mysharona1987:

Like, you want janitors and McDonald fast food workers and cleaners.

You just don’t want them to make a liveable wage and have healthcare and be treated like proper human beings.  

Indeed. This has been a pervasive “norm” for a long while in America, and it all ties back to racism. If you’ll allow me to rant and ramble a bit, i think I can make it clear.

You see, even before the end of the Civil War, whites who were in extreme poverty were placid in it, because they were always socially superior to the enslaved blacks or the uprooted and murdered Native peoples. They had the potential freedom to move around and cast a vote, but not the financial freedom to do so, which of course is how they were pacified. They had no time to waste on higher ideas, always scraping by, controlled by their own egos and their sense of superiority to blacks. Rich whites could keep them in one place, working, their noses down, yet always ready to fight, if a cry of “lynch him” went up.

Then the war happened, and I think it’s no shock that poor whites turned out to keep slavery en masse. Of course they did. It was their self-esteem. It had nothing whatever to do with state’s rights, but with some man in the wealthier or “more educated” north telling them they weren’t allowed to feel superior. Southern land owners perpetuated the stereotypes of the “richer than us” “more educated than us” Yankee, who had no idea about a good days work. This lain side by side with the propaganda of “medical evidence” dehumanizing blacks, and the Northern “treason” of freeing slaves (or as the Southerners saw it “stealing property”) and I think you can see that poor whites were easily mobilized to fight what actually amounted to an economic war.

But now we’ve reached the time after the war, the Reconstruction, and this is where the mindset begins. Suddenly, the market was flooded by a newly created workforce, that of the freed slaves. Men could no longer enslave them by law, so what did they do? Well, it’s really quite simple. They used magnanimity and generosity to enslave. 

“What does that mean?” you ask me. 

It means that a mine owner or a construction company rebuilding the damaged country would offer a newly freed black man a job. But to do the job, he had to have skills and tools. The owner offers to teach the man skills and give him tools on loan. With interest. “I will hand you a livelihood, under the contractual obligation that you pay me back…or work until you have.” Often the first time a freed slave ever signed his name, it was too one of these companies.

These conditions meant, of course, no salary. That man was again, a slave. He was given his training, his tools, his food from the company store. He worked and worked, without safety regulations, until his debt was paid and only the company owner could say when that was. This was true of most industries and trades, and was the way that the racial superiority complex was codified into the structure of capitalism.

The Gilded Age, that of Western expansion – Freed slaves and their children had taken up the cause. They’d become activists, political movers, they fought for their rights. They fought to have the vote. All while western expansion and the stock exchange came up. Men were making billions off the mines in the west, and immigrants who were not citizens followed it. Rules of debt and indenture were being overturned, because the labor force was changing color. What do I mean? The lure of territory and wealth drew in thousands of white European immigrants, all of whom had training and skills they brought with them. White Europeans are not going to tolerate racism, nor be subjected to it. They became wise to the notion of “unionizing”. In the west, everyone was a wanderer, and so racial disparities between whites weren’t as important as they had previously been. The newly formed mines offered instantaneous wealth, and everyone was a gambler

But let’s not forget the racism. The Chinese built the most difficult portion of the transcontinental, that of the several hundred miles between San Francisco and Promontory, scaling the Sierras and pioneering how tunneling was done, but once their labor force was set free in the States…where did it go? For a while, it followed the railroad expansion, south in both California and Nevada, some in Utah, but when that work ended, they were left largely destitute. White men, white European immigrants who were fighting for their own jobs and right to strike it rich, rallied yet again, beneath the psychologically tantalizing banner of racism. They demanded that laws be passed forbidding Chinese or other minorities from mining. Mining was segregated into a white activity to protect the “skilled labor” of those European immigrants – German, Irish, Dutch, Polish, Scottish, and so forth.

