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The Wages of Whiteness
From Bacon's Rebellion to the Dismantlement of Labor Protections
A Deliberately Constructed Instrument
The persistence with which people vote against their economic interests has become a familiar puzzle in political analysis, treated variously as a problem requiring psychological explanation or cultural interpretation. Yet what the historical record offers is something more precise than speculation, something more systematic than the vagaries of individual choice.
Racial division in America has functioned, from its formal legal inception, not as a mere byproduct of economic exploitation nor as a simple reflection of cultural prejudice, but rather as a deliberately constructed instrument designed to prevent cross-class solidarity at moments when such solidarity might threaten established hierarchies of power and wealth. When elites find themselves unable or unwilling to compensate workers adequately through material means such as wages, land distribution, or political enfranchisement, they have repeatedly turned to a form of compensation that costs them nothing to provide while proving remarkably effective at fracturing collective action among the exploited. That compensation, rendered in the currency of status and social positioning rather than material resources, has origins that can be traced to specific historical moments, architects whose names appear in the documentary record, and implementation strategies that were debated, refined, and codified in law. What follows examines how this system of compensation emerged in response to a specific crisis of elite control, how it has operated with striking consistency across four centuries of American history, and why recognizing its contemporary manifestations matters with particular urgency at a moment when the institutional protections that safeguard workers' material interests face systematic dismantlement even as political rhetoric redirects working-class grievances toward familiar racialized targets.
The Alliance That Required a Response
When three to five hundred armed rebels, organized across racial lines and composed of Black and white indentured servants, enslaved people, and poor freemen, marched on Jamestown in 1676 and reduced it to ashes, they created for Virginia's planter elite a problem that would prove more intractable than the rebellion itself. Bacon's Rebellion was not the first servant uprising the colony had witnessed, but it distinguished itself crucially through the interracial composition of the force that carried it out, a distinction that transformed what might have been merely a problem of order into a structural crisis of control. What made this particular uprising threatening to the colonial order was not the violence it unleashed, spectacular though that violence was, but rather the demonstration it provided that poor whites and Black people could recognize a shared enemy in the planter class that exploited both groups and could act on that recognition in coordinated, sustained fashion. The rebellion was eventually suppressed through military force, but the fundamental problem it had exposed could not be resolved through coercion alone, for the structural conditions that had enabled the alliance persisted even after the alliance itself had been defeated.
The planter elite confronted a dilemma whose contours would shape American social policy for centuries to come. They required a large, disciplined labor force to work the tobacco fields that generated the wealth upon which their power depended, yet that same labor force, when unified by shared grievances and shared recognition of who benefited from their exploitation, possessed both the numbers and the motivation to overthrow the system entirely. The solution they devised in response to this dilemma reveals a sophistication in the architecture of social control that merits careful examination. Rather than attempting to improve material conditions for all workers, which would have required actual redistribution of wealth and power, or attempting to maintain control purely through force, which would have required a permanent military apparatus, they constructed instead a legal and social framework designed to ensure that poor whites and Black people would never again recognize their shared interests with sufficient clarity to form sustained alliance. That framework was the legal codification of racial hierarchy, implemented through a series of legislative acts that transformed the basis of labor relations from one centered on the condition of servitude to one centered on the immutability of race, and its effectiveness would prove so remarkable that it would become the template for managing threats to elite power at every subsequent moment when cross-racial working-class solidarity appeared on the horizon.
The Legislative Architecture of Division
The planter class response to Bacon's Rebellion unfolded across three decades through waves of increasingly comprehensive legislation that systematically reconstructed Virginia's labor system along explicitly racial lines. The 1680 Act "for Preventing Negroes Insurrections" initiated this reconstruction by restricting Black movement and assembly, prohibiting weapons ownership for Black people, and establishing different legal categories based explicitly on race rather than on the status of servitude that had previously governed labor relations in the colony. The 1691 legislation expanded this framework by criminalizing interracial marriage, requiring masters to transport freed slaves beyond colonial boundaries within six months of manumission, and imposing financial penalties on white women who bore children with Black men, thereby beginning the systematic work of physical and social separation between populations that had previously lived and labored in close proximity. These early laws established the foundation, but the comprehensive architecture that would serve as the model for subsequent centuries arrived in 1705 with the Virginia Slave Code, a systematic legal framework that made race, rather than religion, economic class, or condition of servitude, the defining category in Virginia law and the primary determinant of an individual's legal status and social position.
