Poor and working-class White Americans were taught that if they expressed solidarity with Black people, also exploited, also laboring hard, they’d lose what Du Bois termed “the wages of whiteness,” those benefits that went along with not being at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It is well established that poor and working-class White people have hoped to gain something from Whiteness—and yet also have a complaint with the way it excludes them from all the status it promised.
