In the 1890s, Black and white farmers across the South built political coalitions that threatened the planter class. Tom Watson, a white Georgia Populist, campaigned on shared economic interests across racial lines. Black and white workers struck together in the 1892 New Orleans general strike. Biracial Reconstruction legislatures had built public schools and infrastructure across the former Confederacy.
Every one of these coalitions was deliberately destroyed—not because solidarity failed, but because it worked. The racial divide Americans take for granted isn't natural. It was manufactured, repeatedly, by economic and political elites who couldn't afford to let Black and white working people discover how much they had in common.
Cross-racial solidarity has emerged repeatedly in American history. In 1676, Bacon's Rebellion united Black and white indentured servants against Virginia's planter class. The response wasn't reform—it was the invention of racial hierarchy. Virginia codified racial slavery, creating "whiteness" as a legal category specifically to prevent future solidarity.
Two centuries later, the pattern repeated. Reconstruction's biracial governments were building functioning democracies across the South. The Populist movement of the 1890s brought Black and white farmers together around shared economic grievances. The Colored Farmers' Alliance and white Populists coordinated across racial lines.
Every time cross-racial economic solidarity emerged in American history, elites responded with manufactured racial division—not because the division was natural, but because solidarity threatened their position. The playbook hasn't changed in 350 years.
Each coalition was crushed by the same sequence: manufacture racial fear, pass laws that separate, use violence to enforce. The Wilmington Coup of 1898—the only successful coup d'état in US history—overthrew a biracial Fusionist government and rewrote North Carolina's constitution. Between 1890 and 1920, every Southern state did the same. Explore the full history →
The destruction wasn't just political. It was economic architecture.
Thriving Black communities were burned—Tulsa in 1921, Rosewood in 1923, and dozens of others. Convict leasing recreated slavery through the 13th Amendment's exception clause. W.E.B. Du Bois identified the mechanism: the "wages of whiteness"—white workers accepted lower material conditions in exchange for psychological superiority over Black workers. The original wedge bargain.
Then the New Deal locked the divide into federal policy. To pass his legislation, FDR cut deals with Southern Democrats that excluded domestic and agricultural workers—the majority of Black workers—from Social Security, minimum wage, and labor protections. The Wagner Act gave workers the right to organize but allowed unions to exclude Black members.
Of the first 67,000 GI Bill mortgages in New York and northern New Jersey, fewer than 100 went to non-white borrowers. The program that built the white middle class was administered to exclude Black veterans. The wealth gap wasn't an accident—it was drawn on a map.
The Home Owners' Loan Corporation literally color-coded neighborhoods. Banks, backed by federal policy, refused loans in Black areas. White veterans built suburbs. Black veterans were locked out. Today's 10-to-1 racial wealth gap—white households holding $1.15 million more than Black households—traces directly to these decisions. How the New Deal built the wealth gap →
When the Civil Rights Act passed, the Republican Party made a deliberate choice to weaponize racial resentment.
Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips said it plainly: the more Black voters register as Democrats, the sooner white Southerners become Republicans. Lee Atwater explained the evolution in his 1981 interview: from the n-word to "states' rights" to "forced busing" to "cutting taxes"—each step more abstract, but the racial targeting unchanged. Reagan's "welfare queen" phrase—based on a single case of fraud—racialized the entire social safety net.
The machinery kept evolving. Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman later admitted the War on Drugs was designed to disrupt Black communities. The 100:1 crack-versus-powder sentencing disparity targeted Black users of the same drug. North Carolina's 2013 voter ID law targeted Black voters with what a federal court called "almost surgical precision." Trump dropped the abstraction entirely—from birtherism to "shithole countries" to calling for the death penalty for the exonerated Central Park Five.
Criminal Justice: The US has 5% of the world's population and 25% of its prisoners. Black Americans are incarcerated at 5x the rate of white Americans. 1 in 3 Black boys born today will be incarcerated during their lifetime. For white boys: 1 in 17. From dog whistles to bullhorns →
Here's what the wedge strategists don't advertise: policies designed to harm Black Americans also devastate white working-class communities.
Jonathan Metzl's Dying of Whiteness showed that white Americans in high-racial-resentment counties have shorter lives, lower incomes, and worse health. Fourteen Republican-led states refused free Medicaid expansion, leaving 4.2 million people uninsured — most of them the white voters those politicians mobilized with racial grievance in the first place.
"Right to work" laws were born in the segregationist South. Vance Muse, who coined the term, was an open white supremacist who argued unions would lead to racial mixing. Today those laws suppress wages for all workers. After integration, Southern states gutted public education funding—and still rank last in outcomes, hurting white and Black students alike.
While voters argued about CRT and DEI, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act transferred $1.9 trillion primarily to corporations and the wealthy. Racial division provided the cover. The wedge isn't a culture war—it's a class war disguised as one. See who really pays →
The costs fall everywhere. Black women are 3x more likely to die in pregnancy. Black Americans carry more student loan debt, more medical debt, less emergency savings. White families are 4x more likely to receive an inheritance. At current rates, it will take 500 years to close the racial income gap—800 years for the wealth gap.
And those who suffer the injustice must also spend resources fighting it. Civil rights activists paid with violence, imprisonment, and death. Those maintaining the status quo paid nothing.
"Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts" – Harry Bosch (Michael Connelly)
Anti-DEI and "reverse racism" messaging works because it accepts a frame where some people's inclusion is up for discussion. The standard response—defending programs, citing statistics—keeps the debate on defensive terrain. Every specific debate is a trap.
The counter isn't policy defense. It's principle: Everybody counts or nobody counts.
The Republican strategy isn't about DEI—it's about establishing that government decides which citizens deserve full participation. Accept that framework for any group, and you've handed them a tool that can be turned on anyone. Today it's Black Americans. Tomorrow it's union workers, immigrants, anyone politically inconvenient.
The 130-year pattern proves it. Every time cross-racial solidarity threatens elite power—Populism, Reconstruction, the New Deal coalition, the Obama coalition—the response is the same: manufacture racial division, break the coalition, profit from the wreckage. The only thing that has ever broken the cycle is solidarity that refuses to be divided.
Universal principles win. You don't have to convince voters to care about a specific group—just to agree that government shouldn't pick who counts. Policies framed as universal consistently poll 15–20 points higher than the same policies framed as race-targeted—even among voters of color. Why universal principles win →
Everybody counts or nobody counts. The question is whether Americans will keep falling for a 130-year-old con—or finally decide they mean it.
Go deeper: Explore the full history in Race as a Wedge: How America's Racial Divide Was Manufactured on Quarex—from Bacon's Rebellion to the modern anti-DEI movement.