The truth is, your class label, to the extent you are beholden to that system, is whatever the upper class labels you in almost all parts of life.
In fact, just the other day, I read that, in North Korea, previous land owners are the outcasts in what’s called the Songbun system. In short, land was taken from the then-“yangban” class (large landowners) and redistributed to the poor. Those former landowners were considered class enemies and those that didn’t flee, were mostly executed or sent to labor camps.
Their entire families carry this social burden for life. They are now called “Jeokdae“-the Hostile class. Barred from higher education, quality employment, even barred from living in the better cities, such as the capital Pyongyang. Their children’s marriage choices can be blocked if the upper class deems necessary.
In simpler terms, in North Korea, if your grandfather owned land, your life is going to be harder because of it. Compared to, for example, anti-Japanese fighters and peasants (in the same system). I say that to illustrate-whatever the upper class may be, you are what they call you in your environment unless a very very large change occurs. I’m talking huge.
In America, we are all still white trash to our upper class; the top ten (10) percent.
Let me explain from the beginning. When you were in public grade school in America, what you probably weren’t told about the end of slavery in 1865 was how the white trash caste was created. Not as a title, or a label, but as a labor class and role.
All of a sudden, there was thousands and thousands of new people looking for work: Black freedmen; Better skilled, and willing to work for less than the white man. The upper class elites (southern landowners and northern industrialists) had an opportunity.
Support a multiracial working class with fair wages and access to land, directly from their bottom line
Or
Maximize profits by replacing poor whites, with skilled black workers, desperate for work, at the expense of poor white farmers’ survival.
They chose profit.
But they couldn’t just toss the poor whites aside, it would have caused mass unrest. An uprising. Violence and riots, more likely than not. Oh no, the poor whites had to be placated somehow. So the elites fed them a lie.
“Don’t worry, white man, you’re still better than the Blacks. We have to hire them, it’s not our fault.”
Treated like white trash, disposed of when convenient, and instead of economic stability, they were given psychological wages. Put simply, they were sold racial pride and paid with their livelihoods. White trash, not as a label, but a social class divided to prevent banding together with the rest of the lower class.
The elites were not concerned for the well being of the whites; To the elites, the same treatment the Black Freedmen got economically, would be good enough for the poor whites. Sharecropping, where landowners allowed tenants to farm the land for a share of the crops, was two thirds white farmers but designed to keep them in debt forever. Landowners provided seed, livestock, tools-but charged insurmountable fees. At harvest, the farmers almost always came out still in debt, year after year, white or black. And for the most part, it was cotton by contract. Tenant farmers didn’t have the means to farm subsistence crops like corn. So if the message was “the Black freedmen are trash”(paraphrased), what could have possibly signaled they thought different of the poor whites, racial pride propaganda aside, if white farmers were stuck at the same economic level as the Blacks they were told to hate? But the lie had not turned into a status quo quite yet.
“We’ll provide seed, tools and livestock at our price-and replace you if we need to.”
By 1870, white wages had collapsed. The poor whites were suffering. Parents were starving so their children could eat. Now the local papers and politicians (controlled by the Elites) had to blame somebody. So they blamed the Blacks (and later, the immigrants too, but we’ll get to that).
Over the next five to seven years, federal help dried up, farmer debts were higher than ever and one in three farmers were farming for somebody else. Many many white families were in an economically perilous situation.
“Black codes” (laws designed to criminalize black freedom) were widespread and the laws in the south began codifying racial hierarchy. This was to reassert white supremacy, and it was done the first opportunity given. Southern Democrats took back the state legislature and governor’s office, then purged black office holders and Republicans who opposed. White supremacist militias (like the KKK) used extreme violence like lynching to suppress black voting, and Jim Crow laws cemented segregation. Convict leasing in some parts made it legal for both Freedmen who had been arrested (for not having a job, for example) to end up back on the plantation. Poor whites were also subject to this process.
“Don’t worry white man, you can’t farm for us, but you can be Sheriff instead. We need you.”
