Definitely...I recently looked up another phobic word for fear of change...
Metathesiophobia
Now if the manufacturing industry is not coming back the same way it was or certain industries are diminishing and new ones coming up, etc...this is all stressful on those who may have had hopes (based on a previous generation's experience) that one could stick to an industry for one's entire life and make a life from that. Those days are gone, perhaps. So there may be a lot of fear and concern as things are changing and some dimensions of American culture were hoping for something more static.
If people are seen to be involved in any way (whether they are a cause or not of the issue) with anything that is distressing then those people tend to become the target of those feelings of fear I think. People are the most powerful agent in most systems so they are seen as a single point of control over that system. Then people in fear can act out their loss of control by trying to assert control over the people that they think they can leverage or blame.
I've read in Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror that racism evolved out of economic competition.
I think it's natural for people to fear change to some extent, but I think it largely depends on whether it's change for the better or change for the worse. But it also has to be put into context of what people actually see and have to deal with in their daily lives. Over the past several generations, one of the central ideas has been that, in America, each generation shows improvement over the previous generation, but that's what may be diminishing. Perhaps those days are gone.
Nowadays, people are fed a daily dose of escalating political rhetoric, talk about global warming and predictions of environmental catastrophe on the horizon, deficits and national debts which grow larger with each passing second, geopolitical instability and rumors of war, and a general decline overall. In their own lives, lots of people (tens of millions) struggle with rising costs in terms of food, housing, healthcare, education, energy, etc. - while they see their paychecks shrink and better opportunities becoming fewer and far between.
I think racism probably had earlier beginnings. One idea I've seen come up occasionally is that racism was largely invented to keep lower class whites and lower class blacks from banding together and forming a united front against the upper classes. By spreading that idea among lower class whites, they could feel as if they're not at the very bottom. Hence, the popularity of Andrew Jackson, whose policies of ethnic cleansing ("Trail of Tears") cleared huge tracts of land that landless whites could then claim - and then use African slaves to work for them. The same basic policy was continued for decades leading up to the Civil War, and it even continued after the slaves had been freed (on paper, at least).
Once that policy ran its course and diminishing returns were setting in, the policy shifted towards elevating blacks and other people of color during the Civil Rights era. That had the effect of scapegoating the lower class whites for all of America's sins, while portraying the upper class whites as "liberal saviors."
That, I think, is the root of the Big Lie behind identity politics.
By demonizing lower class whites, it directed minority anger at that group (or diffused it against all whites of all classes), while leaving the upper class whites alone and mostly off the hook.
Even to this day, the common narrative is that it's all about so-called "rednecks" and "hillbillies" from the South, with an inordinate focus on the short-lived Confederacy as being the symbolic whipping boy for the crimes of the upper class all throughout American history. The effect has been to manipulate people of color to focus on "whiteness" or "white privilege" as being their main bugaboo. Sometimes it's also addressed as "white male privilege" as a ploy to manipulate white women and to further divide lower/middle class white men and women against each other (as recent events demonstrate).
Ultimately, it's had the effect of keeping the lower classes divided against each other, making them poorer while the rich get richer. It's also had the effect of fanning the flames of fear and xenophobia among the lower class whites, who ostensibly feel that they're being targeted for "payback" by minorities and immigrants who are angry over centuries of oppression and want their pound of flesh.
