Racial Triangulation

From the founding of the United States, the Elite (owners and primary beneficiaries of corporate power) have limited democratic participation to ensure unregulated access to inexpensive land, exploitable labor, and natural resources. Simultaneously, people have struggled to reign in Elite pursuit of maximum profit through collective action, unions, social mechanisms, and government. The Elite and their representatives use race to divide groups of people to obscure class tension.

A Racial Bribe refers to an Elite strategy to divide workers along racial lines by creating a façade of aligned interests between white elite and ‘white’ workers.  In return, white workers execute the elite’s bidding to receive nominal economic benefit and significant social benefit.

Who is raced ‘white’ changes, but as a group, whites consistently have preferential access to paid work, and have their property and civil rights protected.

This privileged white identity requires the existence of an oppressed, criminalized racial ‘other’. Without the racial other, defined by systematic exclusion from well paying work, civil rights, and property rights to serve as the contrast to whiteness, white identity would not exist. Who occupies this space of racial other and to what degree changes and adapts to maintain Elite power.

What is the role that non-black non-white racial groups play? When labor demands higher wages or land isn’t freely given, Elite interests need a scapegoat.   A non-black non-white racial group is then targeted and excluded, in order to unify other racial groups through targeted attacks.  Often the groups targeted have been US citizens for generations, for example of Asian Americans who may be fourth or fifth generation citizens, but are treated as ‘perpetual foreigners’ by virtue of their being racialized.

Through this process of targeting non-black non-white racial groups, Elites benefit from weakened organizing, destabilized wages, cheap land and resources, and further consolidation of capital.

When a non-black non-white racialized group, for example, Asians, Hispanics, or a sub group of either, is introduced into the system, that group is used to reinforce inequity.

Initially that third racial group may be offered a conditional racial bribe as “hard working, non-activist” model minority.  However, by accepting the existing racial order (or at least not questioning underlying anti-black prejudice), any perceived success of the group is used to justify continued exclusion black people, while also leaving that group vulnerable to future xenophobic exclusion.

Together, these tactics are called Racial Triangulation. Racial triangulation deflects scrutiny of the economic Elite and of the underlying premises of white innocence and worthiness.

The central organizing principle of the system of racial inequity (black-white racial tension) is reinforced.  Non-elite groups of all races, as well as subordinated groups such as women, continue to be marginalized and face backlash when they demand fair treatment.

Ultimately, racialization is the outcome of a very complex system designed to distribute power unevenly. New racialized groupings that have no basis–in country of origin, language, biology, phenotypic features, shared history or religious experience–are constantly in formation and flux as the system adapts to the present time.

Through the process of racialization, society collectively creates the contours of economic and political access, while enabling the Elite to continue to amass political power and consolidate wealth.