486 LABOR HISTORY

RACE AND CLASS

by
Alan Dawley and Joe William Trotter, Jr.

Scholarship on race in American labor history steadily grows in

quantity and quality. Every month seems to bring added understanding
of the intersections of race and class, racial segmentation of the labor
market, and the impact of race on culture and community. This would
be reason enough to publish a special issue. Yet in many ways, the more
that is understood about race in American society, the more elusive
it becomes. Why do social relations come to be defined in racial terms?
What accounts for shifting patterns of race relations? What about the
fact that the very idea of race changes over time?*
This is an especially good time for stock-taking because we are
passing through a period when the definition of race is once again in
flux. Debates about whether race is declining in significance have been
in the air for some time. Deindustrialization and the decline of the labor
movement have shifted attention to non-traditional subjects, such as
gender and community. Because of the recent reshuffling of America's
ethnic deck, what was once seen largely in bi-polar terms is becoming
multi-polar. That shift was vividly dramatized by the 1992 riots in South
Central Los Angeles, where blacks and Hispanics were arrested in
roughly equal numbers, and the targets of the rioters were often Korean
merchants. What a contrast between this multicultural riot and the ghetto
uprisings of the 1960s, where the targets were the symbols of white
authority.^
The changing shape of race points to the need to examine it in his-
torical terms. There is no better case for historicizing race than the
strange career oiLaRaza. Are Mexican-Americans a people, an ethnic

'Discussions of race as an idea include Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America
(New York, 1983); Michael Banton, The Idea of Race (Boulder, 1977); Richard Hofstadter,
Social Darwinsim in American Thought, rev. ed. (Boston, 1955; orig. 1944).
'On multiculturalism, see Manning Marable, "Beyond racial identity politics: towards a libera-
tion theory for multicultural democracy," Race and Class, 35 (1993), 113-130.
INTRODUCTION 487

group, a nationality, or a race? What about internal distinctions be-

tween "white" Spanish and "dark" Indians?^ The U.S. census has done
its bit to confound the categories. Having always counted Mexican-
Americans as white, the census bureau decided by 1930 that they were,
in fact, a "colored race." That reclassification offers an important clue
to solving the problem of race. The reason "Mexican" is an ethnic (or
national) designation on some occasions and a racial one on others
has to do with power. At least that is what David Montejano contends.
Using what he calls a "relaxed" class analysis, he argues Mexicans were
a race "whenever they were subjected to policies of discrimination or
control." Thus during the economic transition to large-scale agribusi-
ness, Mexican immigrants were subjected to labor coercions and Jim-
Crow-style segregation that heightened their identification as a race
in order to bring about their subordination as laborers. After World
War II, however, greater economic diversity, social integration, and po-
litical influence undermined explicitly racial forms of subordination."
Similar patterns can be drawn from the experience of some Euro-
pean immigrant groups. Between the 1880s and the 1940s as the arc
of Social Darwinism rose and fell, the racial identities of Slavs, Italians,
and Jews rose and fell along with it. Deemed inferior breeds at the height
of race-consciousness in the early 1920s, each of these "races" had be-
come extinct by the time Hitler and his Aryans were defeated. Appar-
ently, movement into higher social positions is accompanied by escape
from the "unfit."
The experience of Chinese immigrants is another case in point. Given
long-standing and deep-seated prejudices, it would have been reason-
able to predict that the influx of Chinese after the 1965 revisions in
immigration law would have touched off a wave of nativist and racist
reaction. And so it did. Yet because the class composition of these new
arrivals was skewed initially toward the middle ranks, there was also
talk of the Chinese (and Koreans) as "model minorities." Whether this
was a case where "money whitens" or something else, the fact remained
that race no longer worked to subordinate Chinese immigrants the way
it had in an earlier period. Surely, here was a case of the declining sig-
nificance of race.
Even where race runs deepest in American life—the black/white
divide—historicizing is essential. For example, for decades racial segre-
gation worked to segment occupational structures, divide the labor

^Earl Shorris, "Racism and Racismo," Latinos: A Biography of the People (New York, 1992),
146-171. Further complications arise in subsuming Mexican-Americans among Latinos.
••David Montejano, A nglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin, TX, 1987),
4-9.
488 LABOR HISTORY

