Racism and self-interest aligned white labor against Black workers across all labor factions

Evidence

Wherever one looked—among those who saw the movement in political-electoral terms, or those who advocated revolutionary violence, or those who were committed to economic trade unionism—the labor movement was most often at best ambivalent toward Black liberation and progress. The ideology of racism in combination with self-interest functioned to pit immigrant and poor white workers against the Black worker and the slave. And after the Civil War, the same social consciousness divided the working classes—immigrant and white—from the ex-slave. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 949

Categorization

• XREF: Explains a structural cause of the Black radical tradition’s independent trajectory — white labor’s racialized self-interest forced Black self-organization. — connects to: Irish mob violence against Blacks arose from labor competition, not prior hatred — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 488; Perceived Black labor competition directly triggered white mob violence — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 447; Maddox recruited white merchants to fight integration as a matter of self-interest — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 447 (+2 more)