Dublin Opinion

You see brothers and sisters, there’s not a single good reason for any worker — especially any union member — to vote against Barack Obama.

There’s only one really bad reason to vote against him: because he’s not white.

And I want to talk about that because I saw that for myself during the Pennsylvania primary.

On 1 July 2008 Richard Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), gave a forty-minute speech to the United Steelworkers’ Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Trumka talked about unions, employers, class unity, corporate profits, strike breakers, and, near the end of his speech, he spoke about race. He told a story about a chance meeting he had with a female Democrat voter he’s known for years, and who told him that she wasn’t going to vote for Barack Obama. At first she said that she was not voting for him because “he’s a Muslim”, and he’s unpatriotic as he doesn’t wear an American flag lapel pin.. Trumka challenged her on these reasons and, after some prodding, she admitted that the reason she could not bring herself to vote for Obama was altogether much more simple and direct: Obama is a black man, and she does not trust black people. “Brothers and sisters”, said Trumka to the convention, “we can’t tap dance around the fact that there are a lot of folks out there just like that woman. A lot of them are good union people; they just can’t get past this idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a black man. Well, those of us who know better can’t afford to look the other way.”

Trumka received a standing ovation for his speech, and there’s a video clip of the section of his speech that dealt with Obama and race at the end of this post. (Cheers to Becky for the link.)

The clip brought me back to an essay by R. Jeffery Lustig entitled ‘The Tangled Knot of Race and Class in America.’ Lustig is Professor of Political Science at California State University, Sacaramento, and the essay is taken from a book edited by Michael Zweig, What’s Class Got To Do With It? I’ve been meaning to write something about Class and Race ever since I read Lustig’s essay, but I never felt confident enough with the material - I have never even visited America, so to write about its society at a grassroots level seems a somewhat futile exercise. (It’s one of the joys of high politics, you can just enjoy the spectacle at face value.) I still don’t feel comfortable with the material, but I thought I’d summarize Lustig’s points as a kind of accompaniment to Trumka’s speech, as both call for a need to engage with the topic of Race and Class.

So. This is what Lustig has to say about Race and Class in America.

Not surprisingly, Lustig sees class as a social relation, one that can only be understood in terms of its historical progress - in particular, the way classes formed in America, in terms of the dynamics of race, slavery, and religion.

1. “Race and ethnicity affected class formation in America from the beginning. Already from the 1840s, organized workers split themselves along ethno-religious lines. American-born Protestant workers participated in broad evangelical reform movements or more nativist groups, while immigrant Roman Catholic workers withdrew into insular ethnic communities… workers fractured politically.”

2. “From the beginning, worker identity in America included a racial identification. Coming to consciousness of their standing in a society that preserved racialized chattel slavery, members of the new working class often drew the distinction between themselves and the slaves more sharply than that between themselves and their bosses. Whiteness became an integral part of the new identity, ‘worker’. ”

3. “Part of learning to be a ‘worker’ for dominant sectors of the American work force became learning to seek group advantage by racializing fellow workers and scapegoating them for problems not of their making. That assured access not only to scarce jobs but also to increasingly scarce dignity in the context of emerging class antagonisms.”

4. “This history.. reveals something important about whiteness. It reveals that that quality [Whiteness] did not derive from a common ancestry, for there was none. French, German, Irish and Eastern European all eventually became ‘white’ along with English people.”

5. “The creation of the white race alliance critically affected working class formation in America. Class distinctions among whites were not ended but secured by it. The fact that in the years after [post civil war] Reconstruction the dominant sectors of the working class were refined in racial terms served to blunt white workers’ efforts to plumb the real sources of their degradation on the job and before the law, discouraging them, in contrast to Europeans, from taking their own wage slavery seriously.”

6. The segmentation of the labour market epitomized by slavery continued in other forms and for other subordinated peoples. By mid-twentieth century, even social scientists who ostensibly denied the significance of class inadvertently acknowledged that there are two working classes in America today, a white one and a Negro one, Puerto Rican, and a Mexican one - the former of which benefits economically and socially from the existence of these lower classes within their midst…. Racism [has become] part of the institutional reality of American society… [and] segments of organised labour [has] played a role in maintaining this situation.”

The role that race played in the formation of ‘white’ and ‘black’ identities, as well as in the economic and social dynamics of the society itself, means that racism is hot-wired into the institutional and material reality of contemporary American society. “Race is a political and economic, and not just a cultural and psychological phenomenon.”

Differential racial opportunities are churned out as part of the society’s normal workings, and are not simply residues of an unfortunate past. Nor are they dependent on overt acts of prejudice. Without having asked for special favors, white people acquire what George Lipsitz terms a ‘possessive investment in whiteness’ - an accumulation of assets gained from unequal educational access, job access, housing advantages, eligibility for bank loans, and access to insider networks. While most may not be conscious racists, in the absence of a larger vision or shared purpose they oppose any effort to devalue those investments. Ending racism in America would require a breaking up of that cycle and enactment of broad social-structural reforms, something more substantial than an appeal to tolerance or weekend ‘diversity’ retreats.”

