Racism was invented to justify economic exploitation, not the reverse

Evidence

We sometimes forget—and I would argue it is an intentional forgetting—that the racism we are fighting today was originally conjured to justify working unfree Black people, often until death, to generate extravagant riches for European colonial powers, the white planter class, and all the ancillary white people, from Midwestern farmers to bankers to sailors to textile workers, who earned their living and built their wealth from that free Black labor and the products that labor produced. … To borrow a phrase from Ta-Nehisi Coates, racism is the child of economic profiteering, not the father. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1333

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates the causal core of the reframing: economic exploitation precedes and generates racism — ‘the child, not the father’ sets up the deviation-vs-design distinction.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s case-study task distinguishing reframing thesis from contested empirical claims; echoes Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me’ framing. — connects to: Social capital was invented to explain racial advantage beyond wealth. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 2382; Atlanta’s image of racial moderation was elite economic calculation, not conviction — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 101
• STORYSTEM: The ‘intentional forgetting’ idea — how origin stories actively suppress the economic genealogy of racism — could seed a piece on how contemporary memory wars over slavery’s purpose are genuinely about economic accountability.