Reconstruction-era racism was deliberately engineered by the weakened southern ruling class

Evidence

But it was not merely a matter of the antagonisms of the poor whites against the Blacks being revitalized by the prominence assumed by the latter during the Reconstruction. The “deep economic foundation” for these antagonisms was in fact being challenged by proposals to radically alter land tenure put forward by Black legislators. Rather, it was the remnants of the southern ruling class that focused the attention of poor whites on to the Black workers. The ruling class had been so weakened by the war that for the first time it was forced to aggressively recruit poor whites as its allies. “The masters feared their former slaves… . They lied about the Negroes… . They forestalled the danger of a united Southern labor movement by appealing to the fear and hate of white labor… . They encouraged them to ridicule Negroes and beat them, kill and burn their bodies. The planters even gave the poor whites their daughters in marriage” (p. 633). — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1087

Categorization

• XREF: This echoes the Frankfurt School material on how ruling classes manufacture inter-class antagonism to forestall united labor movements. — connects to: Southern Democrats entrenched power by disfranchising blacks and poor whites — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 210; Economic and political self-interest jointly drove Southern anti-union law — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 227
• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the common grief of racial animus about Reconstruction poverty: locates white supremacy as a deliberate ruling-class strategy, not spontaneous working-class prejudice.