One of the fundamental challenges facing American society is this idea of ‘whiteness’ as a privileged position in society, even if sometimes that ‘privileged’ position consists of nothing more than being better than a black man. Gene Hackman’s character in Mississippi Burning, agent Rubert Anderson, tells a story about his father, about how he had forced a relatively prosperous black neighbour to leave their neighbourhood, an action he justified to Rubert with the line, “If you ain’t better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?”

It’s that deeply-ingrained idea of whiteness as privilege, “as that most basic of benefits enjoyed by a dominant order, the privilege of thinking oneself normal, of taking one’s own position for granted and not having to reflect on one’s relationship with or responsibilities to others” that is so difficult to combat. There is a sense that Obama’s candidacy must mean an attack on the basic privileges of ‘whiteness’.

Lustig tells us that “even the poorest whites can avail themselves of at least some ‘wages’ of status and opportunity” - in other words, being white carries with it societal capital. Also, “whiteness remains… as an assumed commonality with the powerful, a fictional likeness that binds people to the fragility of their own hold on economic security and the ways the game is rigged against them.” With this in mind, the election of a black man to the highest office in the land cannot help but undermine the idea of ‘whiteness’ as a privilege. And as with all forms of identity, once challenged, it will be fiercely resisted.

In terms of American class relations, race “provides a way for whites still suffering insecurity and poverty to shore up scarce status and dignity. And by providing a lightning rod for ultimately class-based fears and worries, it masks the major causes of social inequality and makes it seem natural.” Aside from the economic and material exploitation inherent in racism, the reality of racism also serves as a whipping-boy for the inequalities of capitalist class relations. In times of economic downturn, white working class America is made to feel that their job security is being undermined by blacks, Asians, and Hispanics. The idea that these exploitations are inherent to the Capitalist mode of production is muddied by divisions of race.

(As an aside, it’s interesting to note that the idea of using race to hide class-based inequalities has been embraced by Fine Gael, and especially Leo Varadkar, who are only short of blaming the wholesale meltdown of the world’s banking system on black people in Blanchardstown.)

So. What is Professor Lustig’s answer to this ‘tangled knot’ of race and class in America?

First of all, Lustig argues that elements of class theory have to be adapted to fit the social and historical reality of race in America, not the other way around. The idea that a single working class identity would develop out of the Capitalist mode of production has been disproved by experience. Lustig highlights the social status divisions within society, and the different identities that revolve around these divisions - while all the time noting that these social divisions are themselves subject to divisions along lines of race.

… in light of these different social divisions, the very idea of “identity”, with its implications of singularity, may be misleading. People possess multiple,overlapping self-conceptions. They may simultaneously identify with their job, their region, their ethnic group, the nation (as patriots), the middle class (as consumers), or the working class (as producers)… Rather than objective positions producing “interests”, the way a political struggle is defined and explained often determines how people identify themselves.”

Lustig argues that it is the manner of the political struggle that leads to class consciousness. There is an idea, certainly among the mainstream Irish left, that a political movement should work in much the same way as a piece of string and a bag of beads - the movement organizes its focus groups, and once the reports come back, it simply ties all the issues, or beads, together. This is not the case. Nor is class consciousness the preserve of the trade union and organised labour movements. “Consciousness… is also a product of larger community institutions engaged in struggle.”

Lustig writes that race and class can work together in working class America by embracing the different identities and consciousness that have developed within American society.

Creating unity between different subordinated groups, developing different forms of class consciousness in each, and framing an alternative vision that can unite them… can only be accomplished through political struggle. And such a vision, to truly appeal to a majority of people, would have to be built up out of their current identities and the different ways they live class now.”

He says that the only way to truly combat the social, economic and cultural inequalities in American life is to build a national political movement, one that provides a national critique and national alternative vision for the inequalities inherent in the country’s society.

“The proponents of black (or brown, or feminist, or gay) politics have made genuine contributions to our understanding of social injustice and identified forms of exclusion formerly denied by both mainstream and radical politics. But in recent years they have moved away from broad social critiques and ceased to look for the deeper causes of their inequalities. And they have ceased to present qualitative alternatives to current arrangements and a larger social vision that could unite their struggles with others. They therefore risk reducing the call for diversity to a call only to get more members from their own groups in corporate headquarters and state legislatures. They risk limiting themselves to the call for a larger share of the spoils of a game still rigged to exclude the majority of their fellow-citizens.”

Finally, Lustig finishes with a sentiment echoed by Richard Trumka in the clip below.

“Neither of these [single social issue] approaches addresses the reality of institutional racism or its deeper class character. Neither addresses the need to confront the class conditions of racial minorities’ lives. and neither acknowledges that whiteness, as the visible sign and mask of a system of power, is not something to be emulated or treated on par with other ethnicities. It is the sign of a cross-class bloc of power that needs to be dismantled. And that can only be done by creating a cross-racial alliance among working people… We are dependent on each other. ‘members one of another,’ as the old Puritan phrase put it. Social obligations precede political rights.”