's the irony? The irony is that while they were blaming black people for their problems, while they were blaming black people for the conditions of the greater New Orleans area in which they lived, nobody was paying attention—least of all they—to the fact that these white elite politicians, either in Baton Rouge or in Washington, whose job it was to secure those levees, to make sure that levee funds were spent in the proper way and that they were spent at all, those mostly white and mostly elite politicians did nothing.
At the end of the day, it wasn't just the black folks in the Lower Ninth Ward they didn't care about; they really couldn't have given a rat's ass about those poor and working-class white folks either.
And yet, when the people of St. Bernard Parish got back into session—the first time they had a city council meeting, parish council meeting after the flooding—the lights weren't even on yet, the water wasn't even hooked up, and the first order of business was to pass an ordinance saying that you couldn't rent property in St. Bernard Parish to anyone who wasn't a blood relative.
Now, I'll leave it to your imagination as to why you'd want to pass a law that had never existed before. But now that it's been emptied out and you don't know who might come back, that's a damn good way to keep black people out, isn't it?
Because if you're 95% white to begin with, if you pass an ordinance that says that, that's a great way to say no blacks need apply. You can't say no blacks allowed, but that was an ingenious way to get around the law.
Now they got caught; there was a lawsuit threatening, and they got rid of the ordinance. But my point in bringing it up is to say, once again, divide and conquer is working.
These white folks in St. Bernard Parish need to march across that canal and join hands with the black folks who've been sitting there more than willing to work with them for a long time. They need to march on Baton Rouge, march on D.C., and march on the Corps of Engineers and recognize their commonality of interest.
But the lure of whiteness has tricked these white people, who have nothing in their bank account, into believing that they have more in common with the rich white folks on St. Charles Avenue who didn't lose anything in that flooding than they have in common with the black working-class folks who live about 500 yards away.
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