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For the first time ever, DEEP GREEN book will be at the FRESH Book Festival! Dates are Fri-Sat Jan 7-8 at the Midtown Cultural & Educational Center in Daytona Beach. (There’s also a virtual component, so you can attend regardless of your geographic location.)

Admission: Kids, students, and teachers get in free!! Seniors are $5.00 and general admission is $7.00.

Special Note for kids, families, teachers! We have several really wonderful children’s book authors (some of whom actually dress up in character)! Please spread the word, the youth are out of school and we hope lots of young people can make it.

More info on this outstanding, internationally recognized book festival and also on the film festival (Thursday eve Jan 6; it is always excellent):
https://www.freshbookfestivals.net

So excited! I love this annual festival and always look forward to it. Am thrilled to be there as an author. Visit the link in the first paragraph to see the announcement poster with names and photos of all the authors.

Hey!! I have a TikTok channel now.
15-second micro video postcards from my everyday life. Hope you enjoy these little snippets! I set my standard video time at 15 seconds because I think that’s a cool length for a video. But, I’m not used to it, so I keep getting cut off. I’m really enjoying the format though.

For longer vids you can always visit my YouTube channel. I haven’t posted much there lately but I might again at some point. And, you can also just type my name in the YouTube search field; that’ll bring up a lot of videos of me speaking that are not on my channel per se.

First, two disclaimers:

• I’m not in any position to tell anyone how they “should” approach retirement, or any other aspect of their financial affairs. Everyone comes from different circumstances, and there are reasons why finance is a sensitive subject. As always on this blog, and in my book, I’m merely sharing my own ideas and my own journey, and hope you will find at least some of it helpful in crafting the unique work of art that is your own life.

• Even though I have my ideals that I’m aiming for, it doesn’t mean I’m there right now or will ever get there (though it is my aim). I always endeavor to be transparent about any gaps that exist between my ideals and my actual practice (be it in finances or in any other realm), but I’m mentioning this to you right now just in case it’s not clear.

OK! Disclaimers done.

In my book, I mention that at some point awhile back (actually wow, it was 20-plus years ago now; how time flies), I realized that my money that I had invested in a retirement account was out there in the world doing stuff that I might not approve of.

This realization hit me way before I had even heard of permaculture or regenerative living (living our lives in a way such that we give to people, other species, and ecosystems more than we take). So I wasn’t really sure what to do with it. It did stick with me though, and formed the seed for my current mind-set around income, retirement, and money in general.

For some years now I have been seeing as deeply problematic the whole idea of stockpiling a bunch of assets (in any form, be it money or otherwise) for the purpose of “retiring” or any other form of old-age security. I see this paradigm as problematic for many reasons:

1) Reliance on stocks (here I mean not stock-market stocks, but the permaculture definition of “stocks”: an amassed pile of assets — think of a squirrel’s acorn stash) rather than flows (“our daily bread,” so to speak) fosters insecurity. Stocks by themselves are more brittle than flows. Also, with stocks, the goalpost tends to keep moving. So, if I amass a million, my mind is going to start urging me to work on the second million “just for an extra cushion; just to be safe.” Also, amassed assets are more likely to make a person a target. And cost money and energy to protect.

2) I see “amassing” as a fear-based reflex, based on the idea (created by the industrial-consumer society we birthed in the USA) that “no one will take care of me in my old age”; “old people have no value”; “I won’t be able to engage in economically productive work once I reach age XX.” Rather than amassing personal stashes of assets, we’d do better to go directly to the root of the issue. For example, devise a regenerative career path that extends right up until we die. Could be teaching, tending sheep, grandchild-minding, business mentorship, herbal medicine consultation “wise witch lady”, shaman, master carpenter teacher, seed-bank tender, librarian/archivist, storyteller, musician, what have you. Traditional societies have always had economic roles for everyone from young children to the eldest elders. If we want to take a lot of the fear out of modern living, we need to retrofit this resilience into our society. My personal ideal is to develop an entirely flow-based path for myself, with maybe just enough stockpiled assets for an emergency house repair fund, though I am not at my ideal yet.

3) Stocks are more likely than flows to disrupt ecosystems (both social and biological; neighborhoods and rainforests). This is because chunks of money or other amassed assets always need a place to “park,” and they will exert a distortive influence one way or another. For example, my neighborhood is full of houses that people from other states have bought as their fourth and fifth houses, AirBnB investment properties etc. Meanwhile low-wage workers struggle to find a place to live in the dwindling stock of affordable rental properties.

