Can’t have that, can we? From the moment the first African captives arrived on these shores 400 years ago, this land offered white people of every station one ironclad guarantee. Enslaved people were not just property, nor just unpaid agricultural workers and house servants. They’d been assigned a permanent place on the lowest rung of the social ladder. No matter what misfortunes might befall whites, at least they weren’t Black. The New World offered Europeans not only economic opportunity but a guaranteed social floor below which they could not fall. (Four hundred years later, women still struggle to break through a glass ceiling.) For some reason, that was on my mind while making coffee. It was on Heather Cox Richardson’s last night in the context of Donald Trump’s comments Thursday night about immigrants taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.” It’s a textbook case of the ruling-class, divide-and-dominate ploy from the cartoon above. Richardson writes: In U.S. history it has been commonplace for political leaders to try to garner power by warning their voters that some minority group is coming for their jobs. In the 1840s, Know-Nothings in Boston warned native-born voters about Irish immigrants; in 1862 and 1864, Democrats tried to whip up support by warning Irish immigrants that after Republicans fought to end enslavement, Black Americans would move north and take their jobs. In the 1870s, Californian Denis Kearney of the Workingman’s Party drew voters to his standard by warning that Chinese immigrants were taking their jobs and insisted:…