The most effective weapon ever deployed against American workers is not automation. It is not offshoring. It is not even the corporate capture of the political system, as devastating as that has been. The most effective weapon is the one that has been in continuous use since before the United States existed as a nation: the deliberate, strategic, relentless division of working people along racial lines.

This is not a chapter about racism as a moral failing. It is a chapter about racism as a business strategy. Because that is what it has always been in America — from the tobacco fields of colonial Virginia to the union-busting campaigns of the twenty-first century. Every time working people of different races have come close to recognizing their shared economic interests and acting on them together, the wealthy and powerful have intervened to tear them apart. Every single time. And it has worked. Every single time.

Until now. Because the thirty-trillion-dollar heist has gotten so brazen, so total, so thoroughly devastating to workers of every race, that the old trick is finally losing its power. The question is whether we are smart enough — and furious enough — to see through it before the oligarchy finds a new way to divide us.

The Original Sin: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Invention of Whiteness

In 1676, a century before the Declaration of Independence, something happened in Virginia that terrified the colonial elite so completely that they restructured the entire legal and social order of the colony to make sure it never happened again.

Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy white property owner, organized a militia of white and Black indentured servants and enslaved Black people to challenge the colonial governor over policies toward Native Americans. The specifics of the dispute matter less than what it revealed: poor white people and poor Black people, fighting side by side, had the power to burn the colonial capital to the ground. And they did. Jamestown was reduced to ashes.

The planter class was shaken to its core. As legal scholar Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow: “The events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of [indentured servants] and slaves. Word of Bacon’s Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed.”

The response was not military. It was strategic. Virginia’s lawmakers began to make legal distinctions between “white” and “Black” inhabitants for the first time. By permanently enslaving Virginians of African descent and giving poor white indentured servants and farmers new rights and elevated status, they separated the two groups and made it less likely that they would ever unite again.

Historian Ira Berlin explained what happened with devastating clarity: “They enact laws which say that people of African descent are hereditary slaves. And they increasingly give some power to independent white farmers and land holders. Now what is interesting about this is that we normally say that slavery and freedom are opposite things — that they are diametrically opposed. But what we see here in Virginia in the late 17th century, around Bacon’s Rebellion, is that freedom and slavery are created at the same moment.”

Read that again. Freedom and slavery were created at the same moment. Whiteness itself — as a legal and social category — was invented as a tool to prevent working people from uniting against their economic oppressors. The very concept of race as we understand it in America was born not from biology or nature but from a deliberate ruling-class strategy to divide and conquer.

This is the original template. And it has been running, with modifications and updates, for three hundred and fifty years.

The Template in Action: From Reconstruction to Jim Crow

After the Civil War, the template was deployed again with devastating effectiveness. During Reconstruction, Black and white workers in the South began building political alliances that threatened the planter aristocracy’s grip on power. The Populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s saw poor white farmers and poor Black farmers organizing together around shared economic interests — fair prices for crops, access to credit, regulation of the railroad monopolies that were bleeding them dry.

The response was Jim Crow.

The poll tax, the literacy test, the grandfather clause — these were not just tools of racial oppression. They were tools of class warfare. By stripping Black citizens of the right to vote, the Southern elite also eliminated the political partners that poor white farmers needed to build a governing majority. And to ensure poor whites would not object, they were given the psychological wage of whiteness — the assurance that no matter how poor, how exploited, how powerless they were, they were still better than the Black man down the road.

W. E. B. Du Bois identified this dynamic in his masterwork Black Reconstruction in America: “The wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor.” Both groups were exploited. Both groups were impoverished. But as long as they feared and resented each other more than they feared and resented the people actually stealing from them, the system held.

This is not ancient history. This is the operating manual that is still being used today.

The Battle of Blair Mountain and the Power of Solidarity

The template does not always work. There have been moments in American history when workers saw through the con and organized across racial lines with extraordinary power. One of the most instructive is the Battle of Blair Mountain.

In August 1921, in the coalfields of southern West Virginia, roughly 10,000 union miners — including approximately 2,000 Black miners — took up arms and marched against the coal companies that had turned their lives into a form of industrial feudalism. These miners were paid in company scrip that could only be spent at company stores. They lived in company-owned houses from which they could be evicted at will. Safety conditions were practically nonexistent. Unionists were beaten, harassed, and forced to sign “Yellow Dog” contracts pledging never to join a union.

