Who was the first to come up with the “wages of whiteness” thesis, broadly construed as a theory of how racism works and functions in a hierarchical society? I’m not referring to Roediger’s book by that title, since the theory predates his book, as you can see below. I’m more interested in the general idea of it, which we can see across Europe and North America and across several centuries.

For example, Ludwig Börne, a Jewish convert to Christianity, wrote this about German antisemitism in 1832:

The poor Germans! Living on the bottom floor, oppressed by the seven floors of the upper classes above them, they resolve their feeling of anxiety by speaking about people who live even further below them, in the basement. Not being a Jew consoles them for not having been born a noble!

John C. Calhoun, South Carolina slaveholder and senator, vice president, and architect of what will later become the southern confederate position, declared this in 1848:

With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

And, of course, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote this in 1935:

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white.

All of which got me thinking: Where and when do we first find this theory of racism, whether against Blacks or Jews or some other stigmatized group, as a compensatory gesture for those who are on the penultimate lowest rank of the social ladder? It seems like you can’t really have such a theory until you have some sort of expectation of equality, which then gets frustrated or deferred, for as these quotations suggest, it’s precisely that frustration and deferral that racism is speaking to. But again, when and where does it first arise, not as a phenomenon, but as a formally stated theory or claim about the phenomenon?