Theodore W. Allen did not maintain that "the white workers had been bribed" and he consistently argued against that position. Fifty years ago he explained that such a statement "confuses the white-skin-privilege in general, which is the prerogative of every white person living in the United States, with the special form of that privilege, the payment (direct or indirect) to the 'aristocracy' of labor above what would be necessary according to the laws of normal competition, and which enable those few workers to escape in all but a formal sense from the proletarian to the petit-bourgeois life. He added, "The white-skin  privileges of the masses of the white workers do not permit them nor their children to escape into the ranks of the propertied classes. In the South, where the white-skin privilege has always been most emphasized and formal, the white workers have fared worse than those white workers in the rest of the country." -- Jeffrey B. Perry