They had accepted the rough uncertainties of laboring class life in exchange for the caste system’s guarantee that, no matter what befell them, they would never be on the very bottom. The American caste system, which co-opted this class of white workers nearly from the start, “drove such a wedge between black and white workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests” who are “kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interests,” Du Bois wrote.
