"Racism wasn't born out of hate. It was born out of fear. But to understand that, you have to go back to Virginia in 1676. A small group of planners controlled everything, the land, the courts, the government, while everyone else was just trying to survive. The entire system depended on two groups, poor white indentured servants and enslaved black people. Different circumstances, but the same exploitation. And that shared exploitation turned into a shared anger. Then came Nathaniel Bacon. He recruited poor whites and black people with the same message. The people running Virginia are the real problem. And together they burned Jamestown down to the ground. Planner class was shook. They had just watched the people they had been exploiting realize that together they could burn the whole system down. And that can never happen again. So they changed the system. They phased out white indentured servitude and went exclusively with enslaved black labor. And just like that, they stopped seeing themselves in each other. But the planner class still needed poor white people to be loyal. So they gave them something new, something that they never had before. And it didn't cost them a dollar. Whiteness. No money, no land, no opportunity, just an idea. An idea that no matter how little you had, you will always be above black people. Because if you can get people focused on race, they'll stop focusing on who's actually taken from them. Whiteness wasn't created to celebrate anybody. It was created to keep poor people divided. And more than 300 years later, that strategy still works the way it was designed to."