This has always been the key to understanding white supremacy and white racism in the US.

Going all the way back to the very foundation of this country….Who "convinced" white working-class folks (white indentured servants, poor white dirt farmers, slave patrollers and slave overseers, etc., et al.) that it was more important to be "white" than to be fair to black people? Rich white people. By stoking and maintaining hatred of black people, they (the rich)gained and remained in control of everything, and thus profited from the oppression and exploitation of both groups.

As your piece so eloquently points out, this dynamic, this "psychological wage" of "whiteness" (as W.E.B. Dubois described it over 100 years ago) rather than actual hard cash wages, still obtains to this very day.