Race vis-à-vis Class in the U.S.?

• Published in: Poverty & Race Vol. 15; no. 6; p. 13
• Main Authors: Powell, John A, Menendian, Stephen
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: Washington Poverty & Race Research Action Council 01.11.2006
• Subjects: Race; Racism; Social classes; Social conditions & trends
• ISSN: 1075-3591

Immigrants arriving in this country forcibly negotiated a color line protected by law, custom and ideology. The first Immigration and Naturalization Act, unanimously passed by the first Congress, restricted immigration to free whites. The ways in which the Irish, for example, competed for work and adjusted to industrial morality in America made it all but certain that they would adopt and extend the politics of white unity. From this nation's inception, the race line was used to demarcate and patrol the divide between those who constituted the "We" in "We The People." It was no surprise when in March of 1857, the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, declared in the Dred Scott case that all blacksslaves as well as free-were not and could never become citizens of the United States. Even when freed blacks were brought into the political community after the Civil War and granted citizenship, a now well-imbedded narrative of black inferiority and legacy of separation ensured that whites did not see themselves as having commonalities with blacks. According to economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, much of the difference between American and European welfare systems can be explained by racial heterogeneity. In a pattern that persists today, opponents of welfare programs deploy racialized narratives to rouse a majority in opposition. In contrast to the generous Civil War pensions, provisions to the Freedmen's Bureau were short-lived, meager and stigmatizing. Many believed that welfare provisions to freed slaves were undeserved, and the Bureau was characterized as an immense bureaucracy whose programs were likely to make blacks lazy, dependent and prone to live off of "handouts. " Racism contributed to the undoing of Reconstruction, but the failure of Reconstruction to secure blacks' rights as citizens and free laborers accelerated racism's spread until, by the early 20th Century, it had fully pervaded the nation's culture and politics, with profound class consequences, complicating the efforts of reformers for generations. Long-standing institutional arrangements and deeply imbedded social narratives were disrupted by the transformation following the Civil War. As freed slaves were incorporated into the body politic of the nation, white workers and farmers glimpsed the possibility of solidarity along class lines unencumbered by racial division. The Populist movement sought to harness this possibility into a broad-based, multi-racial alliance of white farmers, trade workers and freed slaves. Southern planters, fearing an alliance between white and blacks, used race to split the movement. Fifty years later, union efforts were similarly stymied because of the fear of disrupting the racial order of the South. The CIO's de-emphasizing race and failing to make strong appeals to black workers made it virtually impossible to generate the grassroots support necessary to combat the exclusions and weaknesses of New Deal labor legislation. Indeed, Southern fears of returning black soldiers joining the union movement were part of the impetus for the Taft-Hartley Act. In the late '70s Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich tried to build a progressive movement by emphasizing economic issues, since these united various city constituencies, but downplaying social issues, the most important of which was race. In doing so, race-baiting crept into the election and destroyed his chances of uniting the city's black and white working-class neighborhoods.