Of course. There seems to be a common misconception out there that all white Southerners were a bunch of slaveowners. This isn't true. Rich planter families would own hundreds of slaves, while most Southern whites were dirt poor. Poorer whites could rent slaves from the rich ones when they needed back-breaking labor done, but most had no hope of owning their own.Sean Hayden wrote: ↑Fri Jul 30, 2021 8:51 pmWhite in all the wrong places: white rural poverty in the postbellum US Southhttps://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.119 ... 003eu266oaMany analyses of whiteness assume a priori that a white identity intimates unproblematic claims to white privilege. As Henry Giroux has noted, however, the reduction of whiteness ‘exclusively to forms of exploitation and domination’ fails ‘to capture the complexity that marks ‘whiteness’ as a form of identity and cultural practice’. While connections between whiteness and domination can certainly be powerful, simply being white does not automatically bring social, economic or any other form of privilege, as whiteness never functions in solitude.
--it's interesting to see what money thought of poor whites at the time (and still does)
If you say that half the men and nearly all the women are very pale, you strike at the matter, but
fail to fairly hit it . . . Unquestionably soap and water and crash towels would improve the
appearance, but I doubt if they would give any bloom to the cheek. The skin seems utterly
without vitality, and beyond the action of any restorative stimulants: it has a pitiful and repulsive
death-in-life appearance . . . The whole economy of life seems radically wrong, and there is no
inherent energy which promises reformation.Although ‘[t]ime and effort will lead the negro up to intelligent
manhood’, he doubted ‘if they will be able to lead this ‘white trash’ even up to
respectability’. African Americans, for Andrews and others, had the potential to rise to
‘intelligent manhood’. White trash, conversely, was forever stuck somewhere beneath
respectability.
In my post prior to this one I quote WEB Du Bois where he explains how racism kept the oligarchs and the poor whites on the same side politically and in favor of the slavery regime.
eta: I'll just repost it because it got knocked off the page and it's a good couple of paragraphs:
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 astonishing economic results. The theory of laboring class unity rests upon the assumption that laborers, despite internal jealousies, will unite because of their opposition to exploitation by the capitalists. According to this, even after a part of the poor, white laboring class became identified with the planters, and eventually displaced them, their interests would be diametrically opposed to those of the mass of white labor, and of course, to those of black laborers. This would throw white and black labor into one class and precipitate a united fight for higher wage and better working conditions. Most persons do not realize how far this failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there are probably not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently, and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.
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. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their votes selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites, and almost utterly ignored the negro except in crime and ridicule. On the other hand, in the same way, the negro was subject to public insult, was afraid of mobs, was liable to the jibes of children, and the unreasoning fears of white women, and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority. The result of both of this was that the wages of both classes could be kept low—the whites fearing to be supplanted by negro labor, the negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor. Mob violence and lynching were the inevitable result of the attitude of these two classes, and for a time were a sort of permissible Roman holiday for the entertainment of vicious whites. One can see for these reasons why labor organizers and labor agitators made such small headway in the South. They were for the most part appealing to laborers who would rather have low wages 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, so that in many districts, negroes were afraid to build decent homes, or dress well, or own carriages, bicycles, or automobiles because of possible retaliation on the part of the whites. Thus every problem of labor advance in the South was skillfully turned by demagogues into a matter of interacial jealousy.
