White workers cemented segregation to protect their labor advantages

Evidence

Racial segregation thus was a fact of South African mineral production almost from inception, establishing the segregative foundations of industrialization more broadly. The industrializing underpinnings of formalized segregation in South Africa and the United States in this sense more or less mirrored each other. Prompted by the interaction between demand for labor discipline and the prevailing conceptions circulating in European racial science of the day, these segregative conditions were cemented in place over time by white workers seeking to guarantee their advantages. Everything was indeed quickly being turned into race. Race now overwhelmingly was providing the prism, the shorthand for social reference, the default disposition. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1459

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the threatened-privilege mechanism test: white skilled workers mobilizing to guarantee advantages because of anticipated status threat from expanded labor pools — the core hypothesis at issue. — connects to: Newly assimilated ethnic Whites enforced segregation to protect their fresh racial privilege — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 418; Economic protection for white workers was justified as necessary racial policy — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2354; Racial consciousness supplied fictive status to white workers while excluding Blacks (+13 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that white workers, not only capitalists or racial ideologues, were the cement of segregation generalizes privileged-group defensive mobilization beyond the state itself, a dense mechanism with clear parallels to gendered and nativity-based analogs.

Broader Connections

• Newly assimilated ethnic Whites enforced segregation to protect their fresh racial privilege #corroborates (0.92) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 418
• White labor ratified the color caste that subordinates global majority labor. #corroborates (0.87)
• Economic protection for white workers was justified as necessary racial policy #expands (0.85) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2354
• White labor’s approval of color caste subordinated colored labor to white profits worldwide #corroborates (0.85) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 950
• The American labor movement defined itself around whiteness as a bulwark against wage slavery #expands (0.85) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 585
• Racial consciousness supplied fictive status to white workers while excluding Blacks #corroborates (0.84)
• White unions’ Jim-Crow exclusion blocked interracial labor unity in the 1870s #exemplifies (0.82)
• Racial segregation operates as rent-seeking that impoverishes black workers #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 401
• White workers chose poverty over interracial parity, fracturing a unified labor movement. #qualifies (0.80) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 589
• Racial ideology developed to obscure the true class origins of white laborers #expands (0.80)
• De jure segregation served to unite white populations facing internal conflict #expands (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1751
• Great Depression labor scarcity made white workers demand Black exclusion from jobs #exemplifies (0.78) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 858
• Occupational segregation creates white jobs and black jobs that tax policy treats unequally #expands (0.75) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 353