One of the things that’s immediately apparent about white supremacy is that it badly hurts non-white people.

Perhaps less obvious is that an effective secondary purpose is to hurt almost all white people, as well.

The bribe of white supremacy is not that it will improve your lot any, just that it will worsen someone else’s conditions a great deal and guarantee you that your position, whatever it is, and your descendants position will always remain better than that detestable other.

What do the Confederate apologists so often claim? “The American Civil War couldn’t have been about slavery; 95 percent of all white people didn’t own any slaves at all”. As if only the people who actually have capital now are the ones who will kill to protect capitalism today.

What’s the bargain of capitalism to a poor person? Well, they aren’t some homeless wretch, are they? And if they work hard, success will one day be theirs, but at the very least, they can comfort themselves that billionaires of today worked very hard for what they’ve got, and that bad things like homelessness only happen to those who had it coming; since they themselves don’t have it coming, they’ll always be fine. No need to worry or feel bad for anyone.

In the same way for poor whites, white supremacy is the guarantee that no matter how poor, drunk, ignorant, and worthless they are, they will be better than best [slur] can ever be. This guarantee is extended to the bad and hated whites, even. In America, the “hillbillies” and “rednecks” were always white. The Irish were always white. The Italians were always white. European Jews were always white. They were just the wrong kind of white, and so suffered horrible discrimination of their own, but once they became settlers, people in these groups could always get in on hurting non-whites if they wanted, even if not always allowed to the top. In fact, that was the whole point of the white coalition for colonization.

Meanwhile, East Asian Americans, South Asian Americans, Latine, and Muslim Arabs (as opposed to Christian Arabs) didn’t get to be white, and sometimes have suffered pogroms or expulsion or terrorist watch lists. But they, too, could take the blood money, be bribed into supporting white supremacy, if it meant someone might be guaranteed to be worse off than they. They could establish a floor of cruelty beyond which only Others felt.

Even prisons have their trustys. You can be a Black cop in Baltimore just as you could be a Buffalo Soldier on a frontier fort. The Naa’dahéńdé (“Mescalero Apache”) could serve as US Army Indian Scouts just as the Anigiduwagi (“Cherokee”) could participate in chattel slavery of Black people.

White supremacy will not make 95 percent of its participants better off, certainly not better off than they’d have been without slavery, genocide, capitalism. But it will make a lot of people much worse off, and if you’re white — if you believe hierarchy is essential and inevitable — then you believe that without white supremacy, it’s possible you’ll fall to the bottom and be regarded as badly as you’ve regarded others, treated as badly as you’ve treated and allowed others treated.

So from a champion boxer like Jack Johnson to a Nobel laureate like Toni Morrison to a centrist capitalist president like Barack Obama, the grievous psychic and material wound is seeing that the essentialism you believe in doesn’t keep the best of those you hate from rising higher than you ever will. That fact that it doesn’t matter if the president actually governs with policies no different than a white man or if he materially helps you, a poor person, have healthcare you couldn’t afford otherwise matters little when the floor of social hierarchy has been ripped out from under you.

When injured, some people would like to be healed and ensure no one can be hurt the same way again. But others would rather see another person in agony just so they can say, “Well thank god I’m not like that poor son of a bitch.”

Theodore W Allen’s massive two-volume The Invention of the White Race (one)(two) is the basis for most of this, but the introduction to it by Jeffrey B. Perry is much shorter and necessarily more accessible.

Readers of the first volume of Invention were startled by Allen’s bold, back-cover assertion that “When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.” That statement, based on twenty-plus years of primary research in Virginia’s colonial records, reflected the fact that Allen found no instance of the official use of the word “white” as a token of social status prior to its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691. As he later explained, “Others living in the colony at that time were English; they had been English when they left England, and naturally they and their Virginia-born children were English, they were not ‘white.’ White identity had to be carefully taught, and it would be only after the passage of some six crucial decades” that the word “would appear as a synonym for European-American.”

Allen was not merely speaking of word usage, however. His probing research led him to conclude that – based on the commonality of experience, the demonstrated solidarity between African-American and European-American laboring people, and the indeterminate status of African-Americans – the “white race” was not, and could not have been, functioning in early Virginia.

It is in this context that he offers his major thesis – that the “white race” was invented as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the latter (civil war) stages of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-77). To this he adds two important corollaries: 1) the ruling elite deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges to define and maintain the “white race” and to implement a system of racial oppression, and 2) the consequence was not only ruinous to the interests of the African-American workers, but was also disastrous for European-American workers.

The framing of white privilege as a heroin shot that Perry does elsewhere is particularly insightful in that there ultimately is no real benefit once you have an addiction, and at that point, lack of access to it feels not just like oppression but an actual attack. 

In one of his speeches, Perry talks about how the biggest obstacle to worker organizing is people who identify and collude with bosses at the expense of workers, which is exactly what whiteness is. It seems like the biggest mistake “anti-idpol” folk make when doing their “class consciousness” work is that white supremacy is a technology of capitalism that, if not addressed head on and inoculated against, will be used to destroy class solidarity as whites become addicted to the capitalist-controlled heroin shots that let them feel “back to normal”.