Northern capital inherited racism as a tool to divide the American labor movement

Evidence

Once the industrial class emerged as dominant in the nation, it possessed not only its own basis of power and the social relations historically related to that power, but it also had available to it the instruments of repression created by the now subordinate southern ruling class. In its struggle with labor, it could activate racism to divide the labor movement into antagonistic forces. Moreover, the permutations of the instrument appeared endless: Black against white; Anglo-Saxon against southern and eastern European; domestic against immigrant; proletariat against share-cropper; white American against Asian, Black, Latin American, and so on. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 960

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Biracial unions drove northern desegregation but their decline splintered liberal-labor alliances — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 39