The language of the 1705 code merits direct quotation because it reveals with unusual clarity the precision and deliberateness with which this system was constructed. The law stipulated that "no negros, mulattos, or Indians, although Christians, or Jews, Moors, Mahometans, or other infidels shall at any time purchase any Christian servant, nor any other, except of their own complexion," a provision whose significance extends well beyond its immediate prohibition on Black ownership of white servants.
What this language accomplished was the establishment of a legal principle that Black people, regardless of their religious affiliation, their freedom status, or their economic position, could not hold authority over any white person, thereby creating a legal floor beneath which no white person could fall and a legal ceiling above which no Black person, no matter how wealthy or educated or accomplished, could rise. The law transformed whiteness itself into a form of property, a status marker that carried with it certain inalienable privileges and that could not be stripped away by economic misfortune or personal failure, thus ensuring that even the poorest white person retained a stake in maintaining the racial hierarchy that the law had codified.
Legal Authority
Poor whites received legal authority through positions on slave patrols, paid roles that granted them direct power over Black people regardless of the Black person's legal status or economic position, thereby transforming some poor whites into agents of social control while providing them with modest income and considerable authority.
Social Status
They received social status through titles of courtesy and forms of public deference that applied to all white people irrespective of their economic circumstances, ensuring that the poorest white laborer could expect forms of recognition and respect denied to even the most accomplished Black person.
Legal Privileges
They received legal privileges through differential treatment by courts, through the right to testify against Black people in legal proceedings while Black testimony against whites was inadmissible, and through protection from the most brutal punishments that the law reserved exclusively for enslaved people.
Psychological Property
Most significantly, they received what can only be termed psychological property in the form of whiteness itself, which functioned as a status marker that no economic catastrophe could eliminate and that provided a permanent basis for claims to superiority over an entire category of people defined by law as inferior.
This compensation structure possessed the remarkable quality of costing the planter class nothing in material terms while proving extraordinarily effective at fracturing working-class solidarity. It required no redistribution of land, no increase in wages, no expansion of political rights, no sharing of actual power. It simply reorganized the legal and social framework so that poor whites received symbolic and psychological compensation for their material deprivation, compensation that was nonetheless real in its effects because status, dignity, public deference, and social belonging constitute genuine human needs whose satisfaction provides authentic psychological benefits. The genius of the system lay not in creating false consciousness but in offering authentic satisfaction of psychological needs as a substitute for material improvement, thereby ensuring that poor whites were not fooled into believing they shared interests with the planter elite but rather were given actual benefits that made alignment with elite interests rational from their individual perspectives, even as such alignment undermined their collective power as workers and ensured their continued exploitation.
Edmund S. Morgan's foundational study American Slavery, American Freedom documents with meticulous attention to archival sources how the planter class understood this dynamic with remarkable sophistication, recognizing that they had created a system in which American slavery and American freedom were not contradictory principles requiring reconciliation but rather mutually reinforcing structures that depended upon each other for their continued existence. The freedom and republican equality that poor whites experienced existed precisely because someone else was enslaved, and the hierarchy itself was not an unfortunate necessity but rather the point of the entire structure. This arrangement allowed the planter class to maintain a labor system predicated on brutal exploitation while simultaneously preventing that labor force from recognizing shared interests and organizing collectively against their exploiters, thereby creating what would become the foundational template for how American elites would manage threats to their power for the next three and a half centuries.
The Analytical Framework: Du Bois Names the System
More than two centuries after the Virginia Slave Codes established the basic architecture of racialized labor control, W.E.B. Du Bois provided in his 1935 study Black Reconstruction in America the theoretical vocabulary necessary for understanding with precision exactly what that architecture had accomplished and how it continued to function in the post-Civil War South. Analyzing the dynamics through which poor whites remained aligned with the planter class despite sharing objective economic interests with Black workers, Du Bois identified and named the mechanism that sustained this alignment across generations and through dramatic transformations in the formal legal structure of labor relations. He called it the psychological wage, a term that captures both the reality of what poor whites received and the function that this compensation served within the larger economic system.
Du Bois wrote that "the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage" consisting of "public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white," admission "freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools," while "the police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness."
