There’s no question Black Americans as a whole had it worse, below the Mason-Dixon Line. But when you divide history by that you can discover that not only does location matter, but usage by the government matters and governmental treatment does. It’s not just a matter of perspective in these aspects. In the North, slavery was abolished legally by 1804, and black Americans achieved success and could vote in the states legally, and there is plenty of evidence of both. Black Americans formed militias across the North, and John Brown tapped into their networks to recruit these militias for his plan to attack the South. This gets erased, as do all positive accomplishments by Black Americans, who fought continuously for democracy after the Civil War, in order to keep the perception of Blacks as the lowest. It is the continual struggle between white supremacists who prize hierarchy over equality combined with a natural tendency to obey hierarchy and believe authority that keeps this viewpoint actively repressive.
That’s why JD Vance turned a tragic accident in Springfield, Ohio in “most of them”, the Haitians, are bad people. The opposite is true—they are almost all there legally, came for jobs, and are helping to grow the community that was in decline. It’s the active repression that continues negative perception by this group in particular for political gain and dominance. The hierarchy of whiteness was used by them as well, where the Southern Democrats funneled money to the North before the Civil War, running many newspapers that inflamed both xenophobia and racism against black Americans.
They recruited the Irish, who constantly felt at the bottom up North, in violent riots against freed blacks in New York City, twice, once in 1834 and once in 1863, in order to gain more political power up North by sparking hatred towards the freed blacks and their white allies, burning down an orphanage civil rights whites opened for black children that included a school. Irish didn’t feel white and had already open hostility to the WASP “Nativist” authorities, given that the Anglo-Saxon had been invading their country for a thousand years, killing and murdering them. The felt like the “black Irish” because of a repression that went on far longer than anywhere else in the world by the Anglo-Saxons. The Southern MAGA confederates took advantage of the in-built resentment to fan the flames through ‘Fox” newspapers, as they hated “Yankees” who were intent on ending slavery, threading their economic wealth.
Of course, hanging Italians in the South and calling them “worse than blacks” doesn’t compare to the vast majority of horrific politically charged lynchings and slaughters against black Americans, not even close really. It’s important to look at the continual reason behind such usage of hate speech, and the deliberate white forces engaging in full scale repression. The South continued 80 per all Black Americans still by 1930, and they were still having their wages stolen by whites who made them pick cotton, cut sugar cane, and work in other industries in conditions often much worse then slavery before 1790. Seeing the motives and usage of hierarchical repression by force I think still helps to see the reasoning behind the hatred, rather than just flat classifications of peoples. The right whites are after the money above all, stealing wages away from the humans who don’t get paid.
Stimulating discussion, and thus reparations are needed for black Americans above all to account for stolen wages not just before the civil war, but for at least the 10 decades after.