movement, and maintain the dominance of the (white/male) capitalist

class. Yet segregation (at least de jure) came and went. Even during
the reign of Jim Crow, there was significant change over time. TWo re-
cent prize-winning books provide illustration. One shows how New
Orleans dock workers in the early part of the century more or less ac-
cepted the system of segregation that drove them into separate unions.
The other shows how Memphis workers in the 1930s and 1940s chal-
lenged segregation in attempting to unite black and white workers under
the Congress of Industrial Organizations.*
Similarly, the process of class formation requires historical, not
merely structural, analysis. Moving away from the model of ghettoiza-
tion that dominated black history in the early 20th century, labor
historians have emphasized the role of class formation in African-
American life. Whether in northern cities, southern cities, or border
state mine patches, the formative experience was the Great Migration.
Movement from field to factory established the black working class
as the foundation for 20th-century Afro-American community life, af-
fecting everything from soul music to the Garvey movement. Labor
historians may debate whether the Garvey movement was working class,
middle class, or simply nationalist, but in doing so they stress the im-
portance of class to black history and to American history in general.
In this regard, they are echoing a general theme of labor historians.
Whatever Americans may wish to believe about themselves, class plays
a fundamental role in their history.
That is true of white workers no less than black, although in very
different ways. African-Americans are never allowed to forget their ra-
cial identity, even though the African-American community is built
around other things, such as kinship, culture, and tradition. For whites,
on the other hand, racial identity —"whiteness" —is not a deeply in-
grained oppressive aspect of their everyday social world. Thus they have
the luxury of pretending race does not matter (a "color-blind" society),
even as they assume the opposite—that their racial identity is the only
one that matters. That assumption rises to the surface when "white-
ness" is defined against its Others — not black, or not yellow, or not
red. Although "whiteness" is a cultural fiction, it was potent enough,
some argue, to be the basis for a social identity in which all the virtues
that went with labor in the nineteenth century-nobility, honesty,
manliness - were coded white. It may be too much to argue that "white-

»Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923 (Ur-
bana, IL, 1991); Michael Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis
Workers (Urbana, 1993).
INTRODUCTION 489

ness" was the central feature of Euro-American working class culture

and politics from the Jacksonian years through the anti-Chinese move-
ment in California.* But there is no doubt about its importance in giving
generations of white workers an illusion of power and a kind of psy-
chic compensation for their lower class status.
So deep is the black-white divide that it is tempting to take it for
granted. Ever since the formation of a specifically racial form of slavery,
America has never been without white racism. And what is distinctive
about racism in America is its extreme polarities. Lacking the fine gra-
dations of Latin America or even the "colored" and "mixed race" cate-
gories of South Africa, America simply divides into black and white.
It is the one census distinction that has not varied since 1790 (though
that may soon change if the designation "mulatto" is adopted). As such,
it has provided quantitative historians with a clearly defined variable
to measure everything from school drop-out rates to unemployment.
Moreover, it is often invoked as an explanatory device to account for
segmentation of the labor market, division in the labor movement, de-
feat in strikes, and, ultimately (along with ethnic divisions), the ina-
bility of American workers to sustain a major socialist or labor party.'
However successful in showing the workings of racism in a class
society, economic analysis is less compelling in uncovering its sources.
Labor historians have too often accepted racial division as a mere re-
flex of economic competition. To be sure, there were certain advan-
tages for white craftsmen to be gained from restricting access to the
trades. And fear of competition from low-paid labor reflected a real
threat to what AFL leaders called the American standard of living.*
But that does not explain why the threat was construed in racial terms.
Moreover, the extreme violence directed against the supposed racial
competitors—riot, lynching, mob action—suggest that other motives
were at work. In the end, the argument that racism was rational in an
economic sense is perhaps more alibi than explanation.
Psychological interpretations are not wholly satisfying, either. Al-
though racism is surely among the most irrational of passions, the Freu-

'David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (London, 1991); Alexander Saxton, The Indispensabte
Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1971).
'David Gordon, et at.. Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of
Labor in the United States (Cambridge, Eng., 1982).
'Edna Bonacich, "A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split Labor Market," /Imer/con Socio-
logical Review, 37 (1972), 547-559; racism and labor market competition are discussed in
Paul Ong, "Chinese Labor in Early San Francisco: Racial Segmentation and Industrial Ex-
pansion,"/I meraj/a, 8 (1981), 62-92; Paul Frisch, '"Gibralter of Unionism': Women, Blacks
and the Anti-Chinese Movement in Butte, Montana, 1880-1900," Southwest Economy and
Society, 6 (1984), 3-13.
490 LABOR HISTORY