4) The work that people are doing to anass that pile of money for retirement “so they can quit working” tends not to be work they’d really want in their hearts to be doing. This tradeoff comes at a heavy opportunity cost not only for individuals but for our collective wellbeing, as much creative energy gets dissipated rather than applied to building the beautiful abundant world we really want.

In a nutshell, my current ideal is to earn the minimum viable income to meet my needs, and be able to work for the rest of my life. And have just a small emergency fund. I don’t know exactly what that means. Income-wise my ideal right now is a steady, consistent $13,000 per year. (My target would be higher, but I am fortunate, through other people’s past hard work, not mine, to own my house free and clear, and have no student-loan debt.) Stockpile-wise, maybe 5k.

I’ve touched on various aspects of finance on this blog and will dig up some links to those posts for you. They include links to some of my favorite articles by other regenerative/permie thinkers as well.

Further Exploration:

• “Flowing Towards Abundance” (Toby Hemenway, resilience.org; originally published on tobyhemenway.com). In permaculture design class when we learned about “stocks and flows,” I immediately realized why no amount of stockpiled money makes people feel secure. It’s the flow, the knowingness of nature’s flow, that brings real security. Article by the acclaimed author of Gaia’s Garden gives an excellent overview of stocks and flows.

• Storing Food “in the Belly of My Brother” (post on my blog January 7, 2021). “In the grand scheme of history, it hasn’t been that long that human beings have had ways to store wealth. The relatively recent innovations of refrigeration, banks, and other vessels for storing surplus have made life easier in a tangible way. After all, what would we modern industrialized humans do if refrigeration didn’t exist? We’d have to grocery shop every day. And if there were no banks or other investment vehicles, where and how would we store our money? A cushion of surplus tides us over in lean times. But the dark side of storage is hoarding, and hoarding actually fuels scarcity. …”

• “Calculating Your Income Profile” (a post I made in October 2020). It’s eye-opening to see where your income, and your net worth, stand in relation to 1) other people in rich industrialized nations; and 2) even more mind-blowing, the world! I see extreme wealth disparity as a major source of damage to ecosystems and cultures.

• “Legacy for Future Generations” (a post I made about 3 months ago where I talk about some of my investment choices).

• “Becoming a Local Investor” (series of four posts I wrote when I was brainstorming places I’d feel comfortable (=ethical) storing money, that would give some kind of good return be it monetary or social or both.

I have a bad habit of scribbling notes on paper and then not remembering whether I typed them up or not. I kinda think that in this case I didn’t!

If you are on social media a lot, and especially if you are the admin of a group, you might get a lot of requests from people to share stuff. It could be a post about their own business thing, or it could be a post for the greater good such as an article about seed-saving, or protecting wildlife.

The natural inclination is to want to help the person, or people, or humanitarian cause, by sharing. But the volume of requests in your inbox (be it email, messenger, phone text or whatever) can get exhausting. A lot of the time it’s just a naked link, such as a link to a video with no explanation, so you’re supposed to click on the video and sit through it to find out what it’s even about.

Here are some tips I scribbled out one day when I was feeling overwhelmed by things in my inboxes that other people wanted me to share.

I. For those times you feel willing and able to share the content, you can streamline the process and make less work for yourself. Here are some tricks I’ve picked up over the years.

• Screen-shot and copy-paste for the win: Those fancy HTML/rich text newsletters we get in our inboxes from eco organizations and other worthy causes look nice, but can be a pain to try and share on Facebook or Twitter. Ditto for event invites that people send to your Messenger or phone text. My hack is to 1) take a screenshot, or screenshots, of the most powerful image from the email or message. (I usually don’t worry about taking the extra effort to crop the image; if it says TMobile and my phone battery capacity at the top, so be it.) Then 2) copy from the body of the email a short excerpt of what you see as the most essential text, plus (very important) the link to their website or event or whatever. 3) Open a post in Facebook or Twitter or wherever, and first paste the screenshot image you took, then paste the text and link. (If you paste the text and link first, Facebook or Twitter will end up displaying something that may not be the most powerful image from the email newsletter, and in fact may not be an image at all — might be just a line of ugly grey text. Keep visual control of the post and circumvent “default ugly link syndrome” by pasting the screenshot before you paste the text. If you forget and do it in the wrong order, as I often have, don’t worry, just scrap the Facebook post and start over.)

