Well, they managed to get a lot of ethnic groups in the U.S. thinking of themselves as white by welding them into one reactionary identity, not-Black. It only took a few decades. Was that identity created artificially by the state?
Irish, Italians et. al became 'white' partly through the evisceration of the cities. The WASP ruling class certainly needed to make more people identify with them (against all logic) and racism is a convenient tool for that. Apart from promoting the suburbs, there's also the drug war which was fairly explicitly created as a race war.
Jenny Brown