Wages of WhitenessW.E.B. Dubois wrote about the way that race was used during reconstruction to prevent disadvantaged working class White Americans from uniting with disadvantaged Black Americans. Dubois theorized that disadvantaged White Americans could cling to their higher racial status as an intangible wage that would prevent them from being too focused on their actual wages. This would prevent a working class alliance between Americans of different races which would far out number their wealthy and powerful white Americans benefitting from economic inequality. Below is an excerpt from Dubois's Black Reconstruction (1935);
Most persons do not realize how far [the view that common oppression would create interracial solidarity] 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 probably are 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 on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote 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. (Black Reconstruction [1935], 700-701)
Note how relevant Dubois's words above are, nearly a century later! In this era of extreme inequality, the bottom 80% of Americans should be united in creating a more egalitarian society. But instead Trump has led much of America to blame any difficulties in society on "DEI" including racial minorities, foreign migrants, and LGBTQ individuals. And his courts have permitted him to serve a second term and free the largely white working class convicts from the Jan 6 insurrection with many of them vowing revenge and a disdain for the law.
Trump's recent attacks on "DEI" are not limited to what Dubois wrote about during reconstruction. In their book, The Politics of Losing, sociologists Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep explain how there is a familiar pattern repeating itself throughout US history. During periods of extreme wealth inequality, the white working class scapegoats minorities as the reason for their struggles. To use Dubois's words, McVeigh and Estep find that working class whites cash in their wages of whiteness during these periods. The result is an increase in racial scapegoating and nativism and a rise in white supremacy. McVeigh and Estep find this scapegoating led to three distinct peaks in KKK prominence: Reconstruction, the 1920s, and the 1960s. But their finding also shows a fourth epoch of white supremacy emerging with Trump. During his first term, America saw the public endorsement of Trump by the KKK, the rise of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the One Percenters at events like Charlottesville and the Jan 6th insurrection. In 2025 lexicon, this white supremacy is cloaked in attacks on "DEI." According to Trump, DEI caused the DC airplane collision; DEI caused the train crash in Ohio; DEI caused just about any catastrophe in the US. And, DEI is causing the lives of white heterosexuals to be more difficult.
Judith Levin from the Guardian explains it like this;
DEI is a capacious euphemism. In the right’s parlance, it stands not for the policy or program but for the Americans the policy serves: people of color, queer people, women and people with disabilities. It stands for the people it did not serve, those unqualified “DEI hires” whisked to high places through government-endowed privilege: VP Kamala Harris, the supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and – we can infer from Trump’s current philippic – the gay former transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg. In Trumpian terms, DEI stands for those who deserve retribution for perpetrating the crises he invents in order to justify retribution against those he claims to have perpetrated them: border invasion, energy shortages, military unreadiness, and, now, aviation disasters.Trump has no ideology. Ideology contains ideas, and Trump does not traffic in ideas. He mobilizes feelings. The feelings he is mobilizing after 67 bodies fell into the Potomac River go beyond resentment and anxiety among those putatively more qualified white, able-bodied men who believe they have lost jobs to the blind and deviant. Normalizing vilification, making bigotry chic and fun, Trump has disinhibited even his critics to dip their toes in the slime.
Dr. Carol Anderson is a history professor from Emory University who has research and published about the reaction of whites to black civil rights gains. She calls the backlash by whites reacting to black gains "white rage" as detailed in her history book at the left. Below is a summary of her claim:"Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.
Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage."
Ian Haney Lopez is a race and constitutional law professor from University of California Berkley. His book shows how racism has been used subtly since Richard Nixon and the "Southern Strategy". This subtle racism is sometimes called dog whistles - phrases that only register with some people who are tuned in to hear them. For example, a politician can say, "welfare costs too much taxpayer dollars" and a neutral person would hear simply that paying money to the poor is expensive. But to those who believe that the poor are mostly black, this phrase says that Americans who are black are taking advantage of tax payer dollars.
Michael Tesler shows how, in the years that followed the 2008 election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times—racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making. These range from people’s evaluations of prominent politicians and the parties to issues seemingly unrelated to race like assessments of public policy or objective economic conditions. Some people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama’s dog, Bo, when they were told he belonged to the white Ted Kennedy. More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics.
Here are photos of opposition during President Obama's Administration:
racial attitudes towards out-groups—including racial resentment, anti-immigrant sentiment, and white racial grievance—strongly correlate with anti-democratic beliefs, whereas in-group racial attitudes do not. Analysis of multiple waves of the American National Election Studies (ANES) reveals that racial resentment and white grievance now explain twice as much variation in anti-democratic beliefs as they did in 2012. Experimental evidence also demonstrates that white Americans react negatively to voting expansions when the racial implications of these reforms are made explicit. These findings underscore the growing alignment between anti-democratic beliefs and racial attitudes in contemporary U.S. politics.
...there is a clear correlation between Trump campaign events and incidents of prejudiced violence. FBI data show that since Trump’s election there has been an anomalous spike in hate crimes concentrated in counties where Trump won by larger margins. It was the second-largest uptick in hate crimes in the 25 years for which data are available, second only to the spike after September 11, 2001. Though hate crimes are typically most frequent in the summer, in 2016 they peaked in the fourth quarter (October-December). This new, higher rate of hate crimes continued throughout 2017.
Is Trump Really That Racist? From NPR's Code Switch (10/2021)
People have talked about Trump breaking norms, especially when it comes to talking about race, going as far as to say that he's the "most racist president in modern history." There are plenty of things you could point at to augment that argument: embracing birtherism, referring to African nations as "shithole countries," telling congresswomen of color to go back to where they came from, calling Mexican immigrants "rapists," refusing to denounce white supremacists during a presidential debate and so on.
Democracy in Color documented Trump's record of racism in part 1 of their report (1/2017 - 8/2018)
From Politico, (10/2024) We watched 20 Trump rallies. His racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.
Don’t Believe Trump When He Claims He’s Not Racist, The Nation (7/2024)