• Look for corresponding online presence: Sometimes it’s easier to just go directly to the person or org’s website and screenshot/copy-paste share from there, rather than trying to work with the email.

• Phone-text-to-self is your friend! This tip is for bloggers. When I’m copy-pasting an excerpt from a great article or email newsletter to this blog, I have learned to first paste the quote into a phone text to myself. Otherwise the 48-point font, yellow highlighting, and whatever other fancy HTML/rich text formatting the authors put into the website or email newsletter gets imported into my blog post and I can’t figure out how to get rid of it. Plain text is necessary, and I have found that the only reliable way to strip out formatting is by first phone-texting the excerpt to myself, and then copy-pasting from the phone-text to this blog. (Sssh, keep it quiet, or next thing you know we’ll have an “improvement” from the cellphone OS designers, allowing rich text formatting to be retained in SMS messages!)

• Note to people who send out email newsletters: Consider using just the default plain text of your email app, rather than all kinds of different font sizes, colors, etc. It’s actually a refreshing look! Author, speaker, entrepreneur Jeff Goins’ newsletter is my favorite example of an email newletter I always enjoy receiving, that uses plain text, often without even images. (You can still include photos and other images in a plain-text newsletter though. Of those who use photos/images, my favorites have only one or maybe two. Simplicity is so refreshing!)

II. For those times when you are not willing/able to take on the free labor of sharing:

• Message the other person back, “This is great stuff, really important and people need to know this! Please share it to the groups, not just to me!” (Sometimes fellow activists do this private-message thing; sometimes they just have a case of the shy’s and need a bit of encouragement to know that what they are sharing in your inbox deserves a much wider audience.)

• Don’t accept “naked links.” If someone sends you a link with no explanation, ask them to write a few words telling you their takeaways from it. I particularly do this a lot with video links. I’m not going to sit through a video just to get the main points to see if it’s worth sharing or not.

• Heads-up, if you are on social media a lot and dedicate a lot of your waking hours to activism, people might assume you are RETIRED or living a life of leisure. This has happened to me. I realized it’s on me to be more clear with people that I work fulltime and am not Richie Rich or Lola Leisure. Freelance yes, at-home (mostly) yes, but nonetheless I work fulltime. And even if I did not, my time and labor have value. As do yours! A good way of conveying our professional/occupational status is via our Facebook profiles, email signature lines, and so on.

• Share skills: If you come across any good online classes, magazine articles, TikTok videos, or other resources about how to post effectively on social media, share them on your page and in your activist groups. Same goes for basic computer classes and articles, if it seems like a lot of people in your network might just not know the basic nuts and bolts of a keyboard and operating system such as how to copy-paste, take a screenshot etc. Also I have found if I don’t know how to do something, google is my friend. I just type “screen shot ios” or whatever.

• Recognize the value of publicity: Social-media marketing, and writing, are two task categories that for whatever reason have become incredibly devalued. It’s ironic, because 1) these tasks are difficult and time-consuming to do well; and 2) I see so many good works and events and movements not getting the attendance or other awareness they deserve. Or people and organizations who should so totally know about each other and be working together have no clue about each other’s existence. Why? Because the owners/organizers didn’t take even the most basic steps to get the word out. If an event organizer doesn’t bother to do publicity, who should?

• Ask to get paid: If you find people turning to you a lot for help with publicity, you could consider becoming a social-media marketing firm and offering paid packages of services. I have sometimes thought of doing this but I’m pretty well occupied with other stuff.

• Ask for reciprocity: If you’ve gone out of your way to help someone get the word out about their thing, you could ask them to support your thing, be it by sharing your posts or donating money or signing up for your class or buying your product or Liking your page or whatever.

• (To use a permaculture design term): “Obtain a yield!” It’s OK to get something for your efforts other than just the warm fuzzy feeling of helping someone. So, for example, I’ll share someone’s link, quote their content, etc., on DEEP GREEN book’s Facebook page, Permaculture Daytona’s Facebook page, or my other pages. Their content is adding value to my page, and I am helping them by bringing their sweet juicy content to an additional audience. It feels like a fair trade! Also, people like recognition. I tag people or magazines or farms or whatever and praise their work (only if I sincerely mean it, of course), and often as not, the tagged person/org will stop by my page and say thanks, and sometimes also Like my page. Again, it feels like a fair trade.

