Racial ideas were deployed to deflect economic class resentment away from elites

Evidence

SOUTH CAROLINA SENATOR Matthew Butler and Alabama senator and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon John Tyler Morgan introduced a congressional bill on January 7, 1890, to fund Black emigration to Africa. It was an ingenious solution to the class and racial problems of big southern landowners. Withering under a southern agricultural depression, many White “dirt farmers” were raging against the Black farmers; others were joining with Blacks to rage against White landowners in the rising interracial, antiracist populist movement. The colonization bill was a deflective measure. It pointed White farmers to southern Blacks—and not rich White landowners—as the chief cause of the southern agrarian depression. White farmers could easily see how the mass ejection of southern Blacks would increase their own labor value. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 711

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates Kendi’s causal inversion: racist policy (colonization bill) driven by self-interest (protecting landowners from interracial populism) produces racist ideas (Blacks as the cause of the depression). This is the book’s core thesis in a concrete case. — connects to: Anti-radical elites dropped racial targets to attack labor as foreign — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 189; Business elites backed racial moderation primarily to protect profits — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 88; Sit-ins finally made class privilege fail to shield white elites from civil rights costs — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 461 (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: the colonization/emigration movement as ruling-class deflection strategy, comparing how elites redirect class anger onto racial outgroups vs. rich landowners across eras.