From the very beginning of the American project, race has been the primary tool for dividing the population against itself.
The colonies were founded on systems of exploitation — enslaved African labor, the dispossession of Indigenous nations, and the imported servitude of poor Europeans.
These groups had, in principle, every reason to unite against the planter and merchant classes who profited from their misery. But unity across color lines posed an existential threat to elite power, and so racial hierarchy was deliberately constructed to prevent it.
Nowhere is this logic clearer than in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, when enslaved Africans, indentured Europeans, and frontier laborers rose together against the Virginia elite. Terrified by this unprecedented class alliance, the planter class responded with a series of laws in the 1680s and 1690s that formalized racial hierarchy for the first time.
They created the legal category of “white,” granting poor Europeans privileges unavailable to Africans: access to land after servitude, the right to bear arms, the right to serve in the militia, legal protections against lifetime enslavement, and reduced penalties for certain crimes.
At the same time, Africans were locked into perpetual hereditary slavery, denied rights of assembly, marriage, and movement. These laws did not arise from ancient prejudice; they were engineered as counterinsurgency — a deliberate ploy to break cross-racial solidarity and secure the loyalty of the poor to the very class that exploited them.
The strategy worked. By offering marginal advantages and a sense of superiority to poor whites, the ruling classes built a firewall against class solidarity.
The invention of racial categories created an artificial wedge that redirected anger downward and sideways rather than upward.
This pattern has repeated endlessly in American history: after Reconstruction, when Black and white workers briefly organized together, elites reimposed segregation and terror to destroy that alliance. During the labor movements of the early twentieth century, appeals to racial purity and “Americanism” were used to fracture unions. And in the post–civil rights era, coded language about “welfare queens,” “law and order,” and “illegal aliens” continued to ensure that the working poor would blame one another instead of questioning a system designed to exploit them all.
The genius of this arrangement is its durability.
Race has functioned not only as a tool of exclusion but as an ideology of distraction — a means of ensuring that discussions of inequality never turn into discussions of class power.
The political establishment, conservative and liberal alike, has depended on that division. The right inflames racial resentment to win elections; the liberal center condemns the rhetoric but accepts the underlying economic order that depends on it.
In both cases, the result is the same: a population divided, disoriented, and unable to mount a unified challenge to concentrated wealth.
Breaking this pattern requires more than moral appeals. It demands building spaces where people can act together across lines of race, ZIP code, and political identity — tenant unions, labor unions, community assemblies, and multiracial coalitions capable of naming the real antagonists: concentrated wealth and the political class that serves it.
It means confronting racism not as an interpersonal failing but as a structure designed to prevent collective power. And it means grounding movements in shared material demands — housing, healthcare, wages, democratic control of workplaces and resources — that reveal how much the public has in common when the fog of division lifts.
Class solidarity has always been the ruling class’s greatest fear.
Turning that possibility into a lived political force — one that cannot be fragmented by appeals to race, fear, or manufactured grievance — is the unfinished work before us.
That starts with recognizing that “whiteness” was never a natural identity; it was engineered as a political technology — a way of teaching some of the exploited to identify with their oppressors rather than with their fellow workers.
Undoing that training begins with making the mechanism visible. When people understand how racial hierarchy was constructed, they can begin to see how it continues to operate — not as a reflection of human nature, but as a deliberate strategy to keep the many divided for the benefit of the few.
But recognition alone is insufficient. The counter-strategy must be just as intentional as the one it seeks to dismantle. That means building the kinds of relationships and shared experiences in which solidarity becomes tangible rather than theoretical — where people discover, often through struggle, that their security depends on one another, not on the myths of racial hierarchy. It also means investing in the cultural and educational work that reveals how division is manufactured, so people can recognize the pattern when it tries to reassert itself.
Ultimately, the task is to expand the public’s sense of what is possible. A divided population is easy to govern because it has been trained to believe that exploitation is inevitable. A population that can imagine itself acting collectively — across race, gender, language, and origin — becomes unpredictable to elites.
Building that imagination is not abstract work; it emerges through local victories, shared campaigns, and organizing within our workplaces and other spaces. People learn solidarity by practicing it.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, an online library dedicated to the movements creating a more free, regenerative, and democratic society.