(For some reason TPM's formatting removed paragraph breaks from the first version posted. Please read this one!)
With W. Virginia supposedly about to go very big for Hillary Clinton, I'd like to dig into something that's been bugging me throughout this campaign--especially so in the past week, with all the brouhaha over Clinton's "hard-working Americans, White Americans" comment-- obviously relevant to the W VA situation. That's the way the media habitually take it for granted that these "White Americans" Clinton is talking about actually do objectively exist--like Buicks or ham sandwiches. 
Indeed, that's what Clinton is implicitly arguing: Like it or not, she's saying, it's just a fact that lots of these White Voters are prejudiced and won't vote for a Black Candidate (another type that Factually Exists), so you've got to nominate me. There it is, super delegates--you've got to deal with reality. 

Well, here's my point: That's just a lie! The whole thing is just total nonsense, which Clinton knows better than anybody--because the whole point of her "hardworking White Americans" comment and all the rest of the furious race-baiting both Clintons have been up to for months--is to manufacture White voters. That's the whole reason to race-bait in the first place--to turn average American citizens into "White" Americans. "Whites" are made, not born, as are "Blacks," and the sole function of race-baiting is to create them.  D'uh, that's why the Clintons have been race-baiting!
Here's my take on how the process works: What's a "White" American? A "White" American is an American who's been persuaded that she/he has something to gain by self-identifying as "White,"and just as much to lose by self-identifying as simply "American"--i.e., having common cause with all other Americans. Whenever an American can be convinced that he/she has something to gain by self-identifying as "White," and plenty to lose by defining "Americans"  inclusively--hey presto, a "White American" has been created.

A quick review of the historical videotape should remind us of how painfully effective this technique has been:

You can create "White" people by enslaving, under law, every African living throughout broad swaths of American territory, labeling them "Black," buying and selling them as chattel and depriving them of all citizens' rights. That technique was employed for hundreds of years, and was extremely good at creating millions of highly convinced "Whites," who were only too happy, under the circumstances, to enthusiastically police the color line created by their betters.

After slavery was finally ended and Americans of African descent gained (on paper) full constitutional rights, those authorities with an interest in maintaining the ranks of "Whites"and "Blacks" passed  the Jim Crow laws,  pretty much undoing the Fourteenth Amendment. They also encouraged shooting or hanging in a public place any Afro-American who actually tried to register to vote or exercise other of his/her citizen rights. Again, those measures, in place in much of the country for the 100 years up 'til the '70s (including areas far outside the South) were really effective at persuading anybody who could get away with it to self-identify--and vote--as "White."

And let's not forget that until the mid-1950s, the Constitution totally barred from citizenship all "non-Whites" such as Americans of Japanese or Indian descent, a provision the Supreme Court upheld on more than one occasion. The U.S. government could round up and imprison tens of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry for the duration of World War II--simply for having Japanese ancestry--because they weren't citizens, and had no citizens' rights.  They weren't "White." Those circumstancess also long encouraged the adoption of a "White" identity by anybody who could manage it.

After World War II, the GI bill and Federal Housing Administration-backed cheap mortgages allowed millions of Americans to buy their first home, going a long way toward creating today's middle-class. Those federal tax-funded programs also heavily subsidized the creation of the suburbs, that middle-class's natural habitat. But those mortgages, and most of those suburbs, were legally barred to "non-Whites." The resultant enrichment of "White" suburban home-owners, directly accompanied by the urban ghettoization and impoverishment of "Blacks" and other "Non-Whites," was also a really successful technique for reminding those Americans who could that they'd better self-identify as "White."

And finally, in the past forty years or so, after the civil rights movement finally succeeded in pushing the Feds to abolish all that Jim Crow etc. crap and start dismantling all the elaborate legal, social and economic structures that sustained all that "White" (relative) privilege--well, then Republican politicians cleverly started arguing to "Whites" that anything the government did to ensure "non-Whites" ("minorities") their full rights as just plain citizens was actually an unfair, unconstitutional attack on the rights of..."White people!" Reverse discrimination! Cheating welfare queens! Political correctness! 

And so those--both "White" and "Black"--who'd maybe started to consider the possibility that they could finally just be Americans, were again frog-marched back into the Dance of Exploitive Categories. And we've had forty years of no universal health-care, Republican wars, ludicrously regressive taxation, and all the other miserable fruits of "White" voting for race-baiting Republicans.

Today is the West Virginia primary. Hillary Clinton may well win, who knows, 70% of the vote. But PLEASE--do not tell me that that's because "White voters just won't vote for Obama." W. Virginians are just Americans like everybody else. If they vote so skewedly "White," it's because for decades they've been skillfully pushed and prodded, in the ugliest of ways and with the ugliest of outcomes--most recently by a leading Democratic candidate--to do so.

Barack Obama has built his campaign on the assertion that an electorate that self-identifies "racially," where "Whites" see voting as a zero sum game where they lose if other Americans win, is actually an America where everybody loses.  And that if instead, all Americans can vote just as Americans, for the broad common interest,  we can finally make some real progress on health care, a sane foreign policy, taxes, etc. 

He had some real success with that approach in Iowa, Virginia, Maryland and some other states.

But then Hillary Clinton came along... and started manufacturing "White" folks.