It would certainly be true to say that capitalism cannot exist without non-economic hierarchies that aid in reproducing class domination. While these vary from one specific capitalist society to another, race is an important element of class reproduction in American capitalism. Moreover, it is important to recognize that race and class belong to different conceptual categories and offer different ways to interpret the dynamics of American capitalism.
Social and economic divisions among workers have spawned simultaneously with the development of capitalism. Where class struggle permeates almost every segment of social life, some sectors of the working class find themselves in a more favorable position to their employers than others, offering them the opportunity for greater success in the struggle for higher wages, better working conditions, and additional benefits.
The persistence of unemployment and inequality has long been recognized by heterodox economic theory, beginning with Marx and continuing well into the present day. The persistence of unemployment is, in part, a consequence of the continual conflict between labor and capital. Unemployment is not merely persistent, it also affects the working class in various ways according to both race and gender. Moreover, inequality is not merely persistent, it also affects people according to both race and gender. This can be better understood, as I argue, from the competitive nature of capitalism, which is the bellum omnium contra omnes as Marx beheld it. For that reason, racism might more easily be seen as a competitive weapon for a privileged portion of society to keep the unprivileged at arms’ length and win the war for higher wages.
In the United States, where the formally neutral “civil rights” and the word “race” generally convey a black concern, to link the social construct of whiteness with race remains uncommon. As a rule, white Americans cannot see race in relation to themselves and are therefore convinced that racism only poses problems for others. There is a scholarly and social blindness to see how racism has on its perpetrators. This marginalized blindness doesn’t stop at the edge of the campus—it involves people in all levels of society, who fail to acknowledge how whiteness conveys internal meanings while also fulfilling anti-black functions and discourage social programs intended to minimize racism’s pernicious legacy.
Capitalism nurtures the continuation of racism, sexism, discrimination, and oppression, as they offer those among the privileged an advantage over subordinate groups. Race is a catalogue of descriptive differences—an ideology which construes populations as groups—sorting them into hierarchies of capacity, civic worth, based on perceived “natural” characteristics attributed to them. “Whiteness” is a descriptive quality that ensures the bearer of it is privileged over Blacks, Latinos, or any race which is not white.
Working class formation and the systematic development of a sense of whiteness went hand in hand for the white American working class. Privileging class over race, nonetheless, is not always meaningful. While it is necessary to set race within social formations, it is damaging to reduce race to class, a view which reflects the neoliberal notion that race isn’t the “issue,” but rather it is “economic growth.” Once growth is achieved, it is believed that problems like racism will simply vanish.
The legacy of racism has been ingrained into laws and legal culture in the United States. In part, the passionate embrace of white supremacy by American citizens in the mid-19th century explains the failure of the post-Civil War Reconstruction and the collapse of the legal framework that supported the freedom of former slaves. But this dialectic has grown so intricately embedded beneath public consciousness that it frames Americans’ perception of the world without critical examination. Explaining why white Southern workers were willing to accept low pay, W.E. Du Bois pointed out in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880:
[T]hat the political success of the doctrine of racial separation, which overthrew Reconstruction by uniting the planter and the poor white, was far exceeded by its … economic results … It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white… The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness… [They] would rather have a low wage upon which they could eke out an existence than see colored labor with a decent wage. White labor saw in every advance of Negroes a threat to their racial prerogatives …
Du Bois concluded that 19th century workers prized whiteness to such an extent that instead of joining with blacks, with whom they shared common interests, they perpetuated a white supremacist vision that supported capitalism and “ruined democracy.”
The long struggle to destroy the institution of slavery and the subsequent rise of racial segregation across the United States undergirds century long conflicts. Without a public grasp of this legacy, the contemporary challenges roiling our cultural and legal institutions appear unassailable, in part, because so little has have been learned or drawn from the way the white racial consciousness was generated during the nineteenth century.
In the early 1860s, the United States was not only a rapidly expanding capitalist nation, it was also a slave-holding republic. The Republican conception of a nation composed of small independent producers, who held deep suspicions of those with power and those who were powerless. The radical ideas of republican government during the early 19th century eschewed dependency and elevated independence. As historian David Roediger argues in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, the degrees of dependency that whites knew during the 18th century, such as apprenticeship, indentured servitude, and convict labor, prevented them from drawing hard distinctions between “an idealized white worker and a pitied or scorned servile black worker.” He asserts that common racial attitudes in the 18th century were more wanton and inconsistent than later periods. This was due to the varieties of “unfreedom” whites were experiencing and also the rising denunciations of slavery that accompanied the Revolutionary War era. But as the class of wage labor expanded between 1800 and 1860, the gradual transition into an economy in which wage labor was widespread generated problems for republican ideology.