This was not metaphor deployed for rhetorical effect but rather precise description of an actual compensation system whose mechanisms Du Bois had observed and whose effects he had documented through careful analysis of economic and political behavior in the Reconstruction South. Poor whites received something real and tangible, something that met genuine human needs for respect, dignity, and social belonging, needs whose satisfaction provides authentic psychological benefits that shape behavior and political allegiance. The wage was psychological rather than material, but it functioned as genuine compensation nonetheless, providing status rewards that cost the elite nothing while proving remarkably effective at preventing the class-based organizing that might have united workers across racial lines in pursuit of material improvement for all.
Du Bois insisted, moreover, that this arrangement was not an accident of cultural evolution or an organic development of social prejudice but rather a "carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently." The language Du Bois chose reveals his understanding that what he was analyzing was strategy rather than spontaneous development, policy designed deliberately to achieve specific economic and political outcomes rather than the inevitable result of preexisting prejudice. "Carefully planned." "Slowly evolved method." These phrases point toward human agency, toward decisions made and refined across time, toward a system constructed rather than discovered. The outcomes that this method was designed to achieve were the prevention of interracial working-class solidarity and the maintenance of elite power, goals that the system accomplished with remarkable success precisely because the compensation it offered was real rather than illusory.
What Du Bois recognized, and what gives his analysis its enduring power, was that the psychological wage kept both groups exploited even as it provided genuine benefits to one group relative to the other. Poor whites received status, recognition, and relative privilege instead of material improvement in their absolute conditions, while Black workers were pushed into even more extreme forms of deprivation that made poor whites' modest circumstances appear fortunate by comparison. The system did not benefit poor whites in any absolute sense, did not improve their wages or working conditions or life prospects when measured against what might have been possible had they organized collectively with Black workers for shared material gains. Instead, it ensured that they received relative advantages over Black people, advantages that proved sufficient to maintain their investment in a social order that exploited them along with everyone else below the elite. The wage was real, providing genuine psychological satisfaction and real social benefits, but it was paid in a currency that kept the recipients poor while preventing them from building the coalitions that might actually improve their material conditions in absolute rather than merely relative terms.
The Alliance Rebuilt: The Populist Moment
Though the Virginia planter class had created a system designed to prevent cross-racial working-class solidarity, systems constructed by human beings can break down when historical circumstances shift sufficiently to create new possibilities. In the 1890s, economic crisis throughout the South generated conditions that threatened to overcome the racial divide that elites had so carefully cultivated and maintained across more than a century. The Farmers' Alliance emerged as a mass movement bringing together over 2.5 million members, including approximately 1.5 million white farmers and 1 million Black farmers, organized around shared economic grievances against railroad monopolies that controlled access to markets, banking interests that charged predatory rates, and the crop lien system that trapped both groups in cycles of perpetual debt. When the Populist Party emerged from this movement, it represented a direct challenge to Democratic Party control of Southern politics precisely because it organized explicitly across racial lines, advancing the argument that poor whites and Black people shared material interests that ought to supersede the racial divisions that benefited only those who profited from keeping both groups economically subjugated and politically divided.
Tom Watson, a white Georgia Populist leader, articulated this vision with a clarity that makes his subsequent transformation all the more revealing of the pressures required to maintain racial hierarchy when economic logic suggested alliance. In his 1892 essay "The Negro Question in the South," published in The Arena magazine, Watson identified with unusual directness the divide-and-conquer strategy that kept poor whites and Black farmers from recognizing their shared interests. "Why should the colored man always be taught that the white man of his neighborhood hates him," Watson asked, "while a Northern man, who taxes every rag on his back, loves him? Why should not my tenant come to regard me as his friend rather than the manufacturer who plunders us both?" The questions exposed the mechanism through which racial animosity was deliberately cultivated and maintained, revealing that such animosity served the interests of economic elites who exploited both groups while keeping them focused on each other rather than on the system that impoverished them both.
Watson pressed further, asserting that "there never was a day during the last twenty years when the South could not have flung the money power into the dust by patiently teaching the Negro that we could not be wretched under any system which would not afflict him likewise; that we could not prosper under any law which would not also bring its blessings to him." This was more than rhetorical flourish. Watson had identified the structural logic that undergirded both groups' exploitation and had articulated the possibility that patient organizing emphasizing shared material interests might overcome divisions that served only elite interests. For a moment that appeared pregnant with historical possibility, the Populist movement gained momentum. Candidates won state legislative seats across the South. Interracial coalitions formed at local levels, with white and Black farmers attending political meetings together and voting for shared economic programs. The movement represented a genuine threat to the established order, precisely the kind of cross-racial working-class solidarity that the system established after Bacon's Rebellion had been designed to prevent.