Social-media sharing and other forms of publicity are more laborious than they might seem. By being more aware of this, and of how important publicity is, maybe we can shift the consciousness around this and share the publicity workload, to the benefit of us all!

These are just my tips; got any tips you’d like to share on this subject? If so, drop me a line, and also let me know if you’d like me to include your name, website, book title, etc. along with your tip. A bit of extra publicity never hurts, right?

As I write this, it is the Winter Solstice. The shortest day and longest night of the year. Rich, fertile time.

Also rich and fertile is my inbox (which I define broadly to include my newsfeed and the various periodicals I subscribe to). This week I’m trying something new: just posting links to some of the best articles I’ve read over the past week or so, rather than trying to do a different post on each very worthwhile topic I’ve come across. Just an experiment! If I like it, and/or if you my dear reader find it useful, I may do it again.

• Quote: “The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.” — Alfred Adler, via Inspiring Quotes email newsletter. Commentary from IQ: “Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler was among the early pioneers of family and group counseling. One reason for his 1911 break with compatriot Sigmund Freud was that Adler believed external factors, such as adult relationships and employment, should be accounted for when treating patients (whereas Freud thought behavior was largely fueled by biology and childhood events). While listening to people reflect on their place in society, Adler heard lots of trepidation. This motivated him to help individuals grow comfortable with risks, because adventures and unforeseen joys await those who say yes.”

• The other week I was among a dozen or so citizens who got to visit my city’s wastewater treatment plant for a tour of their demonstration testing system for direct potable reuse. This was a two-year pilot program to purify wastewater effluent through an advanced purification system. It was only a test, for preparedness purposes, but there has been a lot of public misunderstanding, amplified by people referring to it as “toilet to tap” and “poopy water.” Never mind that it was only a test; that the water was never actually sent out to the public and there are no plans to do so. Also, this technology is actually in widespread use, and has been for years, in many parts of the world including drought-prone areas of Australia and the Western US. My take on this is that it falls under the heading of civil preparedness, and that if we don’t want to have to rely on direct potable reuse, we need to stop wasting water. I also agree with what my friend the environmental-sciences professor, soil & water conservation official, and all-around superwoman said: Anyone who is living with a well and a septic is already drinking poopy water! (though we count on the few vertical feet of soil to be enough distance for adequate filtration, so ideally it is NOT poopy). And everyone who’s living on planet earth is already drinking recycled wastewater! But the fear and resentment about the direct potable reuse demonstration test persists. To provide more information on the subject, I searched and found this great article by Jacques Leslie at yale.edu: “Where Water is Scarce, Communities Turn to Reusing Wastewater.” Finally, if we don’t want to drink poopy water, we could … stop pooping into water! In other words, instead of crapping into the world’s very limited supply of potable water in the first place, we could use compost toilets, the waterless receptacles that are the starting point in a humanure composting system. It’s a low-cost, low-risk approach that’s in common use in many places. (See Joseph Jenkins’ The Humanure Handbook, the definitive manual on this topic.)

• “Why 1,320 Therapists Are Worried About Mental Health in America Right Now“
(Tara Parker-Pope, Christina Caron, and Mónica Cordero Sancho; nytimes.com). “As Americans head into a third year of pandemic living, therapists around the country are finding themselves on the front lines of a mental health crisis. Social workers, psychologists and counselors from every state say they can’t keep up with an unrelenting demand for their services, and many must turn away patients — including children — who are desperate for support.” (I see this mental-health crisis as one symptom of our societal brittleness and anti-resilience; our hyper-individualist society doesn’t really teach people good skills for navigating emotions or for coexisting in close quarters with other people. The pandemic was maybe just a very large straw that broke the camel’s back. Good article; I read it as a call to cultivate nurturing communities.)