No longer worth paying for farm labor, poor whites were recruited for another purpose-not to raise them up financially, but to hold the line the elites had drawn because at the same time, landowners and industrialists started leasing convicts (mostly Black men) from the state. Poor whites were now law enforcement, with a sharp uniform and a shiny badge and authority over the Black sharecroppers they had been told to hate. This was yet again, psychological wage (racial pride in lieu of economic prosperity). To put simply, it was poor people being told they were in charge of over poor people. The poor whites would never be amongst the elite, but, faced with starvation and no other assistance, they were okay with believing they would never be down with the poor Blacks. In reality, they were peers looked down upon by the Elites all the same.
Their subordination to the elites in this new role was a a rare stable livelihood available at the time and it fed the new status quo:
You’re better than them, white man, just like we always told you. They’re the problem you need to fix. The lie then, became closer to the lie we hear today, but not quite:
“You may be poor white man, but you’re better than all the non-whites.“
By 1900, Black Freedmen and immigrants were blamed for everything as cotton prices fell. Landowners and merchants controlled every part of the process, but they weren’t going to admit to fault. They (if i may borrow a quote from the romans) blamed the barbarians at the gate and the poor whites never questioned it.
By 1920, convict leasing had ended, soil exhaustion and mechanization was causing cotton yields to collapse and small farmers were drowning in debt. 1910 onwards, tens of thousands of people, both black and white, were migrating elsewhere. The rural labor force in the south was gutted and at that time, half of southern farms were tenant farmed.. The landowners could have increased wages, could have supported those that stayed. Again, they chose profit.
They imported other labor, and mechanized more and more. The poor whites were now being left more and more with the reality: Nobody else is around to blame. “I’m just poor.” – It was too late. The lie was nationwide. It was inescapable. The poor whites had internalized it because it’s easier to blame somebody else, even in theory, than to admit you’re desperate, helpless and getting worse by the day. Being white was the platitude, but never the solution to poverty.
1933, the Agricultural Adjustment Act was passed and paid land-owners to reduce their farm sizes, causing cotton prices to rise. Sharecroppers and tenants didn’t benefit at all, and if it profited the landowner, they were evicted to cut payments down. Poor farmers were dispossessed yet again.
Cotton prices crashed again, and farms began foreclosing. Families were forced into chain gangs due to debts unpaid.
World War 2 saw young men leaving the labor market to enlist en masse, but when they came home, the same lie wasn’t going to work anymore. Southern agriculture was dying off, and the upper class needed a new way to divide. The lie had to be repackaged for a new era.
The GI Bill provided low cost mortgages and tuitions to white veterans, but black veterans and sharecroppers (including poor whites) were blocked as a due matter of course. Couldn’t have the entire working class moving up together. So working class distress increased all the same and the target of blame used in the past (Black sharecroppers) was no longer effective.
“Welfare handouts are an out-of-control Black problem.”
Both political parties started putting all non-whites in the same basket, as the plight on polite society, the reason some cities were unfit for decent white folks to live. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that at that time illicit economies, like moonshine for example, were overwhelmingly controlled by whites.
The stage was set for the new version of the lie: non-whites cause all the problems for white people.
Nixon campaigned on it. By 1967–68 his campaign began explicitly linking federal “welfare handouts” to lazy Black families even though roughly two-thirds recipients at the time were white working-class mothers. “The welfare queen” was what white people were told they needed to fear. His campaign was built to target the blacks and the “progressive” left.
In a 1994 interview, John Ehrlichman, an aide to Nixon, said:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Put bluntly, his campaign wanted white people to see every welfare check as a racial grievance and any liberal or Black as an enemy. Assistance white people deserved but was deprived of, because of the non-whites. Because of the politically opposed.
That message has stuck for five decades straight and any proposal for universal care or wide reaching social spending is met with the same lies to kill them, politically.
The irony? One need not go much further than a Trump rally to find poor and working class whites opposing programs that they themselves would equally benefit because this “welfare queen” enemy has been internalized. Welfare, as a system, was sold to the Whites that need it as anti-white for so long, they’ll do without if others will benefit from it.
