The Racialized Construction Of Class in the United States

Introduction IN THE UNITED STATES, THE HOLD OF RACISM ON WHITE WORKERS HAS BEEN A constant historical problem for working-class organization. It has been a barrier to union organizing and socialist class consciousness. There are many instances where white workers have actually rejected unionism, typically in the South, because it implied shared membership with black workers. Even in the face of utmost hardship, white workers have traded away economic improvement and class strength for illusory cultural privileges of whiteness. The contemporary quietus toward runaway shops reflects this trade off; white workers watch the overall job base erode in the belief that ultimately only the lower layers of the work force will be effected. Radicals and organizers usually explain racism as a management tactic to divide and control the working class. Yet this explains neither its power, longevity, nor tenacity. Instead, the notable historical exceptions to which radicals make reference remain primarily exceptional cases. Labor history suggests racism has been far more than a tactic, that it is something that resides instead at the very core of the culture. For instance, in the northern states, immediately after the revolution (1800 to 1830), white craft workers and artisans supported the abolition of slavery. To a great degree, slaves in the North were skilled workers, craftsmen of competence equal to the whites, and were often employed in direct competition with white workers by their white owners. [1] Against this competition, white workers had little recourse; their real competitor was the white slave owner. When slavery was abolished, however, these same white workers excluded the freed slaves from their organizations, supported disfranchisement, and at times organized boycotts against employers who continued to use black skilled labor (McManus, 1966: 183). In other words, they had supported abolition in order to then exclude the former slaves as real competition. Thus, they helped initiate the prototype structures of se gregation that would later become Jim Crow. By excluding black workers, rather than joining and coordinating with them, white workers set them up as competition and threw away the chance to make themselves, as a class, a larger and more significant political force in the new states In their rhetoric of exclusion, whites charged that black labor was inferior and that they were incapable of good work, at a time when the skill of black workers was equal to or better than that of white workers, as well as in demand. Ultimately, under the heel of segregation, black workers were relegated to unskilled labor and lost their crafts. The "free labor" ideology of the 1850s, which played a role in the settlement of the Midwest and California, [2] rested on similar contradictions. This ideology derived from the Jacksonian valorization of the "producing class" of workers and artisans. It affirmed the dignity and honor of work, and opposed slavery as demeaning to labor--but only within a white orientation. Ideologically, it equated black workers, both free and slave, with slavery and servility. It thus became part of the rationale for advocating the exclusion of all African-Americans from the new territories, on the claim that their mere presence would degrade the honor of white labor. All in all, white workers opposed slavery to exclude black people, and opposed black people to exclude slavery. As Saxton (1971: 22) demonstrates, in California this process of exclusion did not function to divide the working class, but to define the working class as white. The "free labor" ideology assumed a certain class mobility for wage laborers, by which they could eventually rise to forms of self-employment. That is, workers relied upon a sense of common interest between labor and capital, a social parity between the two that would permit both working-class mobility and individualism. …