The 'Long Con' of American Racism
Rich people have been setting poor white people against poor black people for over 200 years. It still works.
Long, long ago, the wealthy white landowners of the South discovered a simple but foolproof formula for staying in power. It worked then and it still works today. It worked to keep white wages depressed before the 1860s. (how can you compete with “unpaid?”) Hell, it worked so well during the Civil War that thousands of poor Southerners died defending a system that kept them poor and landless by design. But rather than attempt to explain the workings of this con game myself, I’ll leave the exposition to a great Southern politico who saw its workings up close.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President of the United States
That’s why so many of the nice things you get in other countries: low cost public/private healthcare, good infrastructure, paid parental leave, free college tuition…aren’t found here. All those things cost money, which comes primarily from the pockets of the rich. In other countries, the non-rich recognize this and use the force of numbers to get nice things for themselves and their children.
But the rich of America have found the magic loophole that keeps the non-rich of America from demanding those same things. And that loophole is the same one LBJ described: always keep the focus on ‘'the other,’ and what he/she is getting that you think they don't deserve, so you never realize you have more in common with that other than you do with the rich people. So you never join with them to demand more.
It works so well. From 1865-1950, black and white people in former slave states earned less, died earlier, committed more violent crimes and suffered from more preventable diseases linked to poor sanitation such as hookworm and pellagra, than their counterparts in the North and West. For both blacks and whites, literacy rates were lower and infant mortality was higher in the South than elsewhere. Again, the long shadow of slavery.
Selling poor white people on a system that only benefited rich white people is the same scam that LBJ described—America’s longest con.