The response demonstrated that the elite understood exactly what was at stake and were prepared to deploy every available mechanism to destroy the alliance before it could consolidate. Democratic Party machines engaged in electoral fraud so massive and so brazen that it left documentary evidence that historians would later cite as exemplary of the corruption that characterized the period. Violence and intimidation targeted interracial political meetings, with lynch mobs understanding their role in maintaining the racial order that cross-racial political organizing threatened to undermine. Economic retaliation punished white Populists who maintained alliances with Black farmers, with merchants refusing credit and landlords terminating leases. Most significantly for the long-term destruction of the movement, state legislatures across the South passed comprehensive legal frameworks that eliminated Black voting rights through mechanisms like poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses that appeared neutral in their language but were designed and implemented with the explicit purpose of preventing Black political participation. Jim Crow laws formalized and extended segregation into every domain of public life. Lynching intensified as a tool of racial terror meant to enforce Black subordination and to demonstrate to whites what might happen to those who challenged racial hierarchy. The Populist movement was destroyed not merely through violence, though violence certainly played its role, but through the systematic re-imposition and intensification of racial hierarchy that the movement had briefly threatened to transcend.

Perhaps nothing reveals more about the pressures required to maintain racial division when economic interests suggest alliance than the transformation of Tom Watson himself. The man who had written in 1892 about the possibility and necessity of interracial economic solidarity became by 1906 one of the South's most virulent white supremacist demagogues, his rhetoric shifting from calls for cross-racial organizing to vicious attacks on Black people that employed all the standard tropes of white supremacist ideology. C. Vann Woodward documented this transformation in his biography Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, demonstrating that what appeared to be Watson's personal moral failure was in fact evidence of something larger and more systematic. What does it take to transform someone from an interracialist to a white supremacist, to convert someone who once wrote eloquently about shared interests into someone who trafficked in the crudest forms of racial hatred? The answer that Watson's trajectory suggests is that it requires watching your political movement systematically destroyed through fraud and violence, your electoral victories stolen by machines willing to manufacture votes in numbers that exceeded the eligible electorate, your allies terrorized into submission, and learning through bitter experience that the only politically viable position in Southern politics was one that maintained rather than challenged racial hierarchy. Watson's transformation was not merely personal failure but rather evidence of how much pressure was required to maintain the racial divide and how thoroughly that pressure was applied to anyone who threatened to overcome it.
The Mechanism Across History
The Populist moment was not unique but rather representative of a pattern that has repeated with striking consistency at every historical juncture when economic conditions have created potential for cross-racial working-class solidarity that might threaten elite control of wealth and political power. The mechanism through which this potential has been repeatedly neutralized follows a sequence so consistent across different historical periods that it reveals itself as structural rather than contingent, as systematic rather than accidental. Economic crisis first creates shared grievances that cut across racial lines, generating conditions under which workers of different races recognize common problems related to wages, working conditions, debt, housing, or economic security. Organizing efforts then emerge that attempt to build alliances based on these shared material interests, whether through labor unions, political parties, or social movements. These alliances begin to pose threats to elite economic or political interests by demanding redistribution of wealth, expansion of political rights, or regulation of corporate power. The elite response then intensifies racial division through some combination of legislative action that reestablishes or extends racial hierarchy, violence that punishes those who cross racial lines, economic retaliation that makes interracial organizing materially costly, and rhetorical campaigns that redirect working-class anger away from class issues and toward racialized targets. Poor whites receive renewed or enhanced forms of symbolic compensation through status markers, legal privileges, or institutional positions that cost elites nothing but prove sufficient to fracture the emerging alliance. Both groups remain economically exploited, but the potential for unified action that might actually improve material conditions for all workers has been eliminated, and elite control remains secure.
1
Reconstruction Era
Republican coalitions brought together freed Black people and poor whites in Southern state governments that passed legislation expanding public education, democratizing political institutions, and beginning to address the grossly unequal distribution of land and wealth. The elite response included the organized terror campaigns of the Ku Klux Klan, the "Redemption" movement that violently overthrew those governments and restored white supremacist Democratic control, and the establishment of sharecropping and convict leasing systems that kept both groups in forms of debt peonage while giving poor whites symbolic advantages through segregated social spaces and positions of authority over Black people as overseers, crop supervisors, and law enforcement officers.
