Creating a future where all those who work—all those who must sell their labor, who actually produce things of value—are united based on a common interest, a common well being, a common enemy, and are in control of their labor and the forces of production is not thwarted when we acknowledge this simple truth: for the majority of U.S. history, this country has been cleaved in two: black and white. The foundation of the United States is white supremacy; it is a country founded by whites for whites; built on stolen land; with the stolen labor of a stolen people. Within the U.S., there exists a Black working class and a white working class; likewise, there are also a Black poor and a white poor. Why is it that they have not united and risen up to change their conditions? I would venture the primary reason why whites (both workers and the poor) have not united with their Black counterparts, nor felt a need to overthrow this system, is a fairly simple and straightforward one: white supremacy. It is the glue that binds all persons racialized as white, regardless of their class or any other factors. Why have Black workers and the Black poor not seen fit to rise up? That answer is a bit more involved.
White Workers
White supremacy is described by Charles Mills as “a political system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties.”1 That “differential distribution” is in favor of whites and against those who are not white, with special emphasis (or denials) for Black people (anti-Blackness). This system is backed by force. To be sure, white supremacy is a distraction; but it is not one that can or should be taken lightly.
W.E.B. Du Bois, writing about the South during the period of Reconstruction immediately following the Civil War that ended chattel slavery, maintained that the white working class was paid a “public and psychological wage”2 via white supremacy. This “wage” consisted of the non-economic but tangible benefits the white working class received from the class of whites who exploited them: the planters, the land and factory-owning industrialists, bankers, and other men of means. The “public and psychological wages” are the unearned cultural currency known today as “white privilege.” Du Bois asserts that:
Considering the economic rivalry of the black and white worker in the North, it would have seemed natural that the poor white would have refused to police slaves. But two considerations led him in the opposite direction. First of all, it gave him work and some authority as overseer, slave driver, and member of the patrol system. But above and beyond this, it fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters.3
Black Servitude
Before the Civil War and Reconstruction, it is the 1640 trial of John Punch in the British colony of Virginia that gives us a good indicator of the beginnings of the separation of Black workers and white workers in the land that would become the United States. Punch, a Black laborer, ran away from his master along with two indentured servants, one Scottish, the other Irish. The trio were caught and, as punishment, the Scot and the Irishman were to be held for four additional years beyond their original contracted time period. Punch, however, was sentenced to servitude for the rest of his life.
Black identity, as a marker of servitude, would be further solidified about twenty years or so after Punch’s sentencing. It was in 1662 that Virginia enacted a law that declared “Negro women’s children to serve according to the condition of the mother.” If the mother was enslaved, so was the child. Virginia law had originally declared children inherited the status of their fathers. The change in the law was undoubtedly “conceived” to offset the inevitable results of the sexual availability of Black women to white men. By 1667, church had joined with state in the branding of Black servitude in Virginia. While Christian baptisms might save the souls of enslaved Blacks, it would no longer free their bodies. Religious conversion would thus no longer be a path to freedom for Black people or Indians in the colony.
While the sentencing of John Punch may be the beginning of the separation of Black workers and white workers, the creation of “white” as an identity would not come about until after the time of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–1677). It was Bacon’s Rebellion and its aftermath that sent a shudder down the collective white spine of the elite landowning class. Bacon, a land-owning newcomer to Virginia, committed the crime of basically throwing a monkey wrench into the smooth operation of the colony. Positing that all Indigenous peoples (Indians) were the enemy of the colony, he sought support to exterminate them. Such a move threatened the thus-far cordial business relationship the colony had developed with certain local Indian groups. Without the support or blessing of the governor of the Virginia colony, Bacon unilaterally declared war on all Indians on his own, raising a militia of like-minded settlers, killing the colony’s allies, as well as those hostile to the colony. Such treasonous behavior on Bacon’s part created rebellion between his backers and those Virginians still loyal to Britain. Like all good tacticians, both Bacon and the British rulers of the colony offered the promise of freedom to enslaved Afrikans who joined their side. Bacon’s forces, however, were numerically greater. The rebellion lasted one year but its implications were far reaching. The sight—and thought—of the unity of Black and white against the crown (regardless of the reason) was too much to behold. As Howard Zinn notes:
Only one fear was greater than the fear of black rebellion in the new American colonies. That was the fear that discontented whites would join black slaves to overthrow the existing order … masters, initially at least, perceived slaves in much the same way they had always perceived servants... shiftless, irresponsible, unfaithful, ungrateful, dishonest... And if freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done.4
Tobacco production was the economic engine of the colony and a labor-intensive undertaking. Zinn observes that fewer and fewer immigrants from Europe were coming to the Virginia colony, which posed a dilemma: The whites that had been in the colony as indentured servants were either reaching the end of their contracts, or bettering their lot by purchasing small plots of land for themselves.5 At the same time, the supply of Black bodies from Africa seemed to be inexhaustible. The perfect storm had thus begun to brew in Virginia.
