Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 7: The white supremacist narrative for poor and working class whites, then and now

Frank Hyman is a critic of neo-Confederate ideology old and new. And in this essay, he gives his description of how white racism was used before the Civil War and right down to today to keep not just African-Americans but white working people as well as poor and powerless as possible, The Confederacy was a con job on whites. And still is. McClatchy 03/06/2017.

"How did the plantation owners mislead so many Southern whites?" he asks. And gives this answer:

They managed this con job partly with a propaganda technique that will be familiar to modern Americans, but hasn’t received the coverage it deserves in our sesquicentennial celebrations. Starting in the 1840s wealthy Southerners supported more than 30 regional pro-slavery magazines, many pamphlets, newspapers and novels that falsely touted slave ownership as having benefits that would – in today’s lingo – trickle down to benefit non-slave owning whites and even blacks. The flip side of the coin of this old-is-new trickle-down propaganda is the mistaken notion that any gain by blacks in wages, schools or health care comes at the expense of the white working class.

Today’s version of this con job no longer supports slavery, but still works in the South and thrives in pro trickle-down think tanks, magazines, newspapers, talk radio and TV news shows such as the Cato Foundation, Reason magazine, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. These sources are underwritten by pro trickle-down one-per-centers like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch.

For example, a map of states that didn’t expand Medicaid – which would actually be a boon mostly to poor whites – resembles a map of the old Confederacy with a few other poor, rural states thrown in. Another indication that this divisive propaganda works on Southern whites came in 2012. Romney and Obama evenly split the white working class in the West, Midwest and Northeast. But in the South we went 2-1 for Romney.

Lowering the [Confederate battle] flag because of the harm done to blacks is the right thing to do. We also need to lower it because it symbolizes material harm the ideology of the Confederacy did to Southern whites that lasts even to this day. [my emphasis]

This message directed mainly to white workers to not be conned by billionaires and corporate lobbyists and their propagandists is an important one. It is not a substitute for understanding how white racism affects its main targets, obviously very much including African-Americans.

But it is very much a part of that story. Because you can't have racism without racists.