The Cult of Whiteness: How Elites Tricked One Labor Pool to Guard Their Riches
TL;DR: “Whiteness” isn’t a culture or a reward; it’s a political label used by elites to divide the poor and trick working-class European descendants into defending the wealth of the powerful.
Let’s Dig In
Imagine two groups of low-wage workers, Group A and Group B, working for a powerful boss. The boss, or “The Man,” needs to keep wages low and ensure neither group organizes for better conditions. His solution? He gives Group A a slightly better parking spot, a slightly cleaner uniform, and a secret handshake—and tells them they are fundamentally superior to Group B.
That’s the core engine of “race” in America.
The concept of being white is not a historical culture like being Irish or Italian; it was a political, legal, and economic class created by powerful elites in the 1600s to solve a labor problem. When poor indentured servants from Europe started cooperating with enslaved Africans and Indigenous people, the powerful had to step in. They granted poor European descendants some privileges—like the right to police the non-European workers—to manufacture a fake sense of superiority.
This was the creation of a guard dog class.
The working-class “white” man’s reward is not wealth; it’s the permission to look down on others. This feeling of being “not at the very bottom” becomes a replacement for a living wage, political power, and a stable life. The elite don’t see white workers as inherently better than others; they just see them as a labor pool that’s been successfully domesticated and programmed to follow a few simple, self-serving rules:
- Trust Your Kind: Other “whites” are inherently trustworthy.
- Mistrust The Others: Non-whites are a threat to your status and property.
- Defend The System: Authority figures (The Man, the Boss, the Pastor) are worthy of your unquestioning defense, because they represent the system that gave you your “superior” label.
The result is a perpetual, self-defeating cycle: the white working class fights relentlessly against other poor people (who are equally powerless) instead of fighting the rich elites who are actively exploiting them all. Your apartment is still expensive, your wages are still stagnant, and your kids still go to war for abstract reasons, all while you are focused on who to exclude, rather than who to cooperate with.
The ultimate con is making you believe the threat is the person next to you, rather than the person above you. It’s a trick so deep that defending the label “white” feels like defending your own life, even though the label is the very cage keeping all poor people, regardless of color, from uniting to take back control. The white working class, like all other classes of labor, is merely a peg on the royal board, tricked into believing its slightly elevated position is an eternal reward.
Go Deeper: Never take at face value anything that claims to inform or educate. Always check the receipts, and make sure they come from reliable sources.
Link 1: Origin of White Identity in Colonial America Link 2: How Whiteness Was Invented Link 3: The Invention of the White Race (Book Overview) Link 4: The Role of Racism in Wage Suppression (Academic Analysis) Link 5: Whiteness in American History (Wikipedia)