Today we have a name for people like this: Flying Monkeys!

They are the kind of people willing to be the henchmen of the bad guys, and carry water for bad ideas, for a handful of crumbs from their masters, or the illusion of power, and yes, we can start with Irish people being hired as overseers, on plantations where they could abuse the enslaved at will, but never be able to amass enough wealth to ever actually own a single one of them, or we can talk about Southern white women, where the only thing they could ever own were the enslaved people who got passed down to them from their wealthy families.