Sherry Chandler

A bargain with the devil, from Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream:

Once upon a time, down South, Mr. Rich White made a bargain with Mr. Poor White. He studied about it a long time before he made it, for it had to be a bargain Mr. Poor White would want to keep forever. It’s not easy to make a bargain another man will want to keep forever, and Mr. Rich White knew this. So he looked around for something to put in it that Mr. Poor White would never want to take out.

He looked around . . . and his eyes fell on the Negro. I’ve got it, he whispered.

He called in Mr. Poor White and said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about you and me lately—how hard it is for us to make a living down here with no money and the rest of the country against us. To keep my farm and mill going the way I want them to go, making big profit off of little capital, I have to keep wages low, you can see that. It’s the only way I can make as much as I want to make as quickly as I want to make it. And folks coming in from the North have to keep wages low too, for that’s our southern tradition.

“It’s a good way for us rich folks and it’s not bad you either, for you’re smart enough to see that any job’s better than no job at all. And you know too that whatever’s wrong with the South isn’t my fault or your fault but is bound to be the Yankee’s fault or the fault of those freight rates. . . .

“For instance, the nigger. You don’t need me to tell you that ever since the damyankee freed him the nigger’s been scrouging you, pushing you off your land, out your job, jostling you on the sidewalks, all time biggity. If he hadn’t been freed, he’d never bothered you, I could have kept him on the farm and bossed him like I bossed him for 200 years. But the damyankees always know better, don’t they! Here I am busy at my mill with no time to boss him, and here he is pushing, causing lot of trouble. Thing I can’t forget is your skin’s the color of my skin and we’re both made in God’s image; we’re white men and white men can’t let a nigger push ‘em.

“There’re two jobs down here that need doing: Somebody’s got to tend to the living, and somebody’s go tend to the nigger. Now, I’ve learned a few things at making a living you’re too no-count to learn (else you’d be making money same way I make it): things about jobs and credit, prices, hours, wages, votes, and so on. But one thing you can learn easy, any white man can, is how to handle the black man. Suppose now you over the thing you can do and let me take over the thing I can do. You boss the nigger, and I’ll boss the money. How about it?”

See also Joshua Zeitz, What Did Martin Luther King Really Believe?

Critically, he envisioned these broad-based, public-sector compensatory programs as targeting both African-Americans and poor whites, whom he labeled the “derivative victims” of slavery and Jim Crow. In this regard he leaned on the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, who famously observed that poor and working-class whites gained nothing from Jim Crow but the psychological “wages of whiteness.” In return for the psychological boost that “whiteness” gave them, poor whites—millions of them, from slavery times through the modern age—surrendered political and economic power to their elite counterparts. King might well have been thinking of the radical white writer Lillian Smith’s 1943 parable, “Two Men and a Bargain,” in which “Once a time, down South, Mr.

Rich White made a bargain with Mr. Poor White. . . . You boss the nigger, and I’ll boss the money.” According to Smith, they “segregated southern money from Mr. Poor White and they . . . segregated the Negro from everything.”

Smith’s reasoning—and King’s—was well-founded. Jim Crow divided white and black labor against each other, stunting the growth of unions, labor parties, and liberal political coalitions. Jim Crow thus drove down wages across the board and secured a political system (chiefly in the American South) where taxes were regressive, public services were minimal, and political participation was sharply limited. Remember that on the eve of World War II, poll taxes in eight Southern states disenfranchised as many as 64 percent of white citizens and virtually all eligible black voters. It’s hard to say what most working-class whites got from Jim Crow other than the satisfaction that they weren’t black.

As the 1960s wore on, King came to view social problems more through the lens of class and less through the lens of race.

And also Paul Krugman, Bubba Isn’t Who You Think:

In fact, if you look at voting behavior, low-income whites in the South are not very different from low-income whites in the rest of the country. You can see this both in Larry Bartels’s “What’s the matter with What’s the Matter With Kansas?” (pdf), Figure 3, and in a comprehensive study of red state-blue state differences by Gelman et al (pdf). It’s relatively high-income Southern whites who are very, very Republican. Can I get away with saying that rich white trash are the problem? Probably not.

If I had to hazard a guess, strictly my own opinion, about why we’re seeing what looks like a racial split in the current Democratic primary, I would say that it isn’t so much about racism on the part of the “lunch-bucket” whites but about economics issues. When African Americans look at Barack Obama, they see the first black President of the United States of America and they are rightly very excited about that prospect. When working-class white people look at Hillary Clinton, they see some one who will help them with pocketbook issues, issues that are very important right now.

By 1903, 40,000 poor whites had been disenfranchised in Alabama. By 1941, about 600,000 whites and 500,000 African Americans had lost the right to vote, mostly as a result of poll taxes. The choice of the name “Redeemers” was a cynical ploy to conflate religiosity with racism and exploitation. The disenfranchising of poor whites was deliberate as was the move to alienate whites from blacks. If you could convince a man that his white skin made him better than his brown neighbor, then you could control that white man. It isn’t race, it’s class. We still haven’t figured that out.