Sully

There was no such thing as white people in the 1600s. Europeans didn’t call themselves white. They called themselves English, Irish, German, Italian. And they hated each other. The English despised the Irish. Northern Italians didn’t even recognize southern Italians as equals. Germans fought everybody. There was no “white team.” No shared identity. Just Europeans killing Europeans over land, religion, and power. That’s the actual history of Europe. Then suddenly, mid-1600s in the American colonies, something changed. “White” was invented. Why? Because the colonial elite the rich landowners could count. They looked around and realized they were outnumbered. Badly. African slaves, European indentured servants, poor peasants who had no land and no future. Together, they were a threat. So the rich did what they’ve always done: they divided them. They created “whiteness” as a concept and gave poor Europeans just enough legal protections, small privileges, the promise that they’d never be at the bottom to make sure they’d never unite with enslaved Africans. It worked. Poor whites started policing Black people instead of fighting the system exploiting them both. And that’s the con. The whole history of America is rich white men convincing poor white people that their enemies are Black and Brown not the system keeping them all broke.