In his magisterial work Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois cogently demonstrates that poor and working-class whites were distracted from their own alienation and class exploitation by the psychological “wages” of whiteness.20 More recently, critical race philosopher Shannon Sullivan has argued that middle-class whites bolster their sense of moral goodness by defining themselves as “good white people”—in contrast to “racist” rednecks, whom they regard as “poor white trash.”