The constellation of social attitudes and developments that connected “white” with “worker,” Roediger argues, did not solidify until the 19th century. By the 1860s, the process that reduced nearly one-half of the non-slave-labor force to wage dependence—subjecting it to new forms of capitalist discipline—had reached its completion. By then, too, those republican notions of economic independence that inflamed the national imagination during the Revolutionary War had waned. In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, historian Gordon Wood described the widespread feeling during the early 19th century that everything had changed:
… [M]urder, suicide, theft, and mobbing became increasingly common responses to the burdens that liberty and the expectations of gain were placing on people … Urban rioting became more prevalent and destructive than it had been. Street, tavern, and theater rowdiness, labor strikes, racial and ethnic conflicts – all increased greatly after 1800 … America may have been still largely rural, still largely agricultural, but now it was … perhaps the most thoroughly commercialized nation in the world.
The emergence of the United States’ commercial empire in the 19th century was unprecedented. New types of production and social relations that arose during the tumultuous transition to capitalism produced a new political rhetoric that struggled to redefine the new working conditions, variously called “wage slavery,” “white slavery,” or “free white labor.”
The claim to republican citizenship and a corresponding assertion of maleness, was central to the 19th century worker’s devotion to whiteness. Prior to the Civil War, as Roediger writes, blackness “almost perfectly predicted lack of the attributes of a freeman.” The political agitation to expand male suffrage to include all freemen was joined with strenuous efforts to bar free Blacks from exercising the same freedoms. To further distance the black worker and the unskilled white laborers, new terms for servant such as “help” or “hired hand” became fashionable—innovations initiated by the white workers. Similarly, they avoided the term master because of its association with slavery, and replaced it with the Dutch word boss—not yet included in the 1829 Webster’s dictionary, which, ironically, has the exact same meaning as master.
There is also the intriguing evolution of the slang term coon—initially a country bumpkin—into a racial slur. During the 1840 Presidential campaign, Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap became the symbol of the Whig Party, and Democrats denounced their rivals as coons, who were attacked by New York City Democrats as the “Federal Whig Coon Party.” But later in the century, the blackface minstrel character Zip Coon embodied the stereotype of an irresponsible, dandified free black in the North. An arrogant, ostentatious figure, he dressed in high style and spoke in a series of malapropisms (use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one, often with unintentionally amusing effect) and puns that undermined his attempts to appear dignified.
The coon caricature was one of the stock characters among minstrel performers. Minstrel show audiences laughed at the slow-talking fool who avoided work and all adult responsibilities. This transformed the coon into a comic figure, a source of virulent and vulgar comic relief. He was sometimes renamed “Zip Coon” or “Urban Coon.” If the minstrel skit had an antebellum setting, the coon was portrayed as a free black; if the skit’s setting postdated slavery, he was portrayed as an urban black. In either case, he was lazy and good-for-little, and the minstrel shows depicted him as a gaudy dressed dandy who put on airs.
The Coon did not know his place. He thought he was as smart as white people; however, his frequent malapropisms and distorted logic suggested that his attempt to contend intellectually with whites was viewed as pathetic. His use of bastardized English delighted white audiences and reaffirmed the then commonly held beliefs that blacks were innately less intelligent. The coon’s goal was leisure, and his leisure was spent strutting, styling, fighting, avoiding real work, eating watermelons, and making a fool of himself. If he was married, his wife dominated him; if single, he chased women for the pleasure of bedding them.
By the end of the century, the “coon song” craze soared to such intensity that millions of copies of the sheet music were sold. In Roediger’s view, the remarkable popularity of this music after the Civil War grew from its ability to let working-class whites project onto emancipated Blacks the values and actions that both fascinated and frightened them. Democrats attempting to smear their political opponents who favored abolishing slavery coined the word miscegenation, from two Latin words miscere, meaning to mix, and genus, meaning race. It was introduced in an 1863 pamphlet in which Democrats insinuated that supporting Republicans would bring about the feared race-mixing, which was typically called amalgamation. Their term stuck, and became a stock phrase in the political rhetoric of the day that denounced the impending “mongrelization” of the United States.
Race has undeniably demonstrated a power to polarize American society. In a 1995 article written for the Nation, Professor Lani Guinier observed that Americans have “learned to see race as an issue of blame and punishment.” She notes that within the polarized climate of our political debate, there seems to be no longer any will to do more than blame race for our problems. Some see the magnitude of the problems that defy solutions as so overwhelming, they believe the solutions are the problem. In the present day, it seems that history begins to repeat itself. Where the newly forming white working class of the 19th century took whiteness as a means of responding to fears of dependency and anguish over the imposition of capitalist discipline, that same fear is seen in the resurgence of white supremacy to counter fears triggered by the spiraling crisis over globalization, downward mobility, and immigrant workers. Donald’s Trump campaign for president, the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom, and all other reactionary protests against refugees embody this fear.
Where can the poor, the working-class white, Blacks, Latinos and others find common ground, if we cannot recognize our collective self-interest? Clearly, the spurious wages that white racism paid long ago continue to bedevil democracy and diminish our humanity.
About the Author: Anthony Eisenbarth received a B.S. in Economics from Eastern Oregon University, an M.A in Economics from the University of Missouri Kansas City, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Economics at the University of Utah.