Racial Identity and Exclusion in Working-Class America

Abstract

Bruce Nelson credits Ohio steelworkers he met through historian-activistlawyer Staughton Lynd for inspiring his book. In the 1970s these rebel steelworkers built an extraordinary campaign for workers' control of the steel industry in the face of mill closings that devastated communities, and called for democracy in their unions. It was a story that was in sync with the new labor history, which at the time was recovering workers' agency from the dustbin of history. But much of Nelson's book is an elegy to the rank-and-file school of labor history, a school that emphasizes self-activity and inspired so many radical historians like him when they came into the field a generation ago. Nelson argues that labor historians' studies of ordinary workers' agency (including his own book, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s [1988]) overlooked stark evidence about the flip side of working class formation, a powerful impulse toward racialization of class experience. Workers' culture and creativity, the struggle for workers' control, and workers' communitiesthe foci of much of the new labor history-get examined from this flip side. Extending David Roediger's thesis about the wages of whiteness into the twentieth century, Nelson argues that the U.S. working class was continually regenerated through racial polarization. The culprit in the story is the white rank-and-file, whose recidivist racism is presented with a great sense of tragedy. Nelson suggests that white worker identity was developed in such a way that union democracy and workers' control-the political agenda of those Ohio workers as well as many of their labor historian allies-meant exclusion and repression of African-American workers rather than solidarity and universal empowerment. In separate halves of the book, Nelson examines the racial fault lines drawn and redrawn by longshoremen and steelworkers. He notes that these