Working-Class Racism: Broaden the Focus

Abstract

It seems increasingly clear that the labor for much of its youth evaded questions of race. This is especially true of works on nineteenth-century class formation in the antebellum North. Many of these monographs ignored the presence of black workers, or made light of the issue of white racism, or failed to explore how the association of blacks with servitude shaped white working-class consciousness. This evasion resulted from the strenuous, all-consuming effort to escape the strait jacket of exceptionalism. To counter those who argued that American workers lacked European labor's class consciousness and revolutionary proclivities, the new labor historians assembled arguments to show just how western European American labor was. This was an important enter prise, and it recast our understanding of American labor and American capitalism. But it came at a certain price. As Nell Painter has noted, labor historians have sometimes written as though European-American work ers lived out their destinies divorced from slavery and racism, as though, say, Chartism meant more in the history of the American working class than slavery.1 A similar r??valuation is underway regarding how labor historians have addressed questions of race in relation to the great organizing drives of the 1930s. Here, the emerging criticism is not so much that historians have ignored race but that they have exaggerated the commitment of CIO unions to racial egalitarianism. The work of Joe Trotter, Robin Kelley, Robert Norrell, Bruce Nelson, Nancy Quam-Wickham, and others has given us a grim portrait of union rank and files and leaderships infested with racial prejudice and thus unable to serve as effective vehicles for racial equality.2 This critique has been applied to industrial unions North and South and to those, like the United Mine Workers, long considered to be the most progressive in labor's ranks. The historians who are unearthing working-class racism and demonstrating the pervasiveness of its influence write with a degree of passion similar to that of the scholars who, fifteen year ago, discovered how the concept of republicanism could be deployed in the service of class consciousness. This sea change in the tone and substance of labor historiography makes Michael Goldfield's piece on race and the CIO especially timely. His purpose is neither to endorse the new line of interpretation nor to defend