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This is quite complicated. There is a good book called The Mind of the South by W. J. Cash written around 1940 that goes into the history and sociology of this problem in the South, where it is most common. The novel, Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner also explains it though in a more indirect way. Engels pointed it out way back in the last century when he said that the United States would never have a workers' revolution as long as the capitalists were able to pit new immigrants against established workers.
Basically, it all boils down to divide and conquer , and it was not developed in the United States, it has simply been made into an art form by the American employer. Way back in the mother country, England, they would bring in starving peasants from their colony in Ireland to serve as scab labor to drive down the wages of British laborers. The British workers, rather than objecting to their British bosses, would take their anger out on the only socially acceptable target---the imported Irish workers. Attack a British boss and you could get hanged. Attack an Irish worker and you were a local hero.
The same thing happened in America. The bosses would pit two different groups against each other. One group would be a recently arrived immigrant group--Irish, Italian, Chinese, Mexican. Or maybe newly freed Black slaves that had moved north or women who had started working. Since these were oppressed citizens who were starving, they would work for a lot less. The bosses would let their white male workers go and hire the cheaper workers, sometimes as scabs to bust unions. The white workers would not attack the bosses. They would attack their fellow (oppressed) workers. This would increase the oppression under which the immigrants, Blacks or women lived, keeping their wages nice and low---just like the bosses wanted it. The bosses would even pretend to have sympathy with the white male workers. Act like they didn't really want to hire the lower wage workers, they were forced to by hard times or economic necessity or the Reconstruction. In the South they would often make the white workers into "supervisors" to give them the illusion that they were partnered with the bosses, somehow superior even though they were really just wage slaves like anyone else. If a worker felt inferior because he did not make enough money to buy his family the things he wanted, he took solace in knowing that at least he had his boss's respect. At least he was white. If he got bitter, he took his bitterness out on one of the oppressed people, especially any member of an oppressed group who did not have the good sense to look poor and miserable.
Many early unions fed into this notion by excluding certain immigrants and Blacks and women. Workers' rights meant white male workers' rights---even though oppression of other workers was the key to keeping wages low for everyone for the American capitalist. The IWW, which accepted everyone, was persecuted harshly by the federal government at the same time that the KKK was in its full glory in the 1920s.
The Republican Party, at its core, continues to represent the same group of people----Standard Oil by a different name and all the others----whose goal is to keep the American working class divided and its wages suppressed by keeping some groups oppressed. Since homosexuality makes an easy charge to lay against any "enemy of the state" they make sure that gays are always a target. There always has to be a hated immigrant group. Right now it is Mexicans. They fight to keep women underpaid, since they can site biology on that one. They still are not ready to give up on discrimination against Blacks. All they have done is switch from persecuting all African-Americans to going after only the more dark complected ones.
The poor and working class white dupes who vote for the Republicans are lured into the party with promises that they will receive special favors and privileges (that they deserve, of course) if their party is victorious. They are assured that the rich members of their party really, truly love them, because they are white. This is complete bullshit, of course. Dick Cheney has more in common with the Blackest African billionaire tyrant dictator than he does with some white day laborer in Mississippi who votes Republican out of a sense of racial solidarity.
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