2
1930s Labor Organizing
The Congress of Industrial Organizations organized industrial unions that brought together Black and white workers in steel mills, automobile plants, and other manufacturing facilities in what represented the most significant cross-racial working-class organizing since Reconstruction. The response included red-baiting campaigns that exploited Cold War anxieties to portray integrated unions as communist infiltration, racial terror including bombings of union halls and murders of organizers, and the creation of segregated job categories and separate seniority systems that gave white workers access to better positions and protection from layoffs within the same fundamentally exploitative system.
3
1960s Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights Movement began linking with labor movements and anti-poverty organizing in ways that threatened to build a genuinely multiracial coalition demanding fundamental restructuring of economic and political power. The response was Nixon's Southern Strategy, a deliberate effort to redirect white working-class voters away from economic issues and toward cultural and racial grievances through "law and order" rhetoric that coded racial anxiety as legitimate concern for public safety while portraying civil rights activists and urban Black populations as threats to order and prosperity.
What this historical pattern reveals is that racial division functions not primarily as a cultural phenomenon or psychological disorder but rather as a structural feature of American economic and political systems that serves a specific and consistent function. That function is the prevention of cross-class solidarity that might threaten elite control of wealth and power, and the pattern works precisely because the compensation offered to poor whites has always been real rather than illusory. Status matters to human beings. Social belonging matters. The ability to claim superiority over others matters psychologically even when such claims provide no material benefits and may actually prevent the collective action that could lead to material improvement. The system proves effective because it meets genuine human needs for recognition and dignity while channeling the satisfaction of those needs in directions that prevent collective action for material improvement and that maintain the exploitation of all workers including those who receive the psychological compensation.
The Contemporary Application: Dismantling Worker Protections While Redirecting Anger
In 2025, this pattern executes once again with a fidelity to its historical template that would be remarkable were it not so consistent with everything the historical record has established about how elite power maintains itself through the strategic deployment of racial division. Economic conditions for the American working class across all racial categories have deteriorated significantly over the past four decades through wage stagnation relative to productivity and cost of living, explosion of healthcare costs that leave millions one illness away from bankruptcy, housing markets that have made homeownership increasingly unattainable for younger workers, student debt that has created what amounts to a new form of indentured servitude, and the replacement of stable employment with precarious contract work that offers neither security nor benefits. These conditions affect workers across racial lines, creating what would seem to be the objective basis for cross-racial working-class solidarity organized around demands for higher wages, stronger labor protections, universal healthcare, affordable housing, and relief from crushing debt burdens. Yet instead of such solidarity forming and organizing itself into effective political movements, working-class political energy has been channeled toward cultural and racial conflicts while the institutional structures that protect workers' material interests face systematic dismantlement carried out by the very political forces that receive working-class electoral support.
National Labor Relations Board
The National Labor Relations Board, established in 1935 as part of the New Deal framework to protect workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively, has been rendered effectively nonfunctional through actions that violate the statutory protections meant to ensure the agency's independence from political interference. In January 2025, President Trump fired NLRB board member Gwynne Wilcox despite the fact that she was only halfway through the five-year term to which she had been appointed, an action that violated the National Labor Relations Act's explicit provision that board members can be removed only for cause after notice and hearing. Wilcox's termination left the board without the quorum necessary to decide cases, set precedent, or take formal action on unfair labor practice charges, meaning that employers accused of violating workers' organizing rights now face no meaningful enforcement while the administration characterizes this paralysis as merely restoring "employer-friendly" policies.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created in 2011 in response to the financial crisis to protect consumers from the predatory lending practices, deceptive credit card terms, and abusive debt collection that had contributed to the economic catastrophe, has faced similar dismantlement despite having returned more than $21 billion to working people since its creation through enforcement actions against financial institutions that violated consumer protection laws. The agency's closure benefits financial institutions at the direct expense of consumers across all racial and economic categories, yet this harm to working people's material interests has not generated the kind of mass political opposition that might be expected were working-class political consciousness organized primarily around material concerns rather than cultural and racial grievances.
OSHA and EEOC
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has seen systematic reduction in enforcement of workplace safety regulations that protect workers from injury and death, while the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has had its leadership replaced to align with administration priorities that frame diversity and inclusion programs as discrimination requiring elimination rather than as attempts to address persistent patterns of unequal opportunity. The Department of Labor has weakened enforcement of wage and hour protections that prevent wage theft and ensure minimum compensation.
