I believe that most people make decisions that are reasonable to them within their own logic system. It is important work to understand the logic systems of those with whom we disagree, including those whom we see as racist.
Race is one of the primary ways we categorize humans in this country, but race as a way of sorting and defining people is relatively new. From its beginnings, racial classifications were ranked and tied to power.
A strategic analysis of how racism has been used as strategy involves four groups of people: The aspirant White class, those people who have aspired to gain or stabilize wealth and power; Black people: as slaves or freed people who have been forced to supply no wage or low wage labor and have been targets of politicized racism; impoverished White people, who have suffered a disadvantage as labor competition to slaves or freed people and are positioned to carry the message and receive any punishments; and other whites who have held similar attitudes of superiority as those on the front lines.
My focus on Black and White is historically based. The Slave Codes that were enacted to disenfranchise Africans were the model for the codes used against Chinese workers and, later, Japanese during World War II. Similar strategies were and are used against Indigenous, LatinX and gender and sexual minorities.
Whiteness as a Value
Europeans did not come to think of themselves as “White” until they felt the need to define themselves against other peoples. They simultaneously defined theirs as the better category against those whom some would invade, colonize and enslave. Racism, the belief in their own superiority, provided a powerful rationale.
Racism has profound and brutal impact. We can see its results—the laws, policies, practices and the suffering, the degradations and humiliations that follow—and we often think of racism as the original cause–that Black people were enslaved because they were seen as inferior. Historical research shows otherwise. We don’t often think that there might be a strategic reason for racism, a reason that lies with the hater rather than the hated. Racism is a strategy, a means to another end, and useful, to those immoral enough to use it.
Black people were not enslaved because they were perceived as less intelligent. They were interpreted as less intelligent so that they could be enslaved. Historians have provided strong evidence that the concept of racial inferiority was constructed to provide a rationale for the very lucrative economic vehicle of slavery. Centuries of pseudo-science have worked to support the concepts of racial superiority. In the 19th and early 20th century, eugenics researchers experimented on and sterilized non-White people, feeding the scientific arm of the Jewish Holocaust. There is currently a resurgence of “race science” funded by tech money, working to identify genetic trends of supposed inferiority. The language of “race science,” of “pure” and “impure” blood has seeped into the national political language.
Supporting Slavery
Slavery was (and is) an economic vehicle. The great wealth of the United States is built upon the foundation of centuries of low-cost labor. Southern slavery and the northern industries that grew up to support it—such as shipbuilding and “slave cloth” textiles–were ways for individual families to grow wealthy. One of the great conundrums presented by slavery was that Africans were obviously fully human, able to do all the jobs that other humans did. Their enslavement required a justification. Racism provided it.
At first, the justification was that the Africans were not Christians and therefore inferior. As some slaveowners began to baptize slaves, the discourse changed, leading to a centuries-long, tortuous effort to prove intellectual inferiority of Black people.
(It was not always so. In his tragedy Othello, written in 1604, Shakespeare made it clear that the Black general Othello character was intellectually brilliant. Iago made a number of pejorative comments about a Black man “tupping” a White woman because he was jealous of Othello’s brilliance in battle.)
The young American experiment was based on the European Enlightenment, which heralded rationalism and the intellect, along with the ideal of freedom. Slavery was the underbelly of the Enlightenment and one of the massive contradictions of the ideals upon which this country was founded. But slaves were not the only pawns. Poor Whites were pulled into the game. The first time, but not the last, was the Civil War.
Planters were made wealthy by no-wage, enslaved labor and they had much to lose by Emancipation. Slavery did not benefit poor White people; it actually hurt them by providing unfair labor competition. Slaves could do all the same jobs, including the skilled labor jobs. Early labor unions were formed because of the unfair competition and elite Whites worked to counter by bringing poor people into the club of a vaguely defined Whiteness without giving them any other benefit. There was little other reason for poor Whites to risk their lives to defend slavery. Planters conducted a propaganda campaign that Whiteness was its own reward and created armies of poor men who would take up arms, instead of the sons of planters, to die for the “cause.” Poor White men were the cannon fodder of the Confederate army. Historians now use the word “pawn” to describe how poor Whites were positioned in what some called the “rich man’s war and the poor man’s fight.”
Dixiecrats: “Segregation Forever”
The same strategy was used in the 1940’s by the States Rights Democratic Party, more commonly known as the Dixiecrats, when South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond led a movement to galvanize poor White Democrats in opposition to the national Democratic Party. Offering poor Whites nothing other than Whiteness, the tool was segregationist racism to counter the beginnings of the Black Civil Rights movement. The Dixiecrats eventually moved to form the right wing of the present Republican party. (Thurmond’s life shows the lie—we now know that he fathered a Black daughter, Essie Mae Washington, with Carrie Butler, a 16 year-old domestic worker in his parents’ home. He secretly helped to pay for Essie’s college education.)
When the Supreme Court ruled Brown vs Board of Education, the prevailing attitude among Americans was that Black people were intellectually and morally inferior to White people. Long held and pervasive attitudes do not die easy deaths. The idea that Black people are less intelligent is deeply ingrained. The aspirant to power does not need to introduce racism, only to arouse it; it has never gone away. Racism is as a virus, brought up when it is deemed to be useful.
The Current Resurgence
Racism has utility for those in despair. One can take pride and comfort in being “White,” supposedly superior to “Black.” As farming and manufacturing jobs have left, we are seeing people who are in despair resorting to racism to feel better about themselves, seeing others as inferior or as scapegoats. An aspirant to power can manipulate that despair and racism to rise to power by constructing a false “we-ness” of Whiteness with poor White people without improving the quality of their lives otherwise. I know a present-day community activist in Appalachia who is asking her fellow community members to look around, to ask what their supposed White privilege has gotten them.
White researcher Patrick Grzanka has conducted an experiment that found that even those who identified themselves as progressives still made racist comments in private with another White person, to create commonality. In the public sphere, eugenics has recently resurged as “race science” and the American right is using the language of the renewed movement. The people in the streets, chanting the slogans, being arrested for violence, are largely working-class White people who will gain nothing for their actions.
We may not be able to extract racism from the hearts of individuals who resort to it but if we recognize it when elevated to a populist strategy, we can successfully out-maneuver it with counter strategies.
