Spurring collective action across racial as well as generational lines is clearly a difficult political and societal task. As Isabel Wilkerson points out in her book Caste, in the United States, the manufactured idea of “white supremacy” was deliberately promoted after the American Civil War to pit working-class whites against Blacks. It was frequently deployed to undermine workers’ solidarity in labor disputes. The concept and the racial categories underlying it were false, but that did not prevent it from taking hold and poisoning American race relations for generations.