Poor Whites
The psychological wage that Du Bois spoke of—white supremacy—unites both the white working class and the white poor against all Blacks within the United States, regardless of class. It creates an “us” versus “them” dynamic that should be seen as comical—a Hollywood concoction—were it not real. The 2016 election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency is only the most recent example of the “us” versus “them” mentality. Writing for the online magazine Resist, Donyae Coles says that the focus on the needs of poor rural white voters in the 2016 election cycle created a narrative that glaringly left out the fact that poor people of color, some of whom also happen to live in rural areas, have some of the same needs as poor rural whites. Such “oversight” reinforces the idea that poor whites are separate—and thus, above—others:
In discussions that center rural white voters, we are not calling on rural white people to understand their neighbors of color, let alone some distant, brown city folk. In doing this, in saying, “Oh hey, maybe we need to better listen to rural white people,” we are subtly reasserting white supremacist thinking because we are treating these concerns as if they are different and more important than those of people of color in the exact same situations.
White poverty is different because it lacks the structural barriers that keep the communities of POC oppressed. This lack of understanding and the persistent belief in myths about POC (the stereotypes about job stealing Mexicans and Black welfare queens, for example) keep poor white voters trapped in a cycle of voting against the very things that would help them in the long run because they don’t want to help “those” people.6
The rural white poor were courted in the 2016 presidential election under the auspices of white supremacy. As Princeton scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor notes, poverty in the U.S. is rarely seen as white and rural: “the majority of poor people in the United States are white but the public face of American poverty is Black. It is important to point out how Blacks are over-represented among the poor, but ignoring white poverty helps to obscure the systemic roots of all poverty.”7
For the most part the white poor and working class in the U.S. have refused to unite with their Black counterparts. Sociologist Robert L. Allen shows how every major social reform movement in the United States from the mid nineteenth century to the end of World War II (Abolitionist, Populist, Progressive, Woman’s Suffrage, Labor, Socialist, Communist) was derailed due to racist ideology within its ranks.8 This refusal on the part of whites to unite with Blacks, while beneficial to the rulers of capitalism, is deeper than being a mere ploy on the part of bosses to keep workers divided. J. Sakai posits that whites—ALL whites—have always been part of a “labor aristocracy” here in the United States; that as a settler-colonial society, it is the colonized people of color that are the true proletariat.9 That may or may not be true. What is obvious, however, is that not wanting to work in unity with whites can never, ever, be a charge that is laid at the foot of the Black community.
The Black Body Politic
According to Glen Ford, co-founder and executive editor of the Black Agenda Report, African Americans within the U.S. have been the most consistently progressive constituency in the country.10 The Black body politic has historically been the voice of conscience and reason in the areas of peace, civil liberties, and social justice. That is until the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. Ford argues that “the cornerstones of a progressive Black historical consensus has been neutralized, and our instinctive reactions to travesties wrought by power have been short circuited.”11 In short, we lost our minds over a Black president. The hesitancy to criticize former President Barack Obama or the policies he carried out during his tenure has been well documented elsewhere. Needless to say, the election of a Black man as president of a white supremacist settler-colonial project such as the United States tapped into a psychological need of the masses of Blacks—the Black poor, working class, and the Black Elite. Speaking in USA Today back in 2008, Black Republican Armstrong Williams—the 2016 presidential campaign manager for Ben Carson—said, “I can honestly say I have no idea who I’m going to pull that lever for in November. And to me, that’s incredible.” Rising up against a country that elected a Black man as its president, a country with a history of anti-Black racism such as the U.S., was not going to happen—at least not in this go ’round. President Obama’s (s)election was a distraction. But it was only one of many.
Writer Kiese Laymon penned an article for The Guardian that (lightly) touched on another distraction that keeps African Americans from rising up:
We … were supposed to love white folks because they knew not what they did. We were supposed to heal them because they knew not who they were. We were supposed to forgive them because salvation awaited she or he who could withstand the wrath of the worst of white folks. We were supposed to pray for them, often at the expense of our own healthy reckoning.12
It was in June of 2015 that a white racist murdered nine African American churchgoers at Bethel AME in Charleston, South Carolina. A witness who lived to tell of the encounter said the killer labeled Black people as being a scourge upon the U.S. that had to be eliminated. The killer, once identified and located, was brought before a South Carolina magistrate to be arraigned. Before a trial was held, before his innocence or guilt determined, before he outlined the reasons for his crime, the relatives of his victims forgave him. Before he asked for forgiveness for murdering nine innocent African Americans, he was granted forgiveness automatically by the relatives of his victims. The killer has, to this date, never indicated that he sought or needs their forgiveness, but it was granted to him anyway. Automatically.