These are institutions that protect workers regardless of race through enforcement of minimum wage laws, workplace safety standards, anti-discrimination protections, and fair lending practices. Their elimination or systematic weakening benefits employers and financial institutions while harming workers across all racial categories. Yet working-class political energy has been directed not toward defending these institutions but rather toward supporting the administration that is dismantling them, a paradox that makes sense only when understood through the framework of the psychological wage and the historical pattern through which racial division has consistently prevented cross-racial working-class solidarity that might threaten elite interests.
The Redirect: Where the Anger Goes
The rhetorical strategy that accompanies this policy dismantlement follows the historical pattern with precision that reveals continuity of function despite evolution of specific content. Immigration is framed through language of "invasion" while immigrants themselves are characterized in ways that mark them as threats to community integrity, economic security, and cultural identity rather than as people pursuing economic opportunity under conditions of desperation created by the same global economic structures that exploit American workers. This rhetoric does not merely express hostility but rather constructs the interpretive framework through which working-class economic anxiety gets directed toward immigrants rather than toward the employers who suppress wages through threat of replacement, the landlords who raise rents knowing that increased housing scarcity leaves tenants with no alternatives, or the financial institutions that charge predatory interest rates on the consumer debt that workers require to survive periods of unemployment or medical crisis.
The Rhetorical Transformation
Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have been systematically reframed as discrimination against white people rather than as institutional attempts to address historical patterns of exclusion and unequal opportunity, a reframing accomplished through executive orders issued in January 2025 that terminated DEI offices across federal agencies and that characterized such programs as violations of civil rights principles rather than as implementations of those principles. This rhetorical transformation allows opposition to programs designed to expand opportunity to appear not as resistance to racial equity but rather as defense of merit-based principles, even as the same administration systematically weakens the NLRB and CFPB, which enforce workplace protections and prevent financial predation affecting all workers regardless of race.
The Mechanism in Action
The framing accomplishes the crucial work of redirecting attention away from the dismantlement of institutions that provide material protection and toward cultural conflicts that provide opportunities for expression of racial resentment while changing nothing about the fundamental economic structures that exploit workers across racial lines. This is the redirect operating in its contemporary form, the mechanism through which working-class anger about legitimate economic grievances gets systematically channeled toward immigrants, diversity programs, and cultural targets rather than toward the ongoing dismantlement of labor protections, consumer safeguards, and workplace regulations.
The pattern is not new, does not represent innovation or adaptation to novel circumstances, but rather constitutes the same mechanism that has operated since 1705, that destroyed the Populist movement in the 1890s, and that has appeared at every moment when cross-racial working-class solidarity threatened elite interests. The specific targets change, adapting to the particular political vocabulary and cultural anxieties of each historical period, but the function remains constant across all iterations, which is to prevent workers from recognizing shared material interests and organizing collectively for improvement in their actual living and working conditions.
The Psychological Wage in Contemporary Form
The modern version of the psychological wage operates through channels that would be immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with the historical pattern while adapting its specific content to contemporary political vocabularies and cultural structures. Status gets conferred through rhetoric distinguishing "Real Americans" from immigrants, "traditional values" from ideologies characterized as extreme or foreign, "common sense" from forms of analysis characterized as academic elitism divorced from ordinary experience. Cultural authority gets granted through freedom to express racial resentment without facing the social consequences that have attached to such expression in recent decades, a freedom framed as resistance to "cancel culture" and defense of free speech rather than as permission to engage in the kind of racial hostility that the law had made costly during previous periods. Institutional positions get provided through expanded police and immigration enforcement agencies that disproportionately employ white working-class people to enforce laws against Black people, immigrants, and others marked as threats to order, thereby recreating the slave patrol structure in contemporary form. Legal privileges manifest in differential treatment by law enforcement, differential access to justice systems, and differential likelihood of facing serious consequences for identical behaviors depending on the racial category to which one belongs.
Status Markers
Rhetoric distinguishing "Real Americans" from immigrants, "traditional values" from ideologies characterized as extreme or foreign, "common sense" from forms of analysis characterized as academic elitism divorced from ordinary experience.
Cultural Authority
Freedom to express racial resentment without facing the social consequences that have attached to such expression in recent decades, framed as resistance to "cancel culture" and defense of free speech.
Institutional Positions
Expanded police and immigration enforcement agencies that disproportionately employ white working-class people to enforce laws against Black people, immigrants, and others marked as threats to order.