The problem politicans (and therefore the upper class behind them) had about welfare was never about race. It was always about increasing the gap between the upper class and the divided working class.
We are all white trash to our upper class. For this context, we’ll call the Upper Class the top 10%.
Top 10%, roughly 330 million or so people: The high earners. Doctors, lawyers, managers, mid-level executives. They’re not consciously complicit, but they benefit and defend the system. They don’t want every immigrant deported necessarily and they don’t like the idea of starving families if it can be avoided, but they don’t want a single tax payer dollar to pay for universal assistance programs. That would be too much assistance. They know that realistically it would not affect them, but why risk it diluting their advantage? Better to be overly cautious to maintain their class position.
Top 3%, let’s say 5 million people or so: The group that owns most of the nation’s financial assets. Stocks, property, trusts. They’re connected to politicians, working in media, finance, law, tech. They are the first beneficiaries of the effected changes, tax structures, lobbying, status quo economic policies. They do the math on how it benefits them, and then demand changes.
Top 0.5%, call it 800,000 people, give or take: They’re the actual decision makers. They fund political campaigns (across party lines), control media companies and sit on university trusteeships. They own lobbying firms, hedge funds and consulting groups (read: are listened to by politicians). They directly influence national policy. In simpler terms, they’re in control.
Here’s what you need to know:
The decision makers are defended, protected and normalized by the rest of the 10% because to put it plainly, the 10% are too comfortable and will not risk their position to go against the status quo. It’s just that simple.
You hear it all the time from people who have never been hungry, never been without, never seen an eviction notice: “They (poor people) should just work harder. I earned where I’m at.” It’s easy to say that from a position of privilege, with all of your peers nodding in silent, pampered agreement. “Why should we pay for poor people’s welfare? We didn’t get welfare.”
Why would they revolt? Why would they ever, especially collectively, risk lowering themselves by going against the system that has kept them safe and secure when they’ve watched the suffering beneath them for generations? It simply will not happen.
Which leads us to the last 50 years of the lie.
I said the decision makers owned the media and that’s why the last 50 years is seperate to the 100 before that. The explosion of television and cable media. Nightly news parroting talking points put out to destroy solidarity, giving the ruling class the means to beat their carefully chosen propaganda into the masses. In the 80s, it was the “Welfare Queen” you needed to hate. Then they cut social programs to deepen poverty and boost the top earners (read: the top 10%). They told the nation to hate the poor, because they were moral failures and, again, not to be tolerated. In the 90s, Clinton ended Welfare as we knew it, capping benefits and imposing work requirements and that’s fine in theory. We can all agree that free money should not be unlimited, certainly. But the top 10% got richer in those policy changes too. Both parties championed this cause, but in doing so, killed any serious conversation about poverty. Class solidarity continued to fall apart because the politicians were clear: we will not help everybody, and we have to choose carefully who deserves it and who doesn’t.
Then, we saw the lie reach it’s final form. The evolution we see every day, to this day, no matter what channel you watch.
“American man, you’re American because we say so, and we’re your ally. You can trust me but we can only help incrementally because the other side doesn’t want to help you, they want to help them.”
Fast forward to Barack Obama in 2008. Hope and unity promised, but only market solutions. Only incremental progress. Yes, we were given the Affordable Care Act, but private insurance and employer-based plans had to be preserved because doing otherwise would affect the top 0.5%. Well we can’t have that now, can we? Wall street firms were bailed out, homeowners lost their homes. We saw immigration debates split down the middle, some deserved to stay no questions asked while others were burdens to be disposed of immediately. We were told that America had elected a Black man as president and therefore had transcended race. Inequality on an economic scale has never been higher. Corporate donors had won and nobody was talking about it because we had been given incremental progress. And the lie continued.
“American man, you’re American because we say so, and we’re your ally. You can trust me but we can only help incrementally because the other side wants to help somebody else.”
