Racism repeatedly divided American workers and crippled the labor movement

Evidence

Throughout the twentieth century, labor made attempts to check the bosses’ power, but time and again these efforts were curtailed by the same racism that had divided workers both during and after slavery. In the years following World War I, racism pitted Black workers against white veterans, who felt entitled to the jobs Black people had filled during the war. At midcentury, Black factory hands, long shunned by unions, resisted white-led strike efforts, even coming to blows with picketers. Rare and muscular moments of multiracial solidarity—wildcat strikes that brought Black and white workers shoulder to shoulder; biracial coalitions that sprang up spontaneously during walkouts so massive they humbled whole cities—provide a glimpse of what might have been. These were exceptions, however. More common was a labor movement prevented from realizing its full potential, hobbled by white workers too often persuaded that their whiteness was advantage enough. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 595

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that white workers were ‘persuaded that their whiteness was advantage enough’ is a core component of the foundational/peripheral reframing — white identity as a wage-like compensation, connecting to Du Bois’s ‘public and psychological wage’ concept.