America has a tradition of dividing itself up racially, but even among the controlling demographic there is a subdivision into classes. The lowest among them are referred to as "white trash". Basically poor people and the working class. Privilege for them is largely symbolic. There isn't much social mobility for them, but in terms of supporting the ruling demographic they serve a purpose and therefore have to be appealed to. It's done extremely grudgingly by the ruling class, who both depend on them for their power and look down on them as their social inferiors.
This has a long history, beginning with the transportation of English criminals to populate their colonies in the Americas and break ground for them with their labor. It had the added benefit of getting the criminal element and the undesirables like political agitators far away and out of their hair back home in England. America fills up its prisons beyond capacity for the slightest infraction because we have nowhere to send them and besides, their labor might be a way to force them to turn a profit. Back then England sent their convicts to America for much the same purpose, just far away and out of sight.
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| Penal Transportation |
Before America had slavery, we had indentured servitude. Transported criminals were ordered into this servitude as part of completing their sentence, after which they were free to begin a new life and put down roots in the colonies. They were not, however, free to return home to England. England didn't want them back. England wanted them adding to their revenue stream in the colonies producing trade goods which profited England. Things like tobacco and sugar and coffee and rum. Luxuries that fetched a good price in the old world. When they colonized Asia it was tea and opium.
There was another use for the transported criminals in the longer run. The more there were of them the more control and land England gained. The interests of the colonists, even the involuntary ones, still matched closely to English interests. They'd settle down if they felt a sense of ownership, and the land they got at the completion of their indenture reinforced this. They would defend what they felt was theirs and that in turn meant that they would defend English interests since the land was granted to them by England and England could take it away if they didn't behave. It wasn't a democracy, it was a colony whose laws were decided by a king far far away who had a strong personal financial interest in things running the way the stockholders wanted them to. England profited hand over fist from their colonies for a long time.
There were attempts to raise the population in America by different countries who colonized after the Dutch settled first and the English bought them out. There were also Spain and France. One of the ways they did this was by advertising for "redemptioners". Redemptioners were people who exchanged a set number of years of their labor in the form of indentured servitude for the price of a voyage to the new world. It was made attractive by offering them the incentive at the end of it all of owning their own land. Land had already been divided up long ago in Europe, but in America if they would just sign away seven years of hard work they could own their own land. It offered the possibility of social mobility, because if they had land they attained status undreamed-of in their own countries. This was the promise that drew them in.
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| Virginia Memory - Buying and Selling Servants |
Recruiters would work European cities and present it as no great sacrifice in exchange for great eventual reward. "Can't afford your own ticket to the new world? No problem! We'll take you there and all you have to do is commit to a seven-year contract to pay for it. You'll work for an established colonist and learn the ropes so that when your contract ends you'll know how to run your own land. Think of it as an apprenticeship. And when your time is up you get so many acres of land and some seed to plant on it and a stake to start your new life. You'll be a success in no time! Look at me, I've just returned from there and I'm wearing nice clothes and can afford to travel. You can even go on to sponsor your own indentures and leave them to take care of the place while you enjoy the profits. You can live like the nobility." Or at least that's how I imagine their pitch going. A lot of people went for it. Many of them signed away three or four years and when the captain took bids he extended the contract to the full seven years permitted by law in order to maximize his own profit. If you signed up as a redemptioner you didn't have much recourse. You were stranded far away from home with no way to get back if you changed your mind when conditions were much closer to slavery than those described in the sales pamphlet.
Of course all of the people who took this route to the new world were poor. It was a way for European society to get rid of the poor and undesirable people and get some use out of them at the same time. They got here to discover that they'd been sold a false promise of social mobility and success. Many of them didn't survive their servitude. Many of them ran away. There are isolated enclaves in the Appalachian mountains of indentures who ran away into the hills. Nearly all of them stayed poor no matter how hard they worked. Far from becoming equals with the ruling class, they were looked down upon as inferiors and inbreds. The accusation that they were inbred was ironic considering that it was the pot calling the kettle black. The aristocracy in Europe were prone to inherited diseases like hemophilia because they were inbred. Like narcissists do on an individual level, the ruling classes tended to project a lot of their own worst behavior onto the people they considered below them.
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| Inbreeding and the Extinction of the House of Habsburg |
There was a story from ancient Rome in which Seneca was speaking to a newly installed emperor Nero. He said, "A proposal was once made in the senate to distinguish slaves from free men by their dress. It then became apparent how great would be the impending danger if our slaves should be able to count our number." The proposal was dropped. The elite of the 18th century ignored Roman thinking on the subject and began bringing enslaved Africans to the Americas and using the difference in coloring to codify their social hierarchy. They saw a use for it in dividing people against each other. This is in large part because early on indentured people from Europe began feeling solidarity with the enslaved people and began forming alliances with them, they banded together against the landed gentry. An example is Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. It was a rebellion over the governor's refusal to kill natives to take their land, so the rebellion's cause was not just, but it was this rebellion which prompted the switch to importing people from Africa exclusively because it threw such a scare into the landowners.
In 1705 line was drawn between them so that they would not group together against the landowning gentry again. The social caste structure was hardened to prevent another such uprising. Indentures from European stock had to be made to feel as if they were better than slaves, and should have nothing to do with them. They were made to identify with the landowners instead and share their fears. They were told that they were special. Sure, they did the same work and lived in the same miserable conditions as the enslaved people, but they were free. Never mind that it was hard to see the theoretical distinction, to them it made all the difference. The possibility that they could one day rise in station was potent incentive to keep working. The ruling class still laughed at them behind their backs and kept them down, but as long as they were pandered to in public and flattered they would go on supporting the landowners and their interests politically. As long as someone else had it worse than they did, they would accept poverty and abuse because at least they weren't slaves.
The truth is that they never were and never will be viewed as equals by the ruling class. Sucking up to them might get them more table scraps, but they were never going to be offered a place at the table. The vast majority of poor people who buy into being white as a defining aspect of their identity don't seem to understand this. The best interests of the wealthy and their best interests are not the same thing. The concept of race exists only as a strategy to divide society into a more privileged group and all other groups with less privilege to control all of them. Narcissist parents know this tactic instinctively and reward one child while punishing another. It keeps them from feeling solidarity or comparing notes and ganging up against you. In psychology it's called "triangulation" or "splitting". They play people against each other by strategically demonizing one child while praising the other and making them compete with each other for the approval of the narcissist. It's a manipulation tactic used by the personality disordered to get their way even at the expense of those they have recruited as allies. The wealthy ruling class is the sociological equivalent of that narcissistic parent. They ultimately only care about what's good for them.
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