• “SEED KEEPING ‘AN IMPORTANT PIECE OF RESISTANCE’: Philadelphia woman starting a Black heirloom seed farm” (Stephanie Farr; Philadelphia Inquirer TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE, published in Daytona Beach News-Journal). “‘A lot of my peers, their immediate thought was that Black people farming is just like slavery …’ But Mitchell’s mother also taught her that their people’s history didn’t begin with oppression and enslavement, that it had far deeper roots than that. I saw farming as an ancestral African practice that was exploited and this was a way to connect with those farmers even before they were enslaved and oppressed for it … And my instinct was correct – many Africans were enslaved purposely because of their agricultural knowledge and skill.’ For Mitchell, working with the land became a way to repair that trauma and to reframe farming as a ‘strategy of liberation.’ As she became more deeply involved in agriculture, Mitchell felt particularly called to seed keeping, the practice of not only saving seeds, but also preserving and passing down the stories of the cultures from which those seeds came. It’s an important piece of resistance.”

• “Flowing Towards Abundance” (Toby Hemenway, resilience.org; originally published on tobyhemenway.com). In permaculture design class when we learned about “stocks and flows,” I immediately realized why no amount of stockpiled money makes people feel secure. It’s the flow, the knowingness of nature’s flow, that brings real security. Article by the acclaimed author of Gaia’s Garden gives an excellent overview of stocks and flows.

• “Winter Storm Uri … What Went Wrong?” (Amy Stansbury; austincommon.org). Reflections on last winter’s deadly cold spell in central Texas offer lessons in energy preparedness, community resilience. Nice, highly readable graphic summary, with link to detailed report.

The most “micro” improvements in my space put the biggest smile on my face! Today, I suddenly realized that this little plywood tabletop (photo 1) could be set on top of my landscaping cart to turn it into into an instant easel for painting large signs and posters.

The plywood tabletop was made lovingly — look at the rounded edges! — by my Dad in the 1960s or 70s; and given a protective and decorative coat of paint by me a couple of years ago. The tabletop, together with a folding base of metal legs, were among the treasures that came my way from Mom & Dad’s house. Dad obviously made the tabletop to go with the foldable metal base, which may originally have been the base of a metal camp tabletop that broke or something. The tabletop and foldable base are very useful: easy to pack up for craft fairs, Earth Day events, and such.

The base of folding metal legs is narrow and makes the table sit pretty high, so it’s awkward for painting heavy, large-format items (though great for miniatures and other small projects I do). Which is why for large projects I hit on the idea of setting it on top of the landscaping cart which provides a lower wider base.

It’s funny how stuff can just sit around in my house or garage, fairly efficiently stowed (because that’s one of my obsessions), but then suddenly I’m struck by an idea for further optimization of space and uses.

To the right of the landscaping cart is my little bucket of landscaping tools, instantly at the ready to load into the cart for visits to my clients who are all in my immediate neighborhood.

I lived in Tokyo for five years, and lived in a 19-foot travel trailer for 10 years; those experiences have strongly influenced my design approach. An even deeper influence was my childhood, which included a rich diet of camping, travel (military family!), and learning how to be super portable and organized, and pare down to just the things that mattered most, and derive genuine joy from all that.

Other pics show:

• the latest in my ongoing efforts at finding a good way to hang up my bicycle (may not be a good longterm solution because even tho my little single-speed fixie is very lightweight, it might end up bending the garage door too much despite the fact that I put a “ground support” underneath it by stacking pallets).
• someone’s discarded, surprisingly new-looking fence that I use as a hanging wall for bicycle tire pump, helmet, mini artworks and other stuff.
• my various American flags, including both the regular one and a “76” one. Yes, I believe in my country, and I believe we can regain the DIY thrift, resourcefulness, and other sound attributes we were known for in the past. (Many of you have never stopped having those attributes!) (UPDATE: Flag images have been removed because 1) they ended up taking over a post that was intended to be about space design and personal expression; and 2) regardless of what I want our flag to stand for, the image is triggering to many people for good reason. The flag pics prompted a discussion that has formed the seed for a future post about why I display the flag. My reasons are complex, as the flag has been misappropriated in recent years by groups and causes that espouse attitudes and behaviors I consider anti-American and anti-human. When I say I believe in my country it includes a belief in our willingness to self-reflect and evolve.)
• my motorcycle, a little 2006 Honda Rebel 250 that I bought from a nice young man on Facebook marketplace. I have had it a couple of months since passing the mandatory FDOT course, and have derived much pleasure and a surprising lot of transferable skills from learning to ride.