The coal companies had tried every trick in the book to prevent solidarity. They recruited Black workers from out of state specifically to break white miners’ strikes, hoping to stoke racial tensions and undermine economic unity. But the conditions were so brutal, the exploitation so transparent, that the miners saw through it. Class solidarity became more powerful than the racial divisions their employers were trying to weaponize.

For five days, the armed miners fought a battle against an anti-union citizen army backed by the coal companies — the largest labor uprising in American history and one of the largest armed insurrections since the Civil War. It took federal troops and Army bombers to suppress it.

Blair Mountain proved something that the ruling class has spent the last century trying to make Americans forget: when workers of all races unite around their shared economic interests, they become an unstoppable force. The coal operators understood this. That is why they spent so much energy trying to prevent it. And that is why the corporate oligarchy of the twenty-first century continues to invest billions of dollars in strategies designed to keep Black workers and white workers, native-born workers and immigrant workers, from ever joining the same side again.

The Modern Playbook: How Corporate America Weaponizes Race

The methods have evolved since Bacon’s Rebellion. The template has not. Today, the division of workers along racial lines is accomplished through a sophisticated, multi-billion-dollar operation that works on several levels simultaneously.

The Political Level. The Southern Strategy, pioneered by Richard Nixon and perfected by every Republican campaign since, uses racial resentment to convince white working-class voters to support politicians who systematically dismantle the economic protections those same voters depend on. Cut taxes for the rich? White workers cheer because they’ve been told the money is going to “welfare queens.” Gut labor protections? White workers shrug because they’ve been told unions are corrupt institutions that give unfair advantages to minorities. Block healthcare reform? White workers oppose it because they’ve been told it’s a handout to people who don’t look like them.

The result: white working-class voters consistently vote against their own economic interests, empowering politicians who serve the corporate oligarchy while delivering nothing to the workers who elected them except the hollow satisfaction of knowing that someone else is suffering more.

The Media Level. The corporate media ecosystem — from Fox News to talk radio to the algorithmically optimized outrage machines of social media — generates a continuous stream of racial grievance content designed to keep working people angry at each other instead of angry at the people robbing them. Every story about immigration, about crime, about “woke” culture, about Critical Race Theory in schools — every one of these narratives serves the same function that the colonial Virginia legislature served in 1676: keeping poor white people focused on poor Black and brown people instead of on the billionaires and corporations that are actually causing their economic pain.

The Workplace Level. Union-busting consultants — a $340-million-a-year industry — routinely use racial division as a strategy to defeat organizing drives. As David Hecker, president of the American Federation of Teachers Michigan, warned: “Don’t fall for well-funded, divide-and-conquer tactics.” The playbook is textbook: in workplaces where Black and white employees are beginning to organize together, management introduces wedge issues, promotes racial resentment, and creates competing factions. The goal is not to address anyone’s grievances. The goal is to prevent solidarity.

The Policy Level. The U. S. Chamber of Commerce and its allies spend billions lobbying against policies that would disproportionately benefit workers of color — minimum wage increases, paid family leave, healthcare expansion, affordable housing — while framing their opposition in race-neutral language about “free markets” and “personal responsibility.” The policies they block would help all workers. But by associating these policies with racial minorities in the public imagination, they ensure that white working-class opposition does the Chamber’s work for free.

The Numbers: What Racial Division Actually Costs

The racial wage gap is not just a Black problem or a Latino problem. It is a measure of how successfully the corporate oligarchy has divided American workers against each other — and how much that division costs everyone.

As of the second quarter of 2025, the median white worker earned twenty-four percent more than the typical Black worker and approximately twenty-nine percent more than the median Latino worker, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Black Americans made up thirteen percent of the entire U. S. labor force but only 1.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. Meanwhile, Black workers represented nineteen percent of those who would benefit from a raise in the federal minimum wage — overrepresented in the lowest-paid jobs by a factor of nearly fifty percent.

The wealth gap is even more staggering. White households held 84.2 percent of all U. S. wealth as of the fourth quarter of 2023 while making up sixty-six percent of households. Black families accounted for 11.4 percent of households but owned just 3.4 percent of total family wealth. The median Black family had a net worth of $44,100 — just 15.5 percent of the $282,310 median white wealth. The typical Latino family owned $62,120, just 21.8 percent of the median white family’s wealth.

