Racism gave white American workers a fictive status compensating their limited material well-being

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

• XREF: Echoes W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘psychological wage’ thesis and modern analyses of white racial status as a labor-control mechanism. — connects to: US slavery’s bipolar color caste recruited the lowest whites into policing status — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 361; Atlanta civil rights histories overlooked working-class and middle-class whites’ central role — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 629