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Sure, I won’t argue that cheap labor wasn’t available elsewhere, but that wasn’t the main point by then. The goal was creating an underclass that was systematically excluded and subordinate. The relative social status mattered as much, if not more, than the labor itself. As LBJ put it: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Racial laws enforced both economic exploitation and a social hierarchy that made poor whites' own exploitation acceptable for them, since they could at least take comfort in knowing they're better than the blacks.
Plus, they still found ways to exploit black people to a greater degree than poor whites through disparities in sharecropping, tenant farming, and the legal loopholes that enabled forced labor via vagrancy laws and convict leasing. They got away with what they could, having just lost a war, after all.
That sounds nice, but I don't have the impression that the amount of government pickpocketing has went down since the Civil Rights movement.
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