Content Warning: Brief reference to sexual violence

There's a lot here. The theoretical end of it is that white supremacy is basically a con game wherein rich whites bamboozled poor whites into hating black people instead of uniting with them to work out some kind of class-based solidarity. This is intensely problematic for a lot of theoretical reasons that I just wrote about yesterday so I'm going to be lazy and link myself. (Follow-ups are a-ok; I just don't want to write the same paragraphs again less than 24 hours later. :) ) The very short version of it is that the argument assumes class identities and concerns are fundamentally more salient, real, and important and historical actors who do not pursue class-based activism are somehow dysfunctional. This is appealing to many people for many different reasons, including many serious anti-racists...but it's not very good history. The record is much muddier about what people consider most important.

I don't want to leave you with just theory, though. It can be important, but it's just as important to not project theory back onto a past that doesn't comply. Let's look at a few of the things Wise says, scooping out your quotes because I'm terrible at transcribing from audio.

He says in the early colonial period, black slaves did not make up the bulk of colonial labour. Instead, most farm work was done by indentured servants (mostly white, some black)

This is true for the Chesapeake and that is where American white supremacy usually gets its start. (English white supremacy is a bigger story. European white supremacy larger still.) As Wise notes, the transition of Virginia from a society where the main form of labor operated under white indentures to one of black slavery is a thing that plays out over the course of the seventeenth century. More specifically, historians tend to locate it in the century's later half. Following Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom, we also tend to point to Bacon's Rebellion as the critical point.

Morgan's work holds up very well, especially for something written in the Seventies, but he's more concerned with slavery -it's right there in the title- than white supremacy. The two are closely related in the history of the United States, but not identical. For the Bacondunnit argument to hold, there needs to not be a lot of white supremacy prior to his rebellion and a notable uptick after. It's desperately hard to find any era in American history where white supremacy isn't having a banner year, so we can stipulate to the back half for now. The question is what those poor whites thought of black people before it.

Our sources here are not great. There's plenty of evidence of interracial cooperation and even some intermarriage. But we also have evidence from well before Bacon's Rebellion that Englishmen have no great objection to exploiting Africans. They also don't mind exploiting Englishmen, but even before Jamestown we have records of them understanding Africans as different and at least distancing themselves mentally. You could do things to Africans that you would not do to a fellow Englishman, a fellow Christian, a fellow civilized person, or a fellow white. Just which of those variables is most salient is very hard to parse out because our sources frequently use two or more interchangeably and these are fuzzy categories in any era.

The fuzziness was something that enslaved Africans could be skillful in manipulating to gain more autonomy, even freedom, for themselves by adopting Christianity (at least for public consumption), Europeans manners of dress, etc. Sometimes it worked too. Anthony Johnson came to Virginia as Antonio. He may or may not have been enslaved himself -it's hard to say what was happening on the ground; de jure slavery is a later enactment but enslavers don't necessarily need the law to do it- but he got his freedom and claimed the rights of an Englishman by sponsoring the import of white indentured servants in exchange for grants of land. He even went to court to defend his property against white trespass and won. That property was the labor of a John Casor, who his neighbors had enticed away. Casor, like Johnson, was black. The court case there dates to the 1650s, well before Bacon's Rebellion.

Does that mean we have no white supremacy in Virginia yet? Or does it mean that Johnson and a few others are exceptional individuals who shouldn't be taken as representative? The answer is a muddle. We don't know what Johnson's day to day life was like or if he dealt with forms of discrimination which whites didn't suffer. We do know that when John Punch and two other indentured servants ran away, the court sentenced the two white dudes to extended terms and gave Punch life in the service of his owner. That's back in the 1640s. There's no indication that Punch did something singularly worse than his companions. The lone distinction between them is that he's black. Is that white supremacy? Few would argue otherwise and seeing it at this official level suggests it's been rolling around more generally, a supposition supported by looking at English attitudes toward Africans in the Caribbean and West Africa. This is where we have our first evidence of black people being seen as other and foil to white, Christian Englishmen.

But let's take it one step further. We tend to place white supremacy and slavery in Virginia, as we should. It's probably the earliest mainland British slave society. But it's not the first British North American colony to legalize slavery. Massachusetts has 'em beat there. A man named Samuel Maverick brought enslaved Africans to the Boston area. He also tried to -I'm sorry- increase his investment by ordering the one man he enslaved to rape the one of the two women he enslaved in 1638. We know because she objected loudly and came rushing to a neighbor for help. This is not something Maverick would likely have done with people he considered meaningfully his equals. We know this because Maverick's white house guest, Joseph Josselyn, wrote it down. He proceeded in the next paragraph to a funny anecdote about getting attacked by a wasp. Again not what we would expect of someone who believed black people their equals, but precisely as one might anticipate in a person who views them as markedly inferior.

None of this is to say that white elites don't use white supremacy as a tool for dominance, but it's pretty clear that they didn't create it whole cloth to keep Virginia tidy after Bacon's Rebellion. They spoke to intellectual trends already well-advanced in the Anglophone world. Nor should we assume, because we know race isn't real and consider it a bad deal, that poor whites at the time did so as well. They knew their material condition better than we ever will, and they took the deal. The only reasonable conclusion I can come to from that is that they consulted their interests just like everyone else and chose white supremacy as, bare minimum, more appealing than interracial cooperation. They may have chosen it with enthusiasm, specifically to avoid their being placed on par with people they already saw as profoundly degraded and inferior to themselves. I mean, if whiteness has real value (material or otherwise) then that's free capital you're being given. It clearly did, so why would whites refuse it?

Bottom line: It's reasonable to credit white elites with some of white supremacy, but there's no call at all for excusing poor whites from their own knowing participation. We should treat them as conscious, aware political actors just as we would the rich dudes, even if that makes us uncomfortable. For sickening irony, this Wise and others making the argument are doing antiracism in a way that requires us to treat poor whites with the same lack of agency that whites usually treat non-whites.