How did American history generate white privilege?

In the shadow of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, sharecropping became a common way for impoverished farmers to scrape out a living from someone else’s land, usually sharing half of the crops grown with the landowner in a system that left the poor trapped in poverty. While both poverty-stricken black and white farmers were trapped into never-ending debt agreements with landlords, lingering vagrancy laws, that allowed police in states such as North Carolina to arrest unemployed black people and send them to prison farms to work for free, simultaneously reinforced the vestiges of slavery. In this way sharecropping functioned as an aggressive post-slavery form of slavery, and similarly the modern US prison system arguably still functions in a very similar way today. Prison labour is still a massive industry in the country, effectively keeping the dynamics of slavery alive today and maintaining a different experience in modern America based largely on a person's skin colour.

modernamericanpoetry.org/criticism/matthew-lessig-sharecroppers bullcity150.org/landless_people/sharecropping truthout.org/articles/modern-day-slavery-from-incarceration-to-forced-adoption

This widely held concept helped to justify the genocide against Native Americans, with many settlers thinking the Westward expansion of white settlers across North America was their destiny throughout the 19th century. Although historians point to this as a minority belief of the political class of the period, it did however inspire the movement of settlers of European decent westward across the entire North American continent, socially homogenising the region as they went. Much of the deaths in this era were the result of taking away land from native populations and diseases such as small pox, but violence played a significant role, and such ideas of racial dominance even inspired Adolf Hitler’s imperial expansion across Eastern Europe in the following century. Such ideas of a privileged white settler who is obliged to dominate and civilise the indigenous savages informed American imperialism both at home and abroad also, solidifying a racism deep in the heart of American domestic and foreign political policy.

outfrontmagazine.com/trending/culture/dismantling-white-privilege-manifest-destiny portlandobserver.com/news/2018/jun/06/manifest-destiny-modern-america meloukhia.net/2016/03/manifest_destiny_white_supremacy_and_how_the_west_was_won

The United States was born as a European colonial project and relied more heavily on slavery that any other colony, racism helped to establish these systems the fact that the country was founded on slavery and colonialism has undoubtedly helped to solidify racism deeply within American society. During the American Civil War much of the country was willing to go to war to preserve this system of industrialised slavery that had made the United States so prosperous, but this long dark history of racism was only further crystallised even as slavery was being abolished in America. Those set to abolish slavery were satisfied with protecting a privileged place for white people in American society, by allowing the enactment of laws such as Jim Crow that literally made non-whites second class citizens in many states. More than anything else it is this very foundational history of the United States that set the stage for white privilege in modern American society, and the modern backlash against concepts such as white privilege, what some have labelled white fragility, is evidence that in many Americans minds attitudes toward race have not developed much since the civil war.

gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/the-development-of-white-privilege-and-racism-during-the-slavery-times-in-colonial-america asianamericanchristiancollaborative.com/article/lets-talk-about-white-privilege-and-slavery