Racial ideology developed to obscure the true class origins of white laborers

Evidence

The Irish were, then, the prototype for the white servant. And as their own impressive numbers were increased, and the servant class augmented by immigrants from Germany and other refugees from the political upsets of European society and their socioeconomic aftershocks in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the vise of intra-European racialism, religious oppression, and class contempts was lifted to embrace most of them. This enveloping racial social order was an ideological accommodation for ignoring or obfuscating the real origins and the more authentic categories of the developing white working class. If they were poor, it was because they had been victims of massive thefts by states and ruling classes; if they were rude and unruly, it was a consequence of the wholesale violations to which they had been subject. Little of this was ideologically convenient when it was comprehended by that infinitesimally small colonial capitalist class that was to use them as laborers, as buffer settlements at the frontiers, or as instruments of discipline for the African populations. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 426

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This anticipates Robinson’s later argument in the book that racialism preceded and justified capitalism’s class exploitation — a core thread of the Black radical tradition’s critique.
• DEFINE: Robinson here reframes ‘race’ as a functional ideological device that conceals class violence and divides potential solidarity — key to defining the tradition’s enemy.

Related

• White racial solidarity was an ideology masking the origins of the white working class (similarity 0.94)
• The Irish were the prototype white servants later absorbed into a white racial identity (similarity 0.84)
• English racialism predated and shaped the proletarianization of the Irish (similarity 0.83)
• English racial ideology predated proletarianization rather than being invented to divide workers. (similarity 0.82)
• Capitalist proletarianization reproduced internal divisions rather than unifying the working class (similarity 0.82)
• Racism and mobility myths prevented white workers from revolutionary consciousness (similarity 0.81)
• Employers justified Irish wage depression through racialized notions of Irish inferiority. (similarity 0.81)
• Capitalism and racism evolved organically from feudalism rather than negating it (similarity 0.80)
• Racial ideology functions as a labor discipline for capital (similarity 0.80)
• Racialism infected even radical intelligentsias who then denied its influence (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalism emerged from feudalism, not as its negation (similarity 0.80)
• Racism supplied non-Black workers a fictive status in place of material well-being. (similarity 0.80)
• American workers’ identities responded as much to race as to class (similarity 0.80)
• Reconstruction-era racism was deliberately engineered by the weakened southern ruling class (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalism integrated Blacks into production while shielding them from bourgeois ideology (similarity 0.80)