The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States-and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as long. Like the black working class, the white working class originates in bondage-the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery, the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture. In their early seventeenth-century primordial state, these two classes were remarkably, though not totally, free of racist enmity. But by the eighteenth century the country's master class had begun etching race into law while phasing out indentured servitude in favor of a more enduring labor solution. From these and other changes of law and economy, a bargain emerged-the descendants of indenture would enjoy the full benefits of whiteness, the most definitional benefit being that they would never sink to the level of the slave.
( Ta-Nehisi Coates )
[ We Were Eight Years in Power: ]
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