Twenty-eight percent of Black households and twenty-six percent of Latino households had zero or negative wealth — twice the level of white households. These are families with nothing. No safety net. No cushion. No margin for error.

In July 2025, Black unemployment stood at 7.2 percent, compared to 3.7 percent for white workers — nearly double. The federal government, which has long served as a key source of stable middle-class jobs for Black workers, is now under assault. The Department of Veterans Affairs alone, where Black workers represent more than a quarter of employees, is expected to face 80,000 job cuts.

Black women carry the heaviest burden at the intersection of race and gender. Forty-three percent of Black women who attended college are shouldering student loan debt, compared to just 15.7 percent of white men. The poverty rate for Black women is seventeen percent, compared to 6.8 percent for white men. Hispanic/Latina women earn just fifty cents for every dollar an Asian male earns and sixty-five cents for every dollar a white male earns.

These numbers are not natural outcomes of a free market. They are the designed results of a system that has systematically denied people of color access to wealth-building opportunities — through slavery, through Jim Crow, through redlining, through discriminatory lending, through mass incarceration, through the gutting of public education in communities of color — while simultaneously convincing white workers that their interests are opposed to the interests of the people suffering alongside them.

The Cost to White Workers

Here is the part that the corporate oligarchy never wants white workers to understand: racial division costs them too. Not as much as it costs Black and Latino workers. Not in the same ways. But the cost is real, and it is enormous.

Every policy that has been blocked because it was framed as a “handout” to minorities — universal healthcare, affordable childcare, a living minimum wage, paid family leave, free community college — would have helped white working-class families too. When white workers in West Virginia or Kentucky or Ohio oppose Medicaid expansion because they’ve been told it benefits “those people,” they are denying coverage to themselves. When white workers oppose union organizing because they’ve been told unions are vehicles for minority advancement, they are stripping away their own bargaining power.

The states with the lowest union density, the lowest minimum wages, the weakest labor protections, and the most hostile attitudes toward worker organizing are overwhelmingly in the South — the region where the divide-and-conquer template was invented and has been most aggressively applied for three and a half centuries. These are also the states with the highest rates of poverty, the worst health outcomes, the lowest life expectancy, and the greatest economic inequality — for white workers as well as Black and Latino workers.

This is not coincidence. This is causation. Racial division is the mechanism by which the corporate class suppresses wages, blocks worker protections, and prevents the formation of the political coalitions that could challenge its power. It works by making white workers believe they have more in common with white billionaires than with Black coworkers. It is the most successful con in American history.

The thirty trillion dollars stolen from American workers since 1973 was stolen from all workers. The wage-productivity gap does not discriminate. When corporations capture the gains from increased productivity and funnel them to shareholders and executives instead of the workers who generated them, they are stealing from everyone who works for a living — white, Black, Latino, Asian, Native American. Every one of them.

The Immigrant Worker Con

The template extends beyond Black and white. Today, the most actively weaponized version of the divide-and-conquer strategy targets immigrant workers.

The narrative is simple, familiar, and effective: immigrants are stealing American jobs, depressing American wages, and threatening American culture. It is the same narrative that was used against Irish immigrants in the 1840s, Chinese immigrants in the 1870s, Italian and Jewish immigrants in the 1900s, and Mexican immigrants throughout the twentieth century. It has never been true. And it has always worked.

As the Re Imagine Appalachia analysis noted: “Corporations, not immigrants, are to blame for slowing wage growth, declining living standards, and the lack of employment opportunities for the vast majority of Americans.” The jobs that disappeared from American communities did not walk across a border. They were shipped overseas by corporations seeking cheaper labor. They were automated by corporations seeking to eliminate labor costs entirely. They were degraded by corporate strategies that expanded subcontracting, pushed deregulation, and worked to eliminate labor unions.

But blaming immigrants is easier than blaming the CEO who closed the factory. Blaming immigrants is more emotionally satisfying than understanding supply chains and trade policy. And most importantly, blaming immigrants diverts attention from the corporate class that is actually responsible — which is exactly why the corporate class funds the think tanks, the media outlets, and the politicians who promote anti-immigrant narratives.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s observation about Black and white workers in the nineteenth century applies with perfect precision to native-born and immigrant workers in the twenty-first: “The wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor.” Substitute “immigrants” for “Negro labor” and “native-born workers” for “whites,” and you have the exact same dynamic operating today.

