They’ve been doing it since reconstruction. I read the opinion once that labor never got true power in America because they kept excluding blacks for a long time. I think about that a lot. Hating a black guy was more important to many labor movements than class solidarity.
This is why labor unions really started to fail in the 60s and 70s. The union guys valued race far more than class and the powers of unions diminished.
They have been doing it well before reconstruction. Once upon a time there wasn’t that much racism in the US, but after Bacon’s rebellion the elites realized that whites and blacks were working together and have since then been pitting them against one another.
They also purged all the communists as a show of good faith to the government (which, uh, didn’t work). Those communists were likely more prone to class solidarity as an ideological commitment and also more willing to fight with radical actions like strikes, but instead we were left with opportunistic leadership that just wanted to secure the bag for themselves, and at best the other members of the union, but had no interest in any building any kind of broad coalition or promoting equality on a societal level - that would make them sound like a Red.
They’ve been doing it since reconstruction. I read the opinion once that labor never got true power in America because they kept excluding blacks for a long time. I think about that a lot. Hating a black guy was more important to many labor movements than class solidarity.
This is why labor unions really started to fail in the 60s and 70s. The union guys valued race far more than class and the powers of unions diminished.
They have been doing it well before reconstruction. Once upon a time there wasn’t that much racism in the US, but after Bacon’s rebellion the elites realized that whites and blacks were working together and have since then been pitting them against one another.
They also purged all the communists as a show of good faith to the government (which, uh, didn’t work). Those communists were likely more prone to class solidarity as an ideological commitment and also more willing to fight with radical actions like strikes, but instead we were left with opportunistic leadership that just wanted to secure the bag for themselves, and at best the other members of the union, but had no interest in any building any kind of broad coalition or promoting equality on a societal level - that would make them sound like a Red.