You didn't outright say that, but the way you outweigh its influence gives the impression.
I vehemently disagree with the bold. The idea that racism wouldn't have been as politically or economically useful without elite manipulation assumes that class solidarity was ever a viable or natural state in American history. IT WASN'T. The working class in the US has never been united across racial lines in any meaningful way, and it didn't take elites to impose that division.
White laborers overwhelmingly rejected alliances with Black people, not just because of elite propaganda but because they actively benefited from racial hierarchy. Even before legal codifications led to formalized racial distinctions, white workers saw themselves as superior to Black people and embraced that identity rather than class solidarity.
Yes, policies and propaganda reinforced and sustained racial divisions, but they weren't artificially imposed onto a naturally united working class. You seem to give more weight to elite influence over individual choice and I disagree. We are never going to see eye to eye on that.
You’re arguing against a point I never made. Nowhere did I say class solidarity was ever the natural state of America’s working class. What I said is that racial hierarchy has been deliberately upheld, institutionalized, and reinforced by the ruling class because it served their interests. That's not a theory, that’s just history. Of course, white people are racist, no one is denying that. But the idea that their rejection of class solidarity was purely organic, with elites just sitting back and watching, is historically inaccurate. You keep pushing this idea that I "over-weigh" elite influence, but all I’m saying is their influence matters, and it has been an active, strategic process. The ruling class didn’t just observe racism, they invested in it, structured it into law, and used it as a tool because it was profitable. In addition to white workers rejecting Black allies because they personally felt superior—they were also incentivized through
policy, labor laws, and structural advantages that reinforced that choice.
No, we won’t see eye to eye, because you seem to think class division and racial hierarchy just naturally exist in a vacuum, while I recognize that even if the elite did not build it, they've maintained and reinforced it for reason. Dismissing elite manipulation as just an afterthought ignores the fact that
racism was shaped into a tool of power. And that is literally why the system of white supremacy exists as a system. White supremacy is a system, white people didnt just magically wake up and unanimously decide they were superior to black people. That ideology was cultivated and reinforced over generations through laws, economic structures, and propaganda designed to uphold racial hierarchy for the benefit of the ruling class.
The working class in the U.S. have never been united across racial lines because the ruling elite has spent centuries making sure of that. Acting like racial divisions just ‘naturally’ happened, with the elites as passive observers, completely ignores history.
If class division along racial lines was so inevitable, then why did the ruling class actively pass laws, use state violence, and flood the media with propaganda to maintain it? Why were Black and white workers legally prohibited from organizing together? Why were labor unions racially segregated by design? Why did plantation owners deliberately offer small privileges to poor whites to keep them from aligning with enslaved people? You’re acting like the ruling class just happened to benefit from racial division, when in reality, they engineered and reinforced it at every turn because they knew that class solidarity was a real threat to their power.
Saying ‘it didn’t take elites to impose that division is like saying "it didn’t take oil companies to make people dependent on fossil fuels," technically speaking, sure, but without their deliberate, systemic intervention, things would have played out very differently.
