Owners will abandon racial solidarity to defend cheap enslaved labor

Evidence

In the only protracted urban industrial strike in the pre–Civil War South, they demanded pay raises and the removal of “the negroes” from skilled work. If the striking ironworkers thought enslavers really cared more about racism than profit, or that they would not abandon, out of self-interest, their promotions of a unified White masculinity, then they were in for a long and tortured lesson about power and profit and propaganda. Richmond elites banded together. They viewed the anti-Black strikers as being equivalent to abolitionists because they were trying to prevent them “from making use of slave labor,” as the local newspaper cried. In the end, the White strikers were fired. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 496

Categorization

• XREF: Prime real-world example of Kendi’s core claim that profit/self-interest precedes anti-Black policy and ideas — here the ‘racist’ anti-Black strikers actually got fired, not the enslaved workers. The chapter I wrote on racial solidarity vs. wage interests could cite this.
• ADDENDUM: Direct test of Kendi’s inversion: working-class anti-Black racism loses to slaveholder profit interest, showing interest trumps racial ideas. Useful counterpoint for the Immodesty piece’s theme of elites using moral panic instrumentally.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the ironworkers’ own racism was not ‘produced’ by the elites in this case — it preceded and was defeated by elite policy. Does this complicate Kendi’s linear model, or just confirm that elite interest wins regardless?