What Solidarity Actually Looks Like

The answer to racial division is not colorblindness. Pretending race doesn’t exist in a country built on racial hierarchy is not solidarity. It is denial. Real solidarity requires acknowledging that the system has inflicted different degrees of harm on different groups of workers while recognizing that all workers share a common enemy.

The miners at Blair Mountain understood this. They did not pretend race didn’t exist. They knew that Black miners faced discrimination that white miners did not. But they also knew that the coal companies were exploiting all of them, and that divided they would remain exploited while united they could fight back.

The US Majority is built on this same understanding. One hundred and seventy million American workers — of every race, every ethnicity, every background — share a common interest in wages that keep pace with productivity, in healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt them, in childcare they can afford, in a political system that answers to them instead of to corporate donors. These are not “white” interests or “Black” interests or “Latino” interests. They are worker interests. And they can only be achieved through worker solidarity.

The US Majority Amendment is the vehicle for that solidarity — because it dismantles the financial machinery that funds the division.

Every dollar of dark money that pays for a political ad designed to pit white workers against Black workers flows through a system protected by corporate personhood and money-as-speech. Every union-busting consultant who weaponizes racial resentment to defeat an organizing drive is funded by corporations exercising their judicially fabricated constitutional rights. Every think tank that produces research framing minimum wage increases as a “handout” to minorities operates as a tax-exempt entity under rules written by corporate lobbyists. The Amendment does not just change the law. It defunds the con. When corporations can no longer spend unlimited anonymous money on political campaigns, the infrastructure of racial division loses its primary revenue stream.

People Primaries is how it happens. Not by building a coalition of Democrats. Not by building a coalition of Republicans. By building a coalition of workers — the kind of coalition the Virginia planters dismantled in 1676, the kind the coal operators tried to prevent at Blair Mountain, the kind that every corporate strategist in America has spent their career making sure never forms again. A multiracial, multi-ethnic political force united around the shared economic interests of the 170 million — and backed by a constitutional amendment that cuts off the money that has kept them divided.

The Choice

The corporate oligarchy is betting that the old trick will work one more time. That white workers will continue to vote against their own interests because they’ve been told that Black and brown people are the problem. That Black workers will continue to distrust white-majority institutions because those institutions have betrayed them so many times before. That immigrant workers will remain too afraid and too marginalized to organize. That the 170 million will remain divided into fragments — each fragment too small, too isolated, too suspicious of the others to challenge the people who are robbing all of them.

They might be right. The template has worked for three hundred and fifty years. The infrastructure of division — the media, the politicians, the think tanks, the algorithms — has never been more sophisticated.

But the theft has also never been more brazen. Thirty trillion dollars. Stolen in broad daylight. From workers of every race. And the people who stole it are not even pretending anymore. They are laughing at you. They are laughing at all of us — white, Black, Latino, Asian — because they believe we are too stupid, too tribal, too addicted to hating each other to notice who is actually picking our pockets.

In 1676, Black and white servants burned Jamestown to the ground and the planters had to rewrite the laws of Virginia to keep it from happening again. In 1921, ten thousand miners — Black and white, shoulder to shoulder — marched on Blair Mountain and it took the United States Army to stop them. Every time working people have seen through the con and united across the color line, the powerful have had to deploy overwhelming force to put them down.

They are afraid of solidarity. They have always been afraid of solidarity. The entire three-hundred-and-fifty-year architecture of American racial division exists because the people at the top know — they have always known — that the moment workers of all races stop fighting each other and start fighting together, the game is over.

Make them afraid again.

Sources: Facing History & Ourselves, “Inventing Black and White: Bacon’s Rebellion”; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2012); W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935); Re Imagine Appalachia, “Racial Divisions Distract the Working Class from the Real Problem” (2021); Inequality. org, “Racial Economic Inequality” (2025); Bureau of Labor Statistics, Weekly Earnings Data Q2 2025; Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances 2023; Institute for Policy Studies, “Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide”; Economic Policy Institute, “Understanding Black-White Disparities in Labor Market Outcomes”; National Women’s Law Center, Poverty Among Women & Families 2023; David Hecker, Michigan Advance (2023); AFL-CIO/IRI Brief on Labor History (2021).