Comment on “The Racial Politics of Progressive Americanism: New Deal Liberalism and the Subordination of Black Workers in the UAW”

Abstract

My comments on Charles Williams' “Racial Politics of Progressive Americanism” can be brief, because it is an excellent essay and I could not agree more with its central argument. Williams demonstrates that, even though United Automobile Workers (UAW) leaders used the language of racial equality to support some civil rights advances, Walter Reuther and others also invoked a merely formal equality to deny power to blacks thought to be allied with Communists, and to sustain the support of anti-black workers. They pretended that African Americans were an ethnic group like those of many European-descended Americans, ignoring the enormous differences in the oppression black Americans had long experienced and continued to experience (and still experience). In these ways, an Americanist language, arguably a “liberal” language, of equal rights worked against the racial equality it purported to honor. On these points, I am fully persuaded.