White racial solidarity was an ideology masking the origins of the white working class

Evidence

The Irish were, then, the prototype for the white servant. And as their own impressive numbers were increased, and the servant class augmented by immigrants from Germany and other refugees from the political upsets of European society and their socioeconomic aftershocks in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the vise of intra-European racialism, religious oppression, and class contempts was lifted to embrace most of them. This enveloping racial social order was an ideological accommodation for ignoring or obfuscating the real origins and the more authentic categories of the developing white working class. If they were poor, it was because they had been victims of massive thefts by states and ruling classes; if they were rude and unruly, it was a consequence of the wholesale violations to which they had been subject. Little of this was ideologically convenient when it was comprehended by that infinitesimally small colonial capitalist class that was to use them as laborers, as buffer settlements at the frontiers, or as instruments of discipline for the African populations. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 426

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader question of how racial categories were constructed for labor discipline in colonial capitalism. — connects to: Working-class achievement necessarily erases the origins it proves — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1100; Early unions operated as schools teaching Irish whiteness — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 412; Atlanta civil rights histories overlooked working-class and middle-class whites’ central role — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 629 (+1 more)