dian notion that it originates in psychic repression of bodily urges does

not do justice to the evidence of historical variation.' The cultural ex-
planation also sometimes gets carried away. Indeed, with the decline
of biological determinism after the Second World War, a cultural fun-
damentalism has arisen to take its place. The belief that race is the dom-
inant fact in African-American experience, probably in southern his-
tory, and perhaps in American history, as well, ranges across the
spectrum from Afrocentrics to frightened liberals. Even some radical
historians stand on the rock of racism in their battle with conserva-
tives. Thus in rebuttal to conservative ideas about ethnic pluralism and
color-blind individualism, Michael Omi and Howard Winant propose
a model of "racial formation" in which they assert that race in the United
States should be treated as "a fundamental organizing principle of so-
cial relationships."*"
But to say that race deserves as much attention as class is not to
say the two originate in the same social nexus or should have the same
location in social theory. At a minimum, it is necessary to point out
that race is more directly linked to social reproduction than to the struc-
ture of property ownership; that the racial birthright erects social bar-
riers in quite different ways from class; and that any given social for-
mation is more likely to show class inequalities than racial ones. In
light of these points, the fundamentalist approach to race appears, well,
fundamentalist.
What is most provocative in the current re-thinking is the challenge
to any kind of determinist approach to race. Arguments come from
widely different perspectives. Without denying the pervasive impact
of race and racism, Barbara Fields argues that race becomes powerful
in a capitalist society only because it provides a way of reconciling the
contradiction between egalitarian values and class inequality. Using a
concept of ideology derived ultimately from Marx, Fields argues, "Ra-
cial ideology supplied the means of explaining slavery to people whose
terrain was a republic founded on radical doctrines of liberty and nat-
ural rights...." Alexander Saxton extends the point to nineteenth cen-
tury party politics in arguing that "whiteness" was the main bridge
linking working class whites to the shifting political coalitions that ruled
the country."

'Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (New
York, 1990; orig. 1980), xxv-xxviii.
'"Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to
the 1980s (New York, 1986), 66, ital. in original.
"Barbara Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Re-
view, 181 (May/June 1990), 95-118; quote on 114; Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of
INTRODUCTION 491

George Fredrickson also wonders about the primacy of race. With

Weber, he posits the necessity for some hierarchy of status, but leaves
open the question of whether race is required to assign positions on
the totem pole. Indeed, thanks to the civil rights movement, blacks are
no longer categorically relegated to lower-caste status, with the result
that "opportunities for the construction of class and the deconstruc-
tion of race may now exist to an unprecedented degree.. . . '"^
Expanding that opening, discourse theory has taken us about as
far away from biology as we can get. Positing that race is socially con-
structed, just as class and gender are, some historians have arrived at
the notion that these three discourses somehow "intersect." And judging
by the number of book titles which run the permutations of race, class,
and gender, there is a lot of intersecting going on. Paralleling the shift
from "sex" to "gender," postmodernism totally repudiates biological
thinking —what Cornel West calls "racial reasoning" —in favor of cul-
tural explanations of group difference."
From the opposite end of the political spectrum, some conserva-
tives are even more ardent in their denial of priority to race. Especially
in the case of neoconservatives such as Thomas Sowell, race is seen
as an artificial impediment to the free exchange of market commodi-
ties. Get rid of racial bias and, especially, government-sponsored affir-
mative action programs, and true individualism will out. To be sure,
what is given with one hand is often taken away with the argument
that black people are responsible for family break-up, poverty, and slums.
But the desire to keep race at a distance shows the low esteem into which
biological thinking has fallen in the social sciences.'"
In a century where racial reasoning has led to so many horrors,
even sociobiologists shy away from genetic determinism. Pierre van den
Berghe, best known for the idea of herrenvolk democracy, argues for
a genetic base for kinship that predisposes people to support members
of their own "ethny." But he is at pains to warn that genetic differences
have not been shown to bear "any functional relationship with the so-

the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America
Verso, 1990), 13-18. The paradox of racial inequality emerging from the egalitarian ideology
is compared to the Hindu caste system in Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: An Essay
on the Caste System, trans. M. Sainsbury (Chicago, 1970).
Political sociology sometimes treats race as a way of shoring up hierarchy in a class-divided
society. See Thomas D. Boston, Race, Class, and Conservatism (Boston, 1988); David T.
Wellman, Portraits of White Racism, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1993).
"George Fredrickson, "Reflections on the Comparative History and Sociology of Racism," un-
published paper delivered 1992, 13, in possession of authors.
"Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston, 1993), chapt. 2 "The Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning."
"Thomas Sowell, Markets and Minorities (New York, 1981); Shelby Steele, The Content of Our
Character (New York, 1989); George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York, 1981).
492 LABOR HISTORY

