Racial ideology obscured America’s class divisions with a myth of unity.

Evidence

However, in the lower orders, where the mist was thickest and where received wisdom has taught us to expect Blackness, the contemporary spectrum was more complex: the natives of the New World obtained a savage red, European labor a mottled gray. Above their heads it was a simpler matter: the ruling classes stood in dramatic, white relief. But between ourselves and the specter of that American past are the historical and racial fables that obscure the related exploitations and oppressions of African, European, Asian, and Amerindian peoples during the intervening 200 years. As a means of obliterating these events, the myth of white solidarity arose and came to dominate American sensibility. It was for the most part a lie but a terribly seductive one. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 427 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Racism as ideology, not production relations, blocked US class consciousness.; American racism fused Black people into one mass preventing internal class divisions; Race fractures the working classes internally in ways class alone cannot explain (+4 more)

Related

• American racism fused Black people into one mass preventing internal class divisions (similarity 0.88)
• Racial ideology in America concealed class divisions among whites (similarity 0.87)
• White solidarity as a racial identity was a myth obscuring shared exploitations (similarity 0.86)
• Racism as ideology, not production relations, blocked US class consciousness. (similarity 0.85)
• Race prejudice, not class differentiation, united American Negroes economically (similarity 0.82)
• Race fractures the working classes internally in ways class alone cannot explain (similarity 0.82)
• Racist ideology, not production relations, blocked American class solidarity. (similarity 0.81)
• Economic forces, not race, united America’s ruling classes against Reconstruction. (similarity 0.81)
• White Trinidadian elites misread cross-racial solidarity emerging beneath their rule (similarity 0.81)
• American workers’ identities responded as much to race as to class (similarity 0.80)
• Early American Communists dismissed Black racial consciousness as ideological backwardness (similarity 0.80)
• Racial difference can be constructed as antagonism within a single exploited class (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalism triumphed by cultivating divisions rather than erasing them within the working class (similarity 0.79)
• Racial ideology functions as a labor discipline for capital (similarity 0.79)
• Black proletarians developed a psychic identity independent of bourgeois ideology. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Racism as ideology, not production relations, blocked US class consciousness. #corroborates (0.90)
• American racism fused Black people into one mass preventing internal class divisions #expands (0.75)
• White solidarity as a racial identity was a myth obscuring shared exploitations #corroborates (0.70) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 427
• Wright doubted whether class consciousness could supersede racism as ideology. #corroborates (0.60)
• Race fractures the working classes internally in ways class alone cannot explain #complicates (0.50)