Racial consciousness supplied fictive status to white workers while excluding Blacks

Evidence

Thus it was that American liberalism in the nineteenth century, with its ideals of individualism and its antagonisms to socialism, became manifest in a particular way. Its character was molded by an economic order that severely delimited material well-being and a racial consciousness that at one and the same time removed an entire section of the working classes, the Blacks, from the possibility of access to that well-being while also supplying a fictive measure of status to non-Black workers. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 942

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This ‘fictive measure of status’ mechanism anticipates later whiteness-studies arguments (e.g., Roediger, Du Bois’s own wages of whiteness) — a cross-domain parallel worth noting.

Related

• Racism gave white American workers a fictive status compensating their limited material well-being (similarity 0.91)
• Racism supplied non-Black workers a fictive status in place of material well-being. (similarity 0.90)
• Capitalism integrated Blacks into production while shielding them from bourgeois ideology (similarity 0.83)
• Racism and mobility myths prevented white workers from revolutionary consciousness (similarity 0.81)
• Racial ideology in America concealed class divisions among whites (similarity 0.80)
• Racism as ideology, not production relations, blocked US class consciousness. (similarity 0.80)
• American slavery integrated Blacks into production while barring bourgeois ideology (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalism developed along essentially racial lines, not rational universalist ones (similarity 0.80)
• Wright held Black workers more alienated than white working classes (similarity 0.80)
• Marxist categories presumed a white American working class. (similarity 0.80)
• The Negro category was constructed to justify Black labor’s centrality to capitalism (similarity 0.79)
• Early American Communists dismissed Black racial consciousness as ideological backwardness (similarity 0.79)
• Capitalism failed to strip social life of historical consciousness embedded in culture (similarity 0.79)
• Black slave labor undergirded worldwide capitalist expansion. (similarity 0.79)
• Black labor’s post-slavery mobility opened its subcultures to ruling-class penetration (similarity 0.79)