Post by Hieronymous CoreyI think racism is just a tool some of us rich
people use to keep you poor people mad at each other,
because the more you fight amongst yourselves, the
richer all of us rich people get
That's true, as I learned many years ago, and as I wrote back then:
"Every now and then this... comes up, and so I refer, again and again, to a history book available at the Bradley Library that nails the situation in terms that for some reason nobody much wants to discuss. In fact it won't be surprising if this post is ignored... again. The book is "Rich Man's War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley" By David Williams. And, yes, it wasn't so much "white or black" in the South back then, it was whether you were "rich or poor". Now why is that just not surprising to me, ever?"
https://rec.music.dylan.narkive.com/hjUGnNnJ/gods-generals-rich-man-s-war
Rich Man's War:
Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower
Chattahoochee Valley
By David Williams
Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998. $34.95
"...Williams begins by retelling how the southern planter
class created the white race for purposes of class
exploitation. Until then in Colonial America,
people's race was defined by their class, and there
was no distinction in law or custom between European
and African servants, all of whom were known as
"slaves." Not surprisingly, these bond servants lived,
loved, worked, and rebelled against their upper-class
oppressors together..."
[...]
"...Under the planters' new race laws, race was
defined by genealogy. Masters and servants who could
claim that all their ancestors came from Europe became
members of the white race. In truth, of course, the
"poor whites" continued to be viewed as an alien race
by the elite. As one Georgia planter wrote a friend,
"Not one in ten [poor whites] is. . . . a whit
superior to a negro." Privately called "white trash"
by the elite, the poor whites were publicly embraced
as racial kin by the planters, 3.7 percent of the
population who owned 58 percent of the region's slaves
and were dead set on keeping their exploited workers
divided by racial contempt. Because the antebellum
South's pervasive class exploitation depended on
fabricated white racial pride, any challenge to racial
solidarity among whites threatened to reveal the
hidden class system. Here lay the path to revolution..."
[...]
"...Thus it's not surprising that writer Hinton Rowan
Helper's 1857 book The Impending Crisis of the South,
which exposed the race-class link, was publicly
burned; a Methodist minister spent a year in jail for
simply owning it; and three Southerners were hanged
for reading it. Here is some of what Helper said:
"The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters
of the blacks... but they are also the oracles and
arbiters of all non slaveholding whites, whose freedom
is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy
and degradation is purposely and fiendishly
perpetuated..."
[...]
"Georgia's very decision to secede
from the Union was never put to a popular vote.
Rather, it was made by secession delegates, 87 percent
of them slaveholders in a state where only 37 percent
of the electorate owned slaves..."
(Thanks to Pastor Corey for the typo correction)