Legal Privileges
Differential treatment by law enforcement, differential access to justice systems, and differential likelihood of facing serious consequences for identical behaviors depending on the racial category to which one belongs.
These contemporary forms represent the modern equivalents of the titles of courtesy and public deference that Du Bois identified in 1935, the slave patrol positions that the Virginia Slave Codes created in 1705, the symbolic compensations that have been offered to poor whites at every moment when elite interests required the prevention of cross-racial working-class solidarity. They cost elites nothing in material terms, require no redistribution of wealth or power, demand no actual improvement in the living conditions of those who receive them. Yet they confer genuine psychological benefits that meet real human needs for status, recognition, and social belonging. They create authentic investment in maintaining systems that exploit their recipients along with everyone else below the elite, because even exploited people receiving such compensation experience themselves as better off than others more severely exploited, and relative advantage proves sufficient to generate loyalty to the system even when absolute conditions remain harsh. The psychological wage is not false consciousness, does not represent delusion or irrationality on the part of those who receive it, but rather constitutes genuine compensation that meets real human needs while channeling the satisfaction of those needs in directions that prevent the collective action through which material conditions might actually improve for all workers.
The system works, has worked for three and a half centuries, and continues to work precisely because the compensation it offers is real rather than illusory. Feeling culturally validated provides genuine psychological satisfaction even when such validation is accompanied by wage stagnation and economic precarity. Having permission to express certain sentiments without social sanction meets real human needs for authentic self-expression and community belonging even when such permission comes alongside deteriorating working conditions and vanishing economic security. Serving as a police officer or immigration enforcement agent provides actual status and institutional authority even when the salary remains modest and the work consists of enforcing a system that exploits the officer along with those being policed. Poor whites receiving these forms of compensation are not being fooled, are not victims of false consciousness, are not making irrational choices. They are receiving something real, something that meets genuine human needs. The problem lies not in the reality of what they receive but rather in the fact that what they receive prevents them from recognizing shared interests with other workers who face the same economic pressures, prevents them from demanding the things that would actually improve their material conditions in absolute rather than merely relative terms, and prevents them from organizing collectively for higher wages, stronger labor protections, universal healthcare, affordable housing, and the power to negotiate as equals with those who currently hold economic and political power.
The Historical Record Is Clear
This analysis does not rest on interpretation that requires inference from ambiguous evidence or speculation about motives that remain undocumented. The Virginia Slave Codes state explicitly in their preambles and in the documentary record surrounding their passage that their purpose was to separate poor whites from Black people after Bacon's Rebellion had demonstrated the threat that cross-racial alliance posed to planter class control. Tom Watson's 1892 essay identifies with unusual directness the divide-and-conquer strategy that kept poor whites and Black farmers from recognizing shared economic interests, and his subsequent transformation into a white supremacist demagogue demonstrates the extraordinary pressure applied to anyone who attempted to build cross-racial alliances that threatened elite power. Du Bois in 1935 named the compensation structure, called it the psychological wage, and characterized it explicitly as "carefully planned" rather than as organic cultural evolution, providing both the theoretical framework and the documentary evidence for understanding how the system functioned in the post-Civil War South. These are not contested interpretations but rather documented historical facts supported by primary sources that can be examined by anyone willing to engage the archival record.
The pattern appears with striking consistency at every historical moment when economic conditions have created potential for cross-racial working-class solidarity. The elite response follows the same structural sequence in which racial division gets intensified through some combination of legislative action that reestablishes or extends racial hierarchy, violence that punishes those who cross racial boundaries, economic retaliation that makes interracial organizing costly, and rhetorical campaigns that redirect working-class anger toward racialized targets rather than toward class issues. One segment of the working class receives symbolic compensation through status markers, legal privileges, or institutional positions that cost elites nothing in material terms. Both groups remain economically exploited, often with conditions for poor whites deteriorating in absolute terms even as their relative position over Black people gets maintained or enhanced. The alliance that might have improved conditions for all workers gets broken. The beneficiaries across four centuries have been consistent, which are those who profit from maintaining a divided and exploited labor force that cannot organize effectively for better wages, working conditions, or political power.
The pattern works not because workers are uninformed about their interests or irrational in their choices but precisely because the compensation offered through the psychological wage is genuine rather than illusory. Status matters to human beings. Dignity matters. Social belonging and community recognition matter. The freedom to claim superiority over others and to have that claim validated by law and social custom matters psychologically even when such claims provide no material benefits and actively prevent the collective action that might lead to material improvement. The system proves effective across centuries because it meets real human needs, offers authentic psychological satisfaction, and provides tangible social benefits while channeling the satisfaction of those needs and the pursuit of those benefits in directions that prevent recognition of shared interests across racial lines and that prevent the kind of sustained collective organizing that might actually threaten elite control of wealth and power.