2010 onward, we heard “Take our country back”, anti-Obamacare protests with confederate flags (ironically) and anti-immigrant signs. Dark money from billionaires like the Koch brothers, at maximum volume thanks to conservative media echo chambers pushed the lie in every way they could. The GOP adopted this campaign through and through, and working-class whites ate it up, while Democrats were spineless in their conversations about race and class. Why? Reader, if by now you are not following me, I fear I might not be doing what I aim to do. Because they’re complicit in the lie. It’s called Elite Capture (when the rich make the rules). The very same upper-class interests that fabricated the original white trash class after emancipation now finance and influence modern politics to keep the working class divided and scared. Marginalized and weak. What was once landowners putting out propaganda that newly freed Black men were responsible for white farmers being poor, is now the corporate donors shaping policy in their favor. Gutted social spending, depressed wages, policy carve-outs (i.e. Uber and DoorDash resisting drivers being classed as employees). There is no more white vs black working class. American vs immigrant working class. There never was. It’s the 10% upper class and the 90% working class.
I’ll give you a real life example. I worked in a factory back in 2019 and as part of the factory’s “employee feedback and appreciation” efforts, they would gather the entire workforce in batches to listen to one of the company’s executives (including the CEO himself if I remember correctly) who would take questions, and talk about their plan, and explain everything the employees should be grateful for. “We’re making billions of dollars so we’re trying to pay you as much as we can.” As I sat there listening, while I didn’t expect to hear anything especially encouraging because, naturally large companies don’t worry about encouraging floor level (easily replaceable) employees, a quote from one of the c-suite speakers caught my attention:
“We’re paying you higher than the local factories we’re competing with.”
Not “paying you higher than the cost of living”. Certainly not “paying you higher than the cost of opportunity”. Absolutely nowhere near “paying you as much as we can”. Effectively, “we are paying you just enough based on what us decision makers can get away with to keep you here rather than over there”.
Sometime later, during the pandemic, I was interviewing for remote jobs and I was repeatedly told that my pay would be decided based on what state I lived in because, cost of living is lower in some states and therefore I don’t need as much. Consider how obscene that is. If I live in California, but I’m remote they’ll pay me this much. But in South Carolina where it’s cheaper, I get less even though I’m doing the same work. “We don’t want you to have too much extra money so we pay based on your location.” A policy made simply to limit the momentum of my (an employee in general) financial growth. There’s no other explanation than it’s to maintain the divide between working class and upper class. What, I wonder, would happen if I had started in California and moved to South Carolina?
Now we’re in the era where there is no longer a need to dog-whistle, because the message is amplified by hundreds of thousands of people. Build the wall, deport them, China’s taken our jobs. Scapegoating, blaming the non-whites for poor whites having so little, the upper class shrugging off blame for systems and policies they control to maintain profit has become theatrical culture. Politicians have painted themselves saviors, on both sides of the aisles, backed by the top 0.5% that controls the nation.
“American man, you’re American because we say so, and we’re your ally. You can trust me but we can only help incrementally because the other side doesn’t want to help you.”
Trump blamed the immigrants and other countries. Biden blamed the CEOs. Neither one of them dared address the conglomerates that had supported their campaigns with any working-class focused policy because they’re part of the system themselves. Voters were promised relief from grievances that had stemmed directly from policies they’d helped pass. The White House, to date, is run by corporate money. Doesn’t matter the president, you’re still white trash because the upper class wants it like that. You’re told they’re giving you everything they can give you and the other side will give somebody else more if you let them. You’re told you’re poor because previous presidents failed you or you failed yourself or both. The psychological wage (racial pride instead of upward mobility), that once was fed to the poor whites (you’re better because you’re white and you always will be) has now been modified to “you’re better because you’re American, and we’re doing our best to give you anything else”.
The 90th-percentile (top 10%) household networth is roughly $2 million.
The average member of Congress (535 members: 435 Representatives + 100 Senators) networth: $4.5 million.
It’s not a coincidence.
