In his seminal work on Reconstruction, historian W. E .B. Du Bois famously argued that whiteness served as a “public and psychological wage,” delivering to poor whites a valuable social status derived from their classification as “not-black.” “Whiteness” thereby provided “compensation” for citizens otherwise exploited by the organization of capitalism—while at the same time preventing working-class white Southerners from forming a common cause with working-class black populations in their shared suffering at the bottom of the social ladder.
