White workers chose poverty over interracial parity, fracturing a unified labor movement.

Evidence

Given the choice between parity with Black people—by inviting them into unified unions—and poverty, white workers chose poverty, spoiling the development of a multiracial mass labor movement in America. That decision, wrote W.E.B. Du Bois, “drove such a wedge between white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 589

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ‘Grafting & Growth’ only loosely; better connects to the ‘deviation vs design’ reframing thesis in the reader’s stated purpose, and to recent work on labor and racial capitalism (e.g., the welders-on-the-wallship story in White Noise territory is off — actually connects to Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, the source here). — connects to: White workers cemented segregation to protect their labor advantages — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1459
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone who works on labor history or contemporary organized labor, for the striking Du Bois quote about the mutual hatred of two groups with identical interests.