Read #QuinnNorton about #whiteness:
"The great thing about the divide-and-conquer of creating white-skin #privilege is that you don’t have to give people thusly bought off anything more, and American power structures didn’t. In places with black #slavery, the whites suffered terribly.
"There is a simple truth to American history for the majority of people who have ever been American: the worse the black experience, the worse everyone else’s experience, including whites. Driving down (or eliminating) black #wages, while always agreeable to whites, drove white pay lower than their European counterparts for most of our history."
"It is to the political benefit of the existing system to keep whites, especially poor whites with little more than their whiteness to be proud of. It makes for a predictable political group. Whites thus managed will vote and flock to issues as reliably as tides."