Eco note: I have used about 2 gallons of gas so far; I expect to use about 25 gallons per year; and I account for this recreational hobby in my carbon budget. (If you are still feeling guilty or defiant or hopeless about your hobbies or other lifestyle aspects that don’t seem “eco-friendly,” you are missing one of the key points of my book and blog. Namely: We are allowed to have enjoyments! We don’t have to be pure and perfect! In fact, if we put out a “have to be pure and perfect” vibe, nobody is going to want to do low-footprint living!! The best way to get more people interested in radical reduction is to do it your way!! We need to show the world many examples of how it can be done without sacrificing pleasure and self-expression. In fact, I find in many cases that it INCREASES my pleasure and self-expression!

Deep-Green troops, thank you for your companionship on this challenging and exciting path! I am always here for you.

PS. If you like this post and want to support my work, please share it and check out my other content! Thank you.

Yesterday, on a street corner on a rural edge of my county, there was a Nazi demonstration. Yes, an actual Nazi demonstration. (I heard about it via a post by a fellow admin of one of the groups I co-admin; she in turn heard about it from a friend who took the pictures.)

After sitting with this for awhile, wondering what to do, I wrote an email to our county Sheriff, and CCed several local leaders and media organizations. The letter:

Subject: Nazi demonstration in Deland

Dear Sheriff Chitwood:

Thank you always for your dedication to rooting out evil in the world. You may already be aware of this Nazi white supremacist demonstration that happened yesterday in north Deland (corner of 17 and 15), but I’m alerting you just in case.

As you can see, along with the swastika, there are messages promoting white supremacy. Particularly disturbing is the one saying that “the only real Americans are white”!

I consider this an attack on our citizenry, including our own police force and city/county leaders. Historically, this kind of speech has been considered a gray area, with some court cases ruling that it is covered by the First Amendment, but others such as the landmark Skokie case of 1977 have ruled it “fighting words” and therefore not protected speech.

But even if it is legally allowed, is this who we are? Perhaps our various divisions of law enforcement and government would want to issue public statements deploring this kind of demonstration.

To me, this demonstration is an incitement. It creates an unsafe and putrid climate in our multi-racial, multi-cultural county and all the cities within it.

There may be nothing law enforcement can do to stop this kind of thing, but I wanted you all to have it on your radar. It is deeply disturbing to see on our very own streets this visual evidence of the same moral ill that our country fought against in World War II. It is even, dare I say, an insult to World War II veterans.

Thank you, and peaceful Happy Holidays to you and your department.

Jenny Nazak

Daytona Beach, Volusia County
(A city and county filled with, and proudly led by, many outstanding Black citizens and people of numerous other non-“white” categories of ancestry as well!)

The Sheriff responded:

We were well aware of this and had plenty of resources out there. While this is despicable and not who we are it is protected speech under the 1st Amend. It should be noted that with the exception of one person all participants were not from this County.

Hope this helps,
Sheriff Chitwood

And I replied:

Thank you Sheriff Chitwood; I am glad to hear you were aware and had resources deployed out there. Regardless of which county the participants were from, this happened on our soil, and we must stay vigilant.

And he replied to that:

WITHOUT A DOUBT.

*******

When something like this happens, one naturally feels at a loss for what to do about it; how to respond. It’s tempting to leave it for “someone else” to take care of; assume that “someone else” is already on it. But, if my fellow admin’s friend had not sent her the text and pictures, and if my fellow admin had not then posted them in our group, I might never have found out about this. So I realized that my letter was part of the “what to do about it and how to respond.”

My ancestry is whitey McWhiteface with an extra double supersized order of whiteness (I checked, and turned out to be even more “white” than I had thought.) If someone like me doesn’t speak up, I am allowing our public spaces to become more dangerous for all.

And finally, a note about “whiteness”:

A little while back, after the Black Lives Matter protests, I took some anti-racism trainings and did some readings. I read in “People’s History of the United States,” a bestselling and highly regarded book by Howard Zinn, that “white” is not actually a real race!

It was a construct created by wealthy land-owners in order to bust up the natural affinity that formed between the plantation workers (Anglo-European immigrant indentured servants, and the African people that the land-owning classes had kidnapped and enslaved).

Basically, as I understand it, the overlords fostered a “white” identity among the Scotch-Irish, English, and other indentured servants of Anglo-European ancestry, and gave them just enough petty little privileges to make them feel like a “superior” class to the enslaved Africans they had previously formed close associations with.

When I read that about the deliberate plot by the plantation owners to create division among the two groups of working people they ruled over, it really made a lot of sense and explained a lot! And resonated with my own observations and some other things I’d read.