White landowners equated landlessness with losing their Whiteness and freedom.

Evidence

When legions of small White landowners lost their land, too, they felt as if they were losing their Whiteness and freedom. Whites “must have small plots of land,” one planter complained, “and prefer tending them, poor as may be the return, to lowering themselves, as they think it, by hiring to another.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 677

Categorization

• XREF: Precisely Kendi’s inversion — status anxieties drive racial self-positioning. Ties to contemporary Whiteness studies (DiAngelo, etc.) where Whiteness is a property stake. — connects to: Southern white families’ land claims were founded on Native American removal — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 23; Dispossessed white farmers fought land reform through courts, concessions, alliances, and memoirs — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 10