Stayin' Alive by Jefferson R. Cowie

Author:Jefferson R. Cowie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2010-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

III

Class, always a fragile concept in American civic life, died the death of a thousand cuts in the 1970s, but few problems sliced as deeply as how race and class were set against each other. Class and race are fundamentally intertwined social identities, mutually constructing each other, marbled together into a sociological whole, but a whole that has proven to be one of the most elusive identities in American history. White working people have typically chosen their race over their class; black workers have generally expressed themselves through a politics of racial oppression that has had more traction in American politics than class. Despite the Roosevelt coalition’s linking of black and white working people politically, the tensions within the coalition ran very deep, and, in popular discourse, “working class” still meant white. In the 1970s, race and class were often at odds, trumping any possibility of drawing together the class-based politics of the thirties with the racial freedom of the sixties into that most elusive of things in American history—an interracial class identity. This is not to say that civil rights undermined the cohesion of class—far from it. It is to say that the nation proved incapable of speaking of both at the same time. Rather than synthesis, the seventies were a time of eclipse.

Although race and class are lived as a unified social reality, the separation between labor rights and civil rights is hard-wired into postwar policy. The two legislative landmarks that shape occupational justice are the NLRA (1935) and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964). The former held out the right to form unions during the Great Depression and delivered immigrant Europeans to a sense of economic and political citizenship during the New Deal period. The latter created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the black freedom struggle, which prohibited employment discrimination by race, sex, creed, or national origin. A coherent labor market policy would confront both collective economic rights and the right to non-discrimination, but the two pieces of legislation were products of separate struggles, separate policy traditions, and separate judicial spheres. And they were often in an unfortunate zero-sum tension. As Paul Frymer argues, the two acts are products of “two vectors of power,” and the failure to build a strong and diverse labor movement was not a product of isolated individuals or events, but was “the outcome of a political system that, in its effort to appeal to civil rights opponents, developed a bifurcated system of power that assigned race and class problems to different spheres of government.” The two acts, and the trajectory of the movements that gave birth to each, tended to institutionalize the divisions rather than build bridges between them. By the 1970s, the division was growing into an unbridgeable chasm .47

The roots of the problem stem back to the New Deal itself. The passage of each piece of New Deal labor legislation came with the political cost of keeping blacks, and, less consciously, women, from joining unions. Having left

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