The Oldest Playbook Still Running
What the Virginia planter class understood in the decades following Bacon's Rebellion was something that every subsequent generation of American elites has rediscovered whenever cross-racial working-class solidarity has threatened to emerge with sufficient strength to challenge established hierarchies of wealth and power. The most efficient mechanism for preventing coalition among the exploited is ensuring that one segment of the exploited believes its interests lie with the exploiters rather than with other workers who share their material conditions. The 1705 Virginia Slave Code did not merely create racial hierarchy in the abstract but rather established a specific compensation structure in which poor whites received status markers, patrol duties, and legal superiority instead of the wages, land distribution, or political power that might have actually improved their material conditions. This was a psychological wage that cost the planter class nothing in terms of actual redistribution of wealth or power while permanently fracturing the labor force that had just demonstrated through Bacon's Rebellion what unified workers could accomplish when they recognized shared interests and acted collectively against those who exploited them.
When the National Labor Relations Board gets systematically dismantled, when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau faces closure despite having returned over $21 billion to working people, when OSHA enforcement disappears and federal workers lose collective bargaining rights, when all this occurs while political rhetoric redirects white working-class anger toward immigrants characterized as invaders, DEI programs characterized as discrimination, and cultural targets that allow expression of racial resentment, we are not witnessing innovation or the emergence of new political strategies.
We are watching the oldest playbook in American politics execute with the same logic, the same mechanisms, and toward the same ends that it has pursued since colonial Virginia established the template in response to the threat that cross-racial alliance posed to elite control. The specific policy targets change with historical circumstances, the rhetorical vocabulary adapts to contemporary sensibilities, the particular groups marked as threatening shift according to political convenience, but the fundamental pattern remains constant because the function it serves remains constant, which is the prevention of cross-racial working-class solidarity that might demand actual redistribution of wealth and power rather than symbolic compensation paid in the currency of status and relative privilege.
The question that remains is not whether this pattern exists, for the historical record establishes its existence and its consistency beyond any reasonable scholarly dispute. The question is whether, having seen the pattern documented across four centuries, having traced its origins to specific historical moments and specific policy decisions, having recognized its contemporary manifestations in the systematic dismantlement of worker protections accompanied by the strategic deployment of racialized rhetoric, we can finally break the cycle that has sustained it. Or whether the psychological wage will continue to prove sufficient to purchase allegiance to a system that exploits everyone it claims to protect, will continue to prevent recognition of shared interests across racial lines, will continue to channel working-class political energy toward conflicts that change nothing about fundamental economic structures while institutions that provide material protection get systematically destroyed. The answer to that question will determine not merely the fate of specific labor protections or consumer safeguards but rather the very possibility of achieving genuine democracy in a society that has been structured around the prevention of cross-racial working-class solidarity since its colonial foundation, that has refined the mechanisms for maintaining that division across centuries of practice, and that continues to deploy those mechanisms with remarkable effectiveness even as the historical pattern becomes increasingly visible to anyone willing to examine the documentary record with honest attention to what it reveals.
Sources
Primary Historical Documents
  • Watson, Tom. "The Negro Question in the South." The Arena, October 1892.
Historical Analysis and Theory
  • Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America. The Free Press, 1935.
  • Merritt, Keri Leigh. Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
  • Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. W.W. Norton & Company, 1975.
  • Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Verso, 1991.
  • Woodward, C. Vann. Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel. Oxford University Press, 1938.
Farmers' Alliance and Populist Movement
  • Corbett, P. Scott, et al. "Farmers Revolt in the Populist Era." U.S. History. Multiple educational publishers, 2014-present.
Contemporary Analysis
  • López, Ian Haney. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Oxford University Press, 2014.
  • McGhee, Heather. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. One World, 2021.
NLRB Developments (2025)
  • Abramsky, Sasha. "Trump Is Delivering on Project 2025's Promise to Gut the NLRB." The Nation, June 20, 2025.
CFPB Developments (2025)
Additional Historical Resources
  • World History Encyclopedia. "Bacon's Rebellion." March 3, 2021. https://www.worldhistory.org/Bacon's_Rebellion/
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