cial attribution of dominance and subordination." Inequality is socially,

not biologically, determined.'*
With biology in disrepute, ethno-history has come to the fore. At
the intersection of Afro-American and labor history are studies that
emphasize blacks as a people more than a race. The distinction is im-
portant. Instead of treating blacks (or whites, for that matter) as the
sum total of their race relations—in other words, instead of defining
African-Americans in terms of the white Other (and vice versa), ethno-
history examines the social world and lifeways of black folk. Some-
times the influence of the Chicago School of sociology is evident in
these studies, where African-Americans are treated as one among many
working class ethnic enclaves.'*
In subsuming race under ethnicity, ethno-history has provided an
important clue to understanding the roots of racism. The trouble with
economic (certainly with economistic) treatments of race in terms of
competition or segmentation in the labor market is that race, in the
first instance, is not about the labor market. It is about kinship, court-
ship, recreation, education, and who marries whom —in short, social
reproduction. The difference between race and ethnicity is the differ-
ence between a high barrier to inter-group socialization and a low one.
When the issue of socialization is posed in terms of purity (clean/
unclean) and blood lines (desirable/undesirable), we know we have
moved from ethnic to racial thinking. Conversely, the more differences
are defined in terms of culture and custom—as opposed to biologi-
cally inherited traits-the more we are in the realm of ethnicity.
One of the most fruitful consequences of women's studies has been
to draw attention to just these issues. In contrast to "either/or" models
of race and class, some of the newer work provides supple analysis of
how class structures are constituted through family and community."
As a result, it is clear that labor historians will need to pay more atten-
tion to kinship, courtship, and culture if they wish to get a fully devel-
oped picture of where race arises, how it shapes class development,
and what its explanatory limits are.
The common thread running through all these anti-fundamentalist

"Pierre van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York, 1981), 31. The rise, fall, and reas-
sertion of biological influences are traced in Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The
Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York, 1991).
"John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and
Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960 (Urbana, IL, 1982). Compare Earl Lewis, In Their Own In-
terests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley, 1991).
"Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Fron-
tier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (NevfYoik, 1987); Dolores Janiewski, S;s/er/ioorf
Denied: Race, Class, and Gender in a New South Community (Philadelphia, 1985).
INTRODUCTION 493

arguments is that race cannot be taken as a given. Instead, it is more

a contingent influence than an ultimate cause. It is less the thing that
explains slavery, poverty, or crime than the thing that itself needs ex-
plaining.
In posing race as a problem, the current issue marks a departure
from the 1969 publication of a special issue of this journal devoted
to "The Negro and the American Labor Movement." The issue was
something of a milestone.** Featuring a line-up of then-younger scholars
it examined the relationship between black workers and the labor move-
ment through a series of case studies running from Reconstruction to
the Congress of Industrial Organizations. It reflected current schol-
arly debates—whether to focus on unions or workers, racial antagonism
or cooperation, "Negroes" or "blacks." And it revealed an assumption
among several contributors that race was a given. Whatever else was
in dispute, the black-white divide was so obvious as to require no ex-
planation. According to one author, "Such studies need no special justifi-
cation for, in many ways, 'race is the most visible, and thus the most
potent, of the things that make one lot of men feel different from an-
other lot ' ""
The dissolution of consensus on that point is evident in the current
issue. In deciding to publish historiographical rather than empirical
studies, our intention is to show how race has been reconceptualized
over the past quarter century. Recognition of differences within racial
groups—whether of class, gender, or color—has certainly complicated
the black-white divide, as is evident in the article by Joe Trotter. In
addition, postmodernism has all but buried biology—what is "visible"
as phenotype—while turning to culture —what is constructed as
meaning. That shift, in turn, promotes a move from bi-polarity toward
multi-polarity, as reflected in the articles in this volume on Latina and
Latino workers by Camile Guerin-Gonzales and on Asian workers by
Chris Friday.
At the very least, these articles underline the necessity of historicizing
race. They cause us to ponder why social relations come to be defined

"Labor History, 10 (1969). Not since the 1930s had labor historians focused so intensely black
workers. The impact of black history on labor history was evident in the publication of
Sterling Spero and Abram Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement
(New York, Atheneum, 1969; orig. 1931). Originally published to fill in a missing chapter
in labor history, the book was republished more as an addition to the exploding field of
black history. It appeared with a new preface by Herbert Gutman in the series "Studies in
American Negro Life," edited by August Meier. Likewise, in the 1969 special issue of this
journal, James A. Gross, "Historians and the Literature of the Negro Worker" began with
the declaration, "Scholars have rediscovered Black History," p. 536.
"James A. Gross, "Historians and the Literature of the Negro Worker," op. cit., 546.
494 LABOR HISTORY

in racial, and especially, in racist terms, and how those terms change
over time. Where the current reformulation will come out is not clear.
Are we going through a period similar to the early part of the century
when racial thinking becomes more prevalent, leading to another round
of restrictive immigration laws? Or are we witnessing the opposite, the
retreat of racial thinking in the face of an increasingly interdependent
global culture where Americans learn to trace their lineage through
four great diasporas from Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia?
On one point, however, past experience is perfectly reliable. The out-
come of changes in the ideology and practice of race is sure to shape
the experiences of working people and scholarship about them.