[laomai]

I’ve heard it said on some podcast that race cropped up as an intentional structure to obfuscate class distinctions:

- post slavery, many formerly enslaved people had better skills than poor white people

- to prevent poor white people from joining forces with these formerly enslaved people as a large class of “the poor” vs. small class of “the wealthy” racial distinctions began to be used more frequently

- this had the effect of basically allowing the “poor white man” to side with “wealthy whites” (regardless of if something was in their best interests or not) because he could console himself with “I may be poor but at least I’m white” — even though the rich whites often advanced laws and regulations that were generally detrimental to the poor as a “class group”.

Is there any hard data on this or is it just heresay/opinion?