I say all that to make this point. We’re divided, and needlessly so. Some of us may reach the upper class by the end of our lifetimes, and certainly, I hope so for myself. But the truth is this:
No matter what you’re told by Fox News, what you’re told by your employers, what you read on Social Media…you have more in common with your geographic neighbors (regardless to birthplace, religion, race, sexuality) than you will ever have with a politician or a CEO. “You can be one of us” was always a lie, but they kept using it because it kept working, generation after generation.
Your neighbor, regardless to how different they may be to you, are in the same economic class facing the same economic troubles. You don’t have neighbors that are immigrants taking out of your pockets. Politicians and conglomerates have your entire neighborhood living near identical economic realities and the more you blame your neighbors instead of them, the longer the lie is believed. Don’t believe me? Ask any one of your neighbors what a $3 raise would do for them. I guarantee their answer is almost identical to yours. Now point to a politician in your neighborhood with the same answer. You can’t. Point to a politician that would even notice an extra $6,000 in a year ($3 raise x 2000 working hours). Exactly.
I’m not saying you should invite the neighbors to your cookout, and I’m not saying you should be eating curry with Indian family across from you or going to a Quinceanera for the Mexican family down the street. But open your eyes. The upper class is still treating us all like white trash and we’re letting it happen.
We inherited this white trash class, from the generations of Americans before us, regardless to color. The policies, while certainly more exploitative and damaging to some classes, have, as a whole, increased the wealth gap between the upper class and the rest of us because we are divided. If you have to budget your finances at all, you are not Upper class in America. And if you’re not upper class, you’re lower class. Sorry, that’s just the reality.
You work 55 hours a week or even two jobs, but can’t afford the house you want.
You vote, but nothing changes.
You’re told other Americans, immigrants, or the woke are taking from you yet every dollar you have spare goes to making it to the next month, the next week, or even the next day.
Your rent went up 10% this year but your hourly wage only went up 13 cents.
You’re told to worry about the smallest minority of our problems because the wider problems can’t be fixed yet.
The right tells you to fear and blame somebody, but never them.
The left whispers sweet nothings about “opportunity” and “equity” — but it’s always in the near future, never in the present.
And you, reader, are stuck in the middle, a plateau of subsistence (barely).
The upper class needs cheap labor. They need you distracted and desperate. Grateful for what little you’ve got because rock bottom is so close. They won’t burn the farm down because they own it. They always have. You’re allowed to work there because they get their portion no matter what happens and you’re lucky to have anything left over. You’re a sharecropper in everything but the tools you were rented, you just didn’t notice.
Remember:
You have nothing in common with a billionaire. Your skin tone matching their skin tone is a mere coincidence.
You are disposable to the Upper Class, and no matter how much they tell you otherwise, they’ll dispose of you if profitable. They’ve done it before.
And most important, being born in, raised and then dying in the lower class is a systemic design, not a racial quality. The upper class designed it like that. They go through great lengths to maintain it. Blaming those beside you just perpetuates your (white trash) problems.
Closing note:
I didn’t cite sources here because simply, there are so many on this topic and, as always, I intend to email several experts to discuss this concept. I expect I may be corrected and pointed to specific statistics, literature, and possibly criticisms of this post; all of which I look forward to.
Instead, I will suggest some reading for those that want to know more by people who are more knowledgeable than I am.
First, if you’re not familiar with the term “psychological wage”, I’d suggest: The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class by David R. Roediger. and Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Barbara and Karen Fields
Second, if you only learned about slavery in grade school, I’d suggest: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist (and there are countless other worthwhile reads to explore).
Finally, if you’ve never heard of the term “elite capture”, I’d suggest: Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) by Elizabeth S. Anderson
In case I need to make it explicitly clear, the point here is not that I am downplaying the suffering non-Whites, Black people especially, had to endure or to ignore the vast differences between White existence and non-White existence in America. Not at all. At the risk of being redundant, the point I am making is that the differences amongst the working class were manufactured by the Upper class in the beginning and are maintained today for their (the Upper class) benefit and nothing else.
