It's a little chicken and egg, I think. Racist ideas were used to justify slavery, but it's also possible that racist ideas played into the beginning of enslavement of Africans as well.

These days, I think it's just a matter of people become bigoted through largely osmosis, and the conservative mindset is fertile ground for bigoted messaging. Political and economic elites, then, focus on culture war bullshit because it works as an effective smokescreen to prevent the news from focusing on billionaires' (effectively) war crimes.

Big ol feedback loop of bigotry, unfortunately.

As someone that says 'no war but class war' let me clarify.....yes there are clearly other divides. They are distracting us to keep us divided. Many times the bigot and non-bigot ven diagrams are 2 circle on top of each other, but it's still based in class warfare.

Rich white went and got poor black slaves because it was cheaper than paying the local poor for work. Then the local poor hate the newly migrated people of color. It was slaves, but moved to employing underage kids for foreign countries. Either way it is still a class divide.

The rich use the media to keep us (working class) mad at each other and blame each other for taking our jobs. The truth is the owner class stole our wealth and sold it back to us for money. We were too distracted with lies about honest work to realize the truth in time. Some of this stuff happens in cycle and they wouldn't notice for themselves. They get stuck buying way too much because it's too easy and they don't realize until they own more stuff than they need.

I know not everyone on 'my side' will agree with me and there are blind spots for me. I'm American, globally my quality of life is awesome and it's on the backs of child slaves that I'm too disconnected with to feel guilty about. If you are an American and feel a certain way about your cell phone and chocolate, just know it's not magic. A bad system that we can make better is currently in place. We take for granted because bad people employing child labor because it is cheap.

We are still on the same side even if we don't know it. I believe it was Warren Buffet that said

There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.

The saying isn't trying to claim those people don't exist, of course they do. The saying is a declaration of the truth. The truth that those people are fucking wrong and dumb for their bigoted beliefs. Because our only enemy is the .01% at the top.