The bribe does not need to end poverty. It only needs to make poverty less humiliating, by giving the poor someone more vulnerable to look down on.
The Old Bargain: Race, Labor, and Wealth.
The history of the United States cannot be understood solely as a struggle between rich and poor. It must also be understood as the story of how race has been used to keep the poor from recognizing one another as possible allies.
The racial bribe is not always money. It is a social, legal, and psychological reward offered to one group so that it will identify with power, rather than identify with other exploited groups. It whispers a dangerous promise: you may not be rich, you may suffer too, but at least you are above someone else.
That whisper has protected wealth for centuries. Instead of directing anger upward — toward low wages, impossible rents, medical debt, corporate power, and political abandonment — people are taught to direct it sideways or downward: against African Americans, Indigenous peoples, Mexican workers, Asian migrants, Muslims, asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants, or whatever group is presented as a threat in that moment.
The result is a country where inequality grows, but the discontent that could become solidarity ends up turned into racial resentment.
The Old Bargain
W. E. B. Du Bois described this dynamic as the public and psychological wage of whiteness. Many poor white workers received little material wealth, but they received public status, legal advantages, and the emotional compensation of being treated as superior to Black people.[1] That wage did not make them rich. But it did help convince them that their interests lay closer to the white elite than to the Black workers who were also being exploited.
The racial bribe began early. In 1790, the first federal naturalization law limited citizenship to free white persons.[2] From the very beginning, legal belonging was tied to race. Some people could work, build, serve, and even die in the country without being fully accepted within it.
After slavery, the hierarchy did not disappear; it changed shape. During Reconstruction, poor white farmers and newly freed Black people shared real needs: land, wages, debt relief, education, safety, and political representation. But Jim Crow laws, segregation, racial terror, and voter suppression divided them. Poor whites were offered status, while landowners, industrialists, and political elites kept power.
The message was simple: do not unite as the poor; identify as white.
Labor, Migration, and Blame
The same strategy shaped immigration policy. Chinese workers were first used as cheap labor and then blamed as a threat to white workers. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first major federal law to restrict immigration by targeting a specific ethnic group of workers.[3] The powerful benefited twice: they exploited immigrant labor and then blamed immigrants for the insecurity that exploitation produced.
The pattern repeated throughout American history. Black workers were blamed for labor conflicts. Mexican and Filipino workers were blamed for low wages in agriculture. Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants were first treated as inferior and then absorbed into whiteness, often in exchange for distancing themselves from Black people and other non-white groups.
The bribe worked because it offered a conditional acceptance: you can rise, as long as you prove that you are not like them.
In the twentieth century, government policies deepened the racial wealth gap. White families had greater access to home-buying programs, suburban development, government-backed mortgages, and opportunities to build wealth after the Second World War. Many Black veterans, even after serving in the military, were excluded from the full benefits of the GI Bill through discrimination in education, housing, banking, and local administration.[4]
This was not accidental. Wealth in the United States has been built through laws, land, labor, exclusion, and inheritance. The racial bribe helped hide that truth. A worker who could barely make rent could be told that the problem was Black families, immigrants, or the poor who received public assistance. Meanwhile, the top of society accumulated more property, more influence, and more control over the economy.
The numbers show the result. Brookings reported that, in 2016, the typical white family had roughly ten times the wealth of the typical Black family.[5] In 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reported that the wealthiest 10 percent of households held 67.2 percent of total wealth, while the bottom 50 percent held just 2.5 percent.[6] The country is divided by race and by class, but race has been used to prevent class solidarity.
How Suffering Is Deflected
The racial bribe is powerful because it changes the emotional direction of suffering. When people are desperate, they look for an explanation. Instead of hearing: your wages are low because corporations weaken the power of workers, they hear: immigrants are taking your jobs. Instead of hearing: housing is unaffordable because profit has distorted the market, they hear: the poor are draining the system. Instead of hearing: your medical debt exists because health care became a business, they hear: someone else is getting benefits they do not deserve.
This is how resentment becomes politically useful. The person harmed by the system is invited to defend that same system, because they believe that someone below them is the real enemy.
Part One shows how the racial bribe turned differences of race and class into a tool of control. Part Two examines how that same logic operates today within immigrant communities, and what might happen when division stops working.
Selected Sources
[1] W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America; explicación del salario público y psicológico de la blancura.
[2] Ley de Naturalización de 1790, que limitó la naturalización a personas blancas libres; recursos de Immigration History / National Archives.
[3] Ley de Exclusión China de 1882; National Archives, Milestone Documents.
[4] Estudios históricos sobre la exclusión racial en la aplicación del GI Bill, vivienda, educación y crédito.
[5] Brookings Institution, Examining the Black-white wealth gap.
[6] Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, The State of U.S. Household Wealth, 23 de junio de 2025.
Ángel Rivas Téllez
Author and founder of Grito de Aztlán.
This article was written by Ángel Rivas as part of a journalistic investigation and is intended for informational purposes only, with editorial input from Rosalba Téllez. The content does not reflect the author's personal opinion and is based on the collection and verification of information of public interest.