Right, of course. No argument that there is or should be a natural sense of interest convergence between the poor and working class white and poor and working class Black and brown. But historically this has never happened for long. Why? Its not because of woke anti-racist activists hijacking the class conversation with identity politics. This phenomenon of scuttled solidarity goes back hundreds of years. What has prevented is is the very real way in which whiteness in the US has operated to skew white folks' perceptions of our class interests, and substitute white advantage for them. White privilege has been a consolation prize offered by the elite since the late 1600s to prevent solidarity. And it has worked. Every single time.

Unlike in previous feudal systems whence white folks come, in the US the myth of meritocracy has always made it hard to organize around class anyway. Whereas in European feudal systems the poor would have understood that mobility was unlikely -- one was either nobility or peasantry and there wasn't much chance of moving up -- here the poor white person, given small perks based on whiteness alone, could see just enough opportunity for rising up in the hierarchy so as to keep the lid on class consciousness. Then add to that the racialization of the "other" and solidarity around shared class interest alone became very difficult... more so than should be the case.

So while you are 100% right about what SHOULD work, we have to address why it doesn't, directly...and that reason is the way that whiteness has worked as what Marx called "false consciousness" frankly. Only by pointing out how whiteness and privilege (as a consolation prize) has harmed white people can it be possible, In other words, unlike most class-centric activists and thinkers who think we can just sort of avoid the race conversation and just focus on class, we actually have to directly confront the way racism and relative privilege have been weaponized as tools of division. NOT by the left frankly, but by elites working in the service of reactionary purposes.

That's what Heather McGhee and Jonathan Metzl do in their books. They don't flinch from calling our whiteness, but they make clear, as I have in many pieces here, that indulging the consolation prize of whiteness is harmful for all, including white people. This is the argument I make in my book Under the Affluence as well and have made for many years.