The United States’ KKK and Argentina’s Rebel Patagonia

The United States’ insistence on a racial caste system is similar to Argentina’s insistence on a ethnic-racist-classist-nationalistic caste system. Both actively marginalized and abused of who they deemed the “undesirables” of society. However, there needed to be a basis on which to oppress these folks. For the United States, particularly after Bacon’s Rebellion, in which poor blacks and poor whites united against the elite, it became a matter of socially-constructed race. For Argentina, several factors were involved– your nationality, race, and class. Both countries continued their oppression through the stronghold of violence. The Ku Klux Klan incorporated all social classes in their effort to subjugate black people in America; this furthered the idea that “you may be poor, but at least you’re not black.” In Argentina, the strike was fueled based on different pay systems across the poor that took into account nationality, ethnicity, and race. Both countries were trying to whiten their respective societies through the use of disenfranchisement, and when they tried to resist (as in the workers’ strikes and eras of slavery and lynchings), their lives proved even less than objectifiable laborers for profit, and were killed.