This essay is a follow-up to Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party.
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| Striking teachers in the West Virginia statehouse, 2018 (CNN photo) |
Political commentators conventionally date the decline of American labor unions to President Reagan mass-firing the PATCO strikers in 1981. But I think the process started much sooner. After peaking in the 1950s, union membership has declined steadily. Though reliable statistics go back to only 1983 (everything prior is estimates and probabilities), union membership rates have halved in that time. This decline has correlated with another powerful social force.
Ian Haney Lopèz dates union desegregation to 1973, and claims that the battles surrounded seniority. White laborers, Lopèz claims, would rather relinquish all union protections, than surrender the senior standing they achieved under racially biased rules. Tacit within this refusal, though, is the corollary that White workers refused to negotiate alongside Black workers. Too many White workers would rather suffer than see Black people share their protections.
I cannot verify this 1973 date; FDR desegregated defense contractors by executive order during World War II, while Truman desegregated the military in 1948. The American Federation of Labor recognized its first majority-Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925. Union desegregation seems more gradual than abrupt. The point remains, however, that the more inclusive unions became, the more White workers abandoned them.
I’ve begun this essay with labor unions because they’re quantifiable. And of course, correlation doesn’t equal causation; White workers might’ve decided they didn’t need union protection and also that they didn’t want to work alongside Black co-workers coincidentally. But the third prong of the trident, the election of softball racist Ronald Reagan, of “strapping young buck” fame, suggests that racism directed White workers’ economic choices, not vice versa.
This pattern recurs throughout American history. Critics have condemned Nikole Hannah-Jones and her 1619 Project for suggesting the Founding Fathers created America specifically to protect their racial hierarchy. But the fact remains that, after the American Revolution, nine of the thirteen original states, including New York and New Jersey, still practiced slavery. White Americans who talked up liberty and autonomy needed ninety years to fully stop enslaving Black Americans.
And then Jim Crow began.
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| Bull Connor looses the dogs on protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3rd, 1963 |
Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison wrote that American values have long valorized individualism and autonomy; but such values have weight only to the extent that they’re denied to some Americans. Me being unfettered only means something while someone else remains restrained. Morrison, a novelist, meant this specifically in literary terms, because in fiction, we can abstract such values to broad moral precepts. But the same principle applies to society writ large.
In today’s America, “peace” doesn’t mean the stability necessary to pursue our physical and spiritual well-being, it means the absence of war. “Wealth” doesn’t mean physical comfort and a full belly, it means the power necessary to employ other people to look after your stuff. “Law” doesn’t mean reliable systems of social order, it means violent crackdowns on nonconformists and the poor. We define our shared values oppositionally.
And, as Morrison writes, we often use race as mental shorthand for this opposition. Sure, sometimes we signify “the other” with other external signs, like hair or piercings. But if White punk rockers want acceptance from the squares, they can shave their Mohawks and remove their tongue studs. Black and Hispanic people can’t stop being Black and Hispanic, and therefore can’t stop being shorthanded as “less than.”
It’s easy, considering American public mythology, to forget that when Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis in 1969, he wasn’t there to mobilize for racial justice. He was there to help unionize the city’s sanitation workers. Sure, those sanitation workers were overwhelmingly Black, but Dr. King had recognized the inextricable bond between American racism and economic injustice. Poverty and Blackness occupy the same headspace in the American imagination.
Concisely put, America organizes itself into in-groups and out-groups, then racializes the groups to simplify remembering who belongs where. The same redlining practices that preserve segregated neighborhoods, have also segregated labor forces. The minute Black people wanted union protections, White workers began embracing myths of radical individualism, even as such individualism left them broke and powerless against billionaire business owners.
Better broke than Black, amirite?
We’re somewhat seeing this rolled back. Black deaths caught on camera have ignited a sense of justice in some White Americans, though not yet enough. But it’s carried its own pushback. Capitalists like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison have sought political power that would’ve made Cornelius Vanderbilt or Andrew Carnegie blush. But it all for the same goal: maintaining the hierarchy of haves and have-nots. Which is, usually, racial.
To Be Concluded