Black people within the U.S. have only been Christians for about 300 years or so. In that time, however, we have swallowed a gospel that not only absolves our tormenters of their crimes but also encourages us not to fight back, not to rise up but, in the words of Laymon’s grandmother, “give it to God.”13 During enslavement, church services held under the watchful eyes of white masters and overseers served as covert planning meetings for freedom. The modern civil rights movement in the U.S. was nurtured in the Black church. As nonviolence gave way to Black Power during the late 1960s in the U.S., Black Liberation Theology appeared as a necessary corollary. But then something happened. Under the air of conservatism that began creeping over the United States after the destruction of the Black Power/Black Liberation Movement, the Black church began to change its tune also. A strategy of confronting the rulers of society was replaced with a prosperity gospel. Individuals are supposed to have wealth. Jesus was wealthy; he simply chose to reject it. Almighty God ordained that everyone should have wealth. This wealth was not being denied to Black people, in particular, because of government policies or racism. Black progress and success was individual. (It was also promised in the Bible.) The focus of the Black church’s sermons was shifted. Pharoah had been let off the hook.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar describes this prosperity gospel as a war on the poor, noting that its adherents are typically “African Americans, evangelicals and those less educated.”14 Parishioners who subscribe to a prosperity gospel are people who are hoping on something better. Unfortunately, in the words of Abdul-Jabbar, they are being sold hope from the descendants of snake oil peddlers. The rise of a prosperity gospel coincides with Republican faith-based efforts at directing domestic policy in the U.S. The presence of flashy, wealthy Black preachers cozying up to Presidents may not be seen as different from those of flashy, wealthy white preachers. The difference lies in the history, and what their presence means for future movement and resistance.
According to Assata Shakur, “People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”15 The words of former Black Panther and current political exile Assata Shakur are most prescient for our times. While Black people have always resisted our oppression on these shores, have always rebelled, to rise up and overthrow the capitalist system of the United States—the United States itself—is a hard pill to swallow, especially when your sacred spaces, which once preached sermons on Black Liberation and doubled as a meeting place for insurrection, now preach sermons on forgiveness and “you, too, can be rich.”
Black people in the U.S. can ill afford such deliberate distractions at this point in history. To effectively rise up and replace the current world with a new, more humane and egalitarian one, we must first envision that new world. It is not, then, enough that we must believe that it will come to pass; we must believe that we are the architects and the builders that can make it come to pass. In order for that to happen, the clutter of “deliberate distractions” must be identified and neutralized.
George Jackson, revolutionary, author, and Field Marshall of the Black Panther Party, put forth a simple question: “Prestige bars any serious attack on power. Do people attack a thing they consider with awe, with a sense of its legitimacy?”16 Jackson posed this query in 1971. An affirmative corollary to Jackson’s query was put forth by another imprisoned revolutionary and writer, James “Yaki” Sayles (a.k.a. Atiba Shanna) in 1980: “To kill the prestige of the oppressive state, is, first of all, to kill the image of its legitimacy in the minds of the people…there is a need to destroy within the minds of the people the sense of awe in which they hold the oppressive state.”17
The U.S. is an illegitimate settler-colonial state. Its prestige must be destroyed. Fortunately, the legitimacy of the U.S. as a moral and democratic beacon continues to be chipped away. The rise of the Black Lives Matter phenomenon under a Barack Obama presidential administration provided a necessary blow. The election of Donald Trump as the 45th president has also landed a most potent blow. There will be more deliberate distractions, more bread and circuses, to distract the Black body politic. These distractions will also target white workers and the white poor, as well as other people of color, immigrants, etc. Our task is to see them for what they are, and work harder to bring into fruition a society where all those who live are secure, are cared for, have their basic needs met, and control the forces that impact their daily lives. It is a monumental task. But it absolutely must be done.
Endnotes
1 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 3.
2 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998), 700.
3 Ibid., 701.
4 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 37.
5 Ibid.
6 Donyae Coles, “The empathy double-standard: Why poor white voters get compassion and poor Black and brown people get blame,” Resist, December 2, 2016. Available online: https://resistmedia.org/2016/12/02/empathy-double-standard-poor-white-voters-get -compassion-poor-black-brown-people-get-blame/.
7 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlacklivesMatter to Black Liberation, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 49.
8 Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990).
9 J. Sakai, Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat From Mayflower to Modern (Oakland: PM Press, 2014).
10 Glen Ford, “Black Madness Under Obama: African Americans More Pro-NSA, Anti-Snowden Than Whites and Hispanics,” Black Agenda Report, January 22, 2014. Available online: http://blackagendareport.com/content/black-madness-under-obama-african -americans-more-pro-nsa-anti-snowden-whites-and-hispanics.
11 Ibid.
12 Kiese Laymon, “Black churches taught us to forgive white people. We learned to shame ourselves,” The Guardian, 23 June 2015. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/23/black-churchesforgive-white-people-shame.
13 Ibid.
14 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, “Prosperity Gospel Is War on the Poor,” Time Magazine, June 8, 2015. Available online: http://time.com/3912366/kareem-abdul-jabbar-prosperity-gospel/.
15 Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (New York: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1987), 262.
16 George Jackson, Blood In My Eye (Black Classic Press, 1996 (1971), 50.
17 Atiba Shanna (Yaki Sayles), Notes from A New Afrikan P.O.W. Journal, Book 1. (Chicago: Spear and Shield Publications, 1980), 4.