Prison management involves use of both carrot and stick. The carrot is the “privileges” offered to the prisoner for obedient behavior. This encourages the inmate to view as a favor that which he should be receiving as a matter of right, to reduce him to dependence on the jailer’s good will, to a slavish mentality. The system of privileges is also a means of playing prisoners against one another.
There are those within Left and Black nationalist circles who subscribe to the theory of “white skin privilege,” that is, that the vast majority of whites, including the vast majority of white workers and the white poor, have a stake in the system of white supremacy. This idea is supposed to be militantly anti-racist. But just as the prison trusty is privileged and yet remains a prisoner, so many European-Americans can be considered as trustees outside the walls. It is true that to a greater or lesser degree the majority of white working people believe it is in their interest to uphold and support institutional racism. But the reality is that white working people are themselves exploited and powerless victims of the same oppressive system. The “privilege” they enjoy is that of not being as exploited and oppressed as African-Americans. The chains – they wear are lighter, but they are still chains. Most important, their chains are fastened to those of African-Americans and can only be broken if those of the African-Americans are broken as well.
The history of the South is the most vivid illustration of this. There, where the overwhelming majority of African-Americans have lived until recently, where racist oppression has taken its most extreme forms — from slavery to semi-feudal oppression, peonage and legal Jim Crow — where after the ending of slavery a form of fascism was imposed on African-Americans for over 100 years, where the lot of African-Americans was a devastating poverty, pauperdom, perpetual debt, squalor, illiteracy —— precisely there one also found the depths of ^hite degradation. One would have expected, if the theory of the opposition of interests between the masses of whites and African-Americans was correct, to find in that region of greatest Black exploitation the greatest white affluence. But what one found instead was a cesspool of white benightedness, illiteracy, and poverty, where the condition of southern white workers and farmers was far inferior by every measure to that of whites in other regions.
