RACE & CASTE
The System Behind the System
Jim Crow ended on paper. But systems don't die. They adapt.
Voter suppression. Economic exclusion. Mass incarceration. Redlining's long shadow. These aren't relics. They're active architecture.
And maybe it's not just about race. Maybe what we're looking at is older. A caste system that America refuses to name.
What You'll Find Here
Examinations of how hierarchy persists under new language.
Comparisons between historical oppression and present day policy.
Analysis that asks whether race, class, or caste is the better lens for understanding what's happening now.
Featured Analysis
Tracing the Architecture of Division
These articles examine how systems of racial hierarchy have functioned not as cultural accidents but as deliberate mechanisms of economic and political control. Drawing on primary historical documents, legislative records, and contemporary policy analysis, each piece traces specific patterns through which elite power has maintained itself across centuries by preventing cross-racial working-class solidarity.
The approach here is not to argue whether racism exists or whether it matters. That debate is settled. Instead, these analyses ask more precise questions: How does racial division function as a tool of class control? What specific mechanisms transform individual prejudice into systemic advantage? How do the same patterns repeat across different historical periods with different targets and different rhetoric but identical underlying logic?
What you'll find below are not opinion pieces but documented examinations of how power operates, how it has always operated, and how recognizing these patterns might finally allow us to interrupt them. The sources are verifiable. The claims are falsifiable. The patterns are undeniable.
The Wages of Whiteness: From Bacon's Rebellion to the Dismantlement of Labor Protections
Published: January 12, 2026
Why do people so consistently vote against their economic interests? Political analysts treat this as a puzzle requiring psychological explanation, but the historical record offers something more precise than speculation about individual psychology. It reveals a system with origins, architects, and a documented blueprint.
In 1676, when three to five hundred armed rebels organized across racial lines burned Jamestown to the ground, Virginia's planter elite confronted a crisis that would shape American policy for the next three and a half centuries. The rebellion itself could be suppressed through military force, but the problem it revealed could not. Poor whites and Black people had discovered a shared enemy in the planter class that exploited them both, and they had acted on that discovery in coordinated fashion. The elite's response was not to improve conditions for workers or redistribute land and power. Instead, they constructed something more sophisticated and far more durable. Between 1680 and 1705, through a series of carefully designed laws, they created a compensation structure that would permanently fracture the labor force that had just nearly overthrown them.