In this electrifying episode of Connecting the Dots, I sat down with Jon Jeter—two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, former Washington Post bureau chief, and Knight Fellowship recipient—who pulled no punches as we unraveled the hidden dynamics of America’s class war. Drawing from his explosive book Class War in America, Jeter revealed how the elite have masterfully weaponized race to keep the working class fractured and powerless, ensuring they stay on top. He delves into the ways education is rigged to widen inequality, while elite interests tighten their grip on public policy. With gripping personal stories and razor-sharp historical insight, Jeter paints a vivid picture of the struggle between race and class in America and leaves us with a tantalizing vision of a united working-class revolution on the horizon. This is an episode that will shake your understanding of power—and inspire you to see the potential for change. Find me and the show on social media. Click the following links or search @DrWilmerLeon on X/Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Patreon and YouTube! Hey everyone, Dr. Wilmer here! If you've been enjoying my deep dives into the real stories behind the headlines and appreciate the balanced perspective I bring, I'd love your support on my Patreon channel. Your contribution helps me keep "Connecting the Dots" alive, revealing the truth behind the news. Join our community, and together, let's keep uncovering the hidden truths and making sense of the world. Thank you for being a part of this journey! Wilmer Leon (00:00:00): I'm going to quote my guest here. We've been watching for a while now via various social media platforms and mainstream news outlets, the genocide of the Palestinian people, what do the images of a broad swath of Americans, whites and blacks, Latinos, Arabs and Asians, Jews and Catholics and Muslims, and Buddhists shedding their tribal identities and laying it all out on the line to do battle with the aristocrats who are financing the occupation. Slaughter and siege mean to my guest. Let's find out Announcer (00:00:40): Connecting the dots with Dr. Wilmer Leon, where the analysis of politics, culture, and history Wilmer Leon (00:00:46): Converge. Welcome to the Connecting the Dots podcast with Dr. Wilmer Leon, and I am Wilmer Leon. Here's the point. We have a tendency to view current events as though they happen in a vacuum, failing to understand the broader historical context in which many of these events take place. During each episode, my guests and I have probing, provocative, and in-depth discussions that connect the dots between these events and the broader historic context in which they occur, thus enabling you to better understand and analyze the events that impact the global village in which we live. On today's episode, the issue before us is again, quoting my guest. When the 99% come together to fight for one another rather than against each other is the revolution. Na, my guest is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media, and his new book is entitled Class War in America. How The Elite Divide the Nation by asking, are you a worker or are you white? Phenomenal, phenomenal work. John Jeter is my guest, as always, my brother. Welcome back to the show. Jon Jeter (00:02:07): It's a pleasure to be here. Wilmer. Wilmer Leon (00:02:10): So class war in America, how the elites divide the nation by asking, are you a worker or are you white? You open the book with two quotes. One is from the late George Jackson, settle Your Quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation. Understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying, who could be saved that generations more will live. Poor butchered half lives. If you fail to act, do what must be done. Discover your humanity and love your revolution. Why that quote? And then we'll get to the second one. Why that quote, John? Jon Jeter (00:02:50): That quote, really that very succinct quote by the revolutionary, the assassinated revolutionary. George Jackson really explains in probably a hundred words, but it takes me 450 pages to explain, which is that the ruling class, the oligarchs, we call 'em what you want. Somewhere around the Haymarket massacre of 1886, I believe they figured out that the way that the few can defeat the many is to divide the many to pit it against itself, the working class against itself. And so since then, they have a embark on a strategy of pitting the working class against itself largely along, mostly along racial or tribal lines, mostly white versus black. And it has enveloped, the ruling class has enveloped more and more people into whiteness. First it was Italians and Germans and Jews, or Jews really starting after World War II and the Holocaust. And then it was gays and women, and now even blacks themselves have been enveloped in this sort of adjacency to whiteness where everyone sort of gets ahead by beating up, by punching down on black people. And so George Jackson's quote really sort of encapsulates the success that we, the people can have by working together. And I want to be very clear about the enemy is not white people. The enemy is a white identity. (00:04:48): Hungarians and Czech and the Brits and the French and the Italians are not our enemy. They are glorious people who have done glorious things, but the formation of a white identity is really the kryptonite for working class movements in this country. Wilmer Leon (00:05:07): In fact, I'm glad you make that point because I wanted to call attention to the fact that a lot of people listening to this and hear you talk about the Irish or the Poles or the Italians, that in Europe, those were nationalisms, those were not racial constructs. Those were not racial identities. And that it really wasn't until many of them came to America and or post World War ii, that this construct of whiteness really began to take hold as the elite in America understood, particularly post-slavery. That if the poor and the working class whites formed an alliance with the newly freed, formerly enslaved, that that would be a social condition that they would not be able to control. Jon Jeter (00:06:11): It was almost, it was as close to invincible as you could ever see. This coalition, which particularly after slavery, very tenuously, (00:06:24): But many, many whites, particularly those who were newer to the country, Germans and Italians and Irish, who had not formed a white identity, formed a white identity here. As you said in Europe, they were Irish Italians. Germans. One story I think tells the tale, it was a dock workers strike in New Orleans in 1894. I read about this in the book, and the dock workers were segregated, black unions and white unions, but they worked together, they worked in concert, they went on strike for higher wages, and I think a closed shop, meaning that if you worked on the docks, you had to belong to the union and they largely won. And the reason for that is because the bosses, the ship owners tried to separate the two. They would tell the white dock workers, we'll work with you, but we won't work with those N words. (00:07:22): And many of the dock workers at that time had just come over from Europe. So they were like, what are you talking about? He's a worker just like me. I worked right next to him, or he works the doc over from me or the platform over from me. He's working there. So what do you mean you're not going to work with, you're going to deal with all of us? And that ethos, that governing ethos of interracial solidarity was one that really held the day until 20 years later, 20 years later, by which time Jim Crow, which was really an economic and political strategy, had really taken hold. And many of the dock workers, their children had begun to think of themselves as white. Wilmer Leon (00:08:06): In fact, I'm glad you referred to the children because another parallel to this is segregated education. As the framers, and I don't mean of the constitution, but of this culture, wanted to impose this racial caste system, they realized you can't have little Jimmy and little Johnny playing together sitting next to each other in classrooms and then try to impose a system of hierarchy based on phenotype as these children get older. What do you mean I can't play with him? What do you mean I can't play with her? She's my friend. No, not anymore. And so that's one of the things that contributed to this phenotypical ethos separating white children from black children. Jon Jeter (00:09:01): Education has been such a pivotal instrument for the elites, for the oligarchs, for the investor class in fighting this class war. It's not just been an instrument, a tool to divide education in the United States. It's largely intended to reproduce inequality, and it always has been, although obviously many of us, many people in the working class see, there's a tool to get ahead. That's not how the stock class sees it. (00:09:35): But beyond that even it is the investment in education. This is a theme throughout the book from the first chapter to the last basically where education, because it is seen as a tool for uplift by the working class, but by the investment class, it's seen as a tool to divide. And increasingly really since about really the turn of the century, this century, the 21st century, it's been seen as an investment opportunity. So that's why we have all of these school closures and the school privatization effort. It's an investment opportunity. So the problem is that we're fighting a class war. We've always been fighting a class war, but it's something that is seldom mentioned in public discussions in the media, the news or entertainment media, it's seldom mentioned, but schools education, you could make an argument that it is the holy grail of the class war, whoever can
