Not just American, it was their key to a version of whiteness that was classed as respectable in a way that agricultural work was not. https://twitter.com/hbryant42/status/1298981406123597830

White share cropping has sort of being buried in the cultural memory (there is a reason we have so many shows about the frontier and homesteading) but the impact of generational white poverty in rural areas can still be seen in the descendants of people who were not landowners

Bootstrap myths & anti Blackness & xenophobia are peddled so hard in Jim Crow era media (and before but Hollywood did a lot of heavy lifting) to deflect the collective national conversation away from what was happening before the Dirty 30's & that kept happening through the 60's

We know that lynching motives were largely financial, but social excuses were given. What we don't necessarily know in public is that poor white people were actively being harmed by some of the same policies & labor movements in rural areas strove to point that out to them.

Coal mining, wildcatting, fishing, ag etc were like every other industry in that owners actually didn't care about working condition for anyone. But they would pay poor whites a few pennies more & pretend low wages were because of competition from BIPOC workers post slavery

This is why I push back against any argument that class is more important than race in conversations about oppression. Race impacts your class at birth because of generational poverty & access to the class ladder & is used to manipulate inter community dynamics.

....this is a chapter isn't it? Fine. To bed I go. But just remember white supremacy lies to white people too.