Slavery and racism weakened the American labor movement by dividing workers

Evidence

Slavery, and the racism it nourished, also played a decisive role in weakening the American labor movement. Capitalists leveraged slavery and its racial legacy to divide workers—free from unfree, white from Black—diluting their collective power. Instead of resisting this strategy, white-led unions embraced it until it was too late, undercutting their movement and creating conditions for worker exploitation and inequality that exist to this day. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 580

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s broader reframing thesis that slavery shaped post-emancipation institutions, and echoes the well-known ‘divide and conquer’ labor history argument found in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction.