The white working class has consistently prioritized racial power over economic gains, a pattern rooted in the psychological wages of whiteness that date back to Reconstruction. Despite assumptions that economic anxiety drives their political choices, history reveals they repeatedly align with white elites to maintain dominance over other racial groups, even at their own material expense.
Du Bois and the psychological wages of whiteness
Sociologist and historian WEB Du Bois coined the term "psychological wages of whiteness" in his 1935 work Black Reconstruction. He argued that poor whites were compensated not economically but socially and politically through participation in Black subjugation. This trade-off allowed white elites to maintain control over capitalism by manipulating white masses against cross-racial class alliances.
Du Bois observed that after the Civil War, white elites weaponized racial resentment to thwart class solidarity among millions of indigent whites and newly freed African Americans. The country's industrialism depended on cotton, which remained profitable only through gross exploitation of Black labor. Slavery devalued white wages, yet poor whites sided with slaveholders rather than abolitionists because they received psychological wages: universal control over Black life by virtue of whiteness alone.
Andrew Johnson's betrayal of poor whites
President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln, exemplified this dynamic. Despite boasting of his own destitute origins, Johnson was more loyal to white supremacy than to the common white man. He revoked promises of land grants and federal protections for Black freedmen, returning confiscated plantations to former owners and poor whites he called "free, industrious and honest farmers."
Johnson used the Homestead Act to deed 160 acres of Indigenous lands to white settlers, winning support from poor whites. However, he never addressed the root of postwar poverty: a broken pension system that left millions of disabled veterans and war widows insolvent. His policies focused on racial politics rather than economic relief, reinstating former Confederates to maintain Black subjugation.
Police state as racial currency
The psychological wages of whiteness were actuated through participation in the nascent police state. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, any white person could demand free Black people produce manumission papers or slave passes. This system offered personal and financial rewards for reporting fugitives and curtailed Black resistance and migration.
As historian Gautham Rao explains in White Power: Policing American Slavery, "It was a system in which white power and police power were one and the same." White patrolling persisted after emancipation, with European immigrants enforcing the police state to gain full social citizenship. Mob massacres, where law enforcement and white vigilantes cooperated, destroyed Black business districts, schools, and civic organizations.
Modern parallels with Trump voters
Contemporary politics mirrors these historical patterns. Non-college-educated white voters have overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump, despite his failure to improve their economic conditions. Polls show his approval rating among this group dipped below 50% in 2026, down 14 points in 15 months. Yet researchers found it was social, demographic, and cultural status threat, not economic hardship, that fueled Trump's rise.
Trump's base ardently supported a $70bn increase in federal funds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). As of June 2026, 50 people have died in ICE custody, most with no criminal record. Detainments often result from anonymous tips by citizens surveilling people of color. Business owners exploit undocumented employees by cutting pay and hours, cashing in on psychological wages.
Economic irrationality of racial loyalty
White non-college-educated households possess more than 20 times the wealth of low-income Black households, a gap that widened after pandemic bailouts. Despite this, white voters oppose policies that include aid to people of color, even when they primarily benefit whites. The term "pork barrel policy" originated from salted pork distributed to enslaved people, souring white opinion on universal aid.
During the 1960s, the Democratic party lost white racists, not white workers. The 1970 "hard hat riot" saw construction workers attack anti-war protesters, realigning blue-collar whites into a vertical racial alliance with suburbanites under Nixon's "silent majority." This coalition paid white wages through crackdowns on Black political organizing and expansion of the carceral state.
Conclusion: Racial power over economic gains
Frederick Douglass warned that northern liberals prioritized reconciliation across white classes over Black rights. Today, coastal elites ask what Democrats should do to satisfy working-class MAGA voters, ignoring what they gained: social and political currency of universal white dominance. No amount of economic stimulus will move those who choose control and violence over putting food on the table, when the point is keeping others from doing so.
