Poor whites cling to race because it alone defines their condition

Evidence

Their poverty is almost exclusively the consequence of their contempt for work and their adjustment to the way of life of black tribes. Like the blacks, they deserted the soil if the most primitive cultivation no longer yielded the little that was necessary or if they had exterminated the animals of the region. Together with their former slaves, they came to the gold and diamond centers, abandoning their farms whenever the black workers departed. But in contrast to the natives who were immediately hired as cheap unskilled labor, they demanded and were granted charity as the right of a white skin, having lost all consciousness that normally men do not earn a living by the color of their skin. Their race consciousness today is violent not only because they have nothing to lose save their membership in the white community, but also because the race concept seems to define their own condition much more adequately than it does that of their former slaves, who are well on the way to becoming workers, a normal part of human civilization. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 507

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the race-thinking toolkit: race consciousness as what remains when all other identity markers are stripped away — echoes of how colonized or minoritized groups become defined by ascriptive identity.
• ADDENDUM: The mechanism by which race replaces class identity parallels the identity-signaling dynamics in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — status markers become more violently clung to as material basis erodes.