So what do we now have? Freed slaves who take odd jobs, perform menial labor, run cattle, shine shoes. Chinese immigrants lured here by industry and then denied any sort of worthwhile work, who become cooks and launderers and bathhouse owners because their culture overlapped the American culture and found a niche. Natives who have been either killed off or uprooted to conveniently distant reservations, kept from all avenues of legal representation or education. And poor, white labor, uprooted from their cultures, trying to scrounge out a living by moving out into the prairies, doing whatever work they could get their hands on, offered by extremely rich men who have the same skin color as them, and who then underhandedly create laws to keep all these people in all these places.

Blacks segregated into slums and denied education. Chinese forbidden from occupations that use their engineering skills. Irish who are worked half to death and herded into the pen of racial intolerance so that they can be controlled.

All by men who are accumulating wealth even as they work out the rules for how to aggregate wealth. From the development of the stock exchange to Union busting, to monopolies, to government contracts negotiated before the government had regulations over how these things were done. Wealthy white men built a system that equated the lowest, most difficult jobs with “unsavory” sorts, meaning of course, they turned manual labor into a racial stockpiling. Once this was accomplished, the other, poorer white men were again kept from uprising in a legal system that benefited their whiteness and allowed them to vote. Poor whites were told all the time that immigrants or freed slaves or natives were going to steal their jobs. If that didn’t work, money was thrown at the problem. The late 1800′s saw billions of dollars in the hands of a few men, and they ran the country like a fiefdom, always using racial and economic talking points to rally those poor whites who were enfranchised. 

Look familiar?

Now we enter the World Wars and the economic and ideological upheaval they caused. Just like the Black Death, whole populations were wiped out, mass migration occurred, the military industrial complex was created, and the surveillance state was born. Rich white men in this country used to back the Nazis in the beginning. Then they silently stepped into the shadows when it was revealed what Germany had done. But racial hatred was still a rallying cry. The Japanese immigrants forced into internment camps weren’t returned their property. They were herded into pens to give rich white men the soldiers they needed to fight the war, and it was done on every news reel, done to pacify whites who were afraid and to assure the “real Americans” that something was being done. Those men and women returned to their homes to find them destroyed. But here’s the trouble when you have a large war, a good many of the soldiers die.

Those soldiers were poor to middle class white men. A vacuum was again created.

With fewer white men, the smaller group was more easily pacified with things like the cultural oppression of women, segregation, economic growth in their tax bracket. This turbulence and sudden population shift fed into the Civil Rights movement. People traditionally funneled into menial labor by racism begin fighting for equality, aided by displaced Europeans who came face to face with racial hatred in their own lands. The Civil Rights movement had television, it had mass media, it had white supporters, and it had a tinier uneducated white male population than had previously existed. it had everything it needed to make the issue of racial propaganda clear and precisely the right leaders to vocalize dissent.

But, to paraphrase Richard Pryer, white people “be fuckin’”. Baby boomers create hordes of tiny people and the economy shifts out of the post war boom and into the Cold War. Those who have learned how to stockpile wealth, take it back up again, and the increasingly complicated tax code assists. Reaganism was ingenious in its way, because it elevated those who had money to godlike status with their supposed powers to stimulate growth. All that trickle down economic poppycock did was ruin the economy and erase what little gain the middle class had gained. The New Deal and all the social welfare programs that had been used initially to benefit poor whites were now being vilified as propping up poor minorities. Economic downturns funnel more poor whites, often students and younger people, into those jobs that were once the legally mandated position of the racially segregated…

And voila. You have the culture that demeans manual labor even as it relies upon it, scrimps a penny with the worthless folk in order to buy one more latte. It is important to see this not just for a control mechanism now – that damages your self-esteem and teaches others to bully you. See it for what it actually is – an extension of a historically codified system of legal racism and capitalistic strong-arming. It is a form of thievery, but it is done with ideas and not with guns. It is rape and enslavement, that pits one group against another so that a stable work force can be achieved. 

Rich white men are racists. They gain from the system that is founded on it, structured to support it, and is constantly being refined to further propagate it. See it, not as one isolated decade amongst dozens, but as a cycle that has risen and fallen since the beginning of this country.

I apologize for going on for so long and for stating things with sweeping generalizations. Often this kind of “epic” discussion can only be brief if it is executed with generalization.