Whether Douglass admitted it or not, some—perhaps most—Blacks did look down on poor Whites. They denigrated the Whites who did not enslave them as “White trash.” Actually, some uncorroborated reports suggest that enslaved Blacks created that term. Blacks had seen poor Whites doing the master’s dirty work, as overseers, or on slave patrols, while clinging to the stinking fallacy that the lowest of them was still better than the highest Black person. And if poor Whites were “White trash,” then what were elite Whites? Black consumers of racist ideas had come to associate Whiteness with wealth and
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