You can't have capitalism without racism

Racism is not a personal problem as they would have us believe. How many times do we hear that we are born with racist ideas? This ideological viewpoint is the ideology of the ruling class. It is obviously advantageous to the capitalist class to perpetuate this view. But they develop and propagate these and divisive ideas. Racism,religious sectarianism are tactics aimed at dividing the working class; we are not born racists, it has to be learned.

Ideas have a material base. It was not the peasant whose surplus Labor gave the king his wealth that dreamed up the idea of "Divine right", that the king was god's emissary on earth.
Injecting divisive racist ideas in to society makes perfect sense if you are the 10% that gets rich by stealing from the other 90% as they are always thinking of ways to get even.

Racist ideology and the idea of white supremacy really began to take hold with the advent of capitalism and imperialism in particular. Indentured servants, commoners and slaves ran away together in the East Indies so they passed legislation making the indentured servant responsible for the slave.

The Untied Irishmen was comprised of both Catholic and Protestants, in fact, many Protestants led it. I was just checking out William Cobbett in Wikipedia as he was a bit of a character who lived during the revolutionary 1790's 1800's. Cobbett pointed out that in the colonies of Virginia and the Carolina's "free negroes" were being admitted in to the United Irishmen who had brought their ideas of struggle with them to the Amercias after being driven out by the British after the defeat of the rebellion in 1798.

There were examples of poor white indentured servants who rioted calling for the kiling of the whites. They meant their opressors, the rich, of course but this is how we express ourselves sometimes. The point is that history is more about class division, division between the rich and the poor while race and religion were not so much an issue. The capitalist class that was threatened by the unity of those they exploited made an issue out of race and white supremecy in order to divide their enemies. "You can't have capitalism without racism" said Malcolm X. He was right.