SJDI Race Critique—Negative

1NC – Race K

1NC—Race KThe history of Black people and unions is founded and upheld by racism and exclusion. Unions have served as a tool to marginalize workers of color and sustain white supremacy. This is the story of the black longshoremen whose complaints of discrimination were denied and continued to suffer at the hands of unions discovered to be cohabiting with the Ku Klux Klan. From strikes, to minimized employment opportunities we begin to see the essential role in upholding structural antagonisms and anti blackness unions play. Jeong ‘13 (Sarah, Journalist and Harvard Law grad sarahjeong dot net, 12-21-2013, Unions and Racism, https://sarahjeong.net/2013/12/21/unions-and-racism/, 7-2-2017)NJWA paper by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson documented the experiences of black longshoremen in southern California, belonging to the ILWU Local 13. While the ports of southern Californian were not Harry Bridges’s home base of San Francisco, it was certainly close enough to where the explicitly racist practices of the local are a shocking contrast to Bridges’s anti-racist rhetoric. Black longshoremen began to work in the ports in the

1940s as white longshoremen left to fight in World War II. But as the white workers returned, Local 13 deregistered 500 longshoremen (most of them black) from their membership. The local claimed it was because of their “lack of seniority”; but the black workers’ lack of seniority was due to being locked out of the union on racist grounds. The unemployed 500 brought an appeal to the local, but it was denied.[15] After a long and bitter lawsuit, the workers were reregistered.[16] Through the 1950s and 60s, these black longshoremen continued to fight racism in their own union. Despite collecting clear and extensive evidence of discriminatory practices, the claims of the southern Californian black longshoremen were denied by both the local and the Fair Employment Practices Commission. In fact in the 1950s, the FEPC refused to even look at the case, because the ILWU was explicitly “anti-racist” on paper.[17] Thus, the radical posturing of the ILWU ended up shielding itself from scrutiny. The efforts of the black workers of Local 13 were happening against a backdrop of a nation-wide movement to address union racism. In 1955, upon the merger of the AFL and CIO, the organization announced several major goals, including the elimination of racism within the trade unions. But in 1960, Herbert Hill, labor secretary of the NAACP, reported that efforts to eliminate discriminatory practices had been “piecemeal and inadequate.”[18] In Hill’s own words, such practices were not “simply isolated or occasional expressions of local bias against color workers, but rather, as the record indicates, a continuation of the institutionalized pattern of anti-Negro employment practices that is traditional with large sections of organized labor and industrial management.”[19] Hill identified AFL-CIO unions as practicing “outright exclusion of Negroes” as well as having “segregated locals, separate racial seniority lines in collective bargaining agreements” and excluding black workers from “apprenticeship training programs controlled by labor unions.”[20] The alienation of black workers was evident in their voting patterns in union certification elections (black workers would often vote in blocs against unions, probably because it was well-known within the black community that the union in question was racist).[21] (Indeed, the Ku Klux Klan often held their meetings in union halls).[22] Hill identified huge numbers of segregated locals in both Northern and Southern cities (sometimes over a hundred segregated locals in a single union),[23] and clear evidence for a extensive patterns of discrimination. For Hill, the unions were complicit in generating economic inequality.[24] The southern Californian longshoremen of the ILWU also blamed their union local—not the employer—for perpetuating racial inequality among the workers. Although they continued to admire Harry Bridges, and never blamed him for the behavior of their local, their own accounts indicate that in a toss-up between black workers and the local, the local would win. According to Elbert Kelly Jr., “Bridges was sympathetic with us and made it clear he couldn’t do anything. He didn’t want to destroy the union. He asked us to take it to the International Board but there was probably not a lot they could do.”[25] Throughout the 1970s, black

members of the Local 13 were locked out of the crane operator jobs (the highest paying job on the dock). Although the longshoremen believed that the

employers were certainly complicit in the discrimination, “the primary group responsible” was actually union local leadership.[26] In fact, “[r]acial conflict over systematic job discrimination continued

through the 1980s and 1990s and remains an obstacle to African American longshoremen.”[27]

The presence of the black worker in unions is a double edged sword - the interest of the “working class” is tied to the subordination of black rights – unions were more invested in the cause of white supremacy than economic advancement of workersKimberle Crenshaw 91, (Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in AntiDiscrimination Law, 101 HARV. L. REv. 1331, 1380-81 (1988). 1991] HOWARD LAW JOURNAL) CX It works every time. It worked when rich slave owners convinced the white working class to stand with them against the danger of slave revolts - even though the existence of slavery condemned white workers to a life of economic deprivation. It worked after the Civil War when poor whites fought social reforms and settled for segregation rather than see those formerly enslaved blacks get ahead. It worked when most labor unions preferred to allow the plant owners to break their strikes with black scab labor rather than allow blacks to join their unions. It is working again as whites, disadvantaged by the high status entrance requirements of blacks, fight to end affirmative action policies that, in fact, have helped more whites than blacks. The reasons for this "Caucasian Commitment" are likely both numerous and complex. But a crucial factor seems to be the unstated understanding by the mass of whites that they will accept large disparities in economic opportunity with other whites so long as they have a priority over blacks and other people of color for access to whatever opportunities are left. Throughout American history, whites have acquiesced in - when they were not pressuring for - policy decisions that subordinated the rights of blacks in order to further some other interest. One might well ask, "what do the masses of working class and poor whites gain from this continued sacrifice of black rights that justifies their acquiescence when so often the policies limit their own opportunities as well as those of blacks?" Even those whites who lack wealth and power are sustained in their sense of racial superiority by policy decisions that sacrifice black rights. The subordination of blacks seems to reassure whites of an unspoken but no less certain property right in their "whiteness." This right is recognized and upheld by the courts and society, like all property rights under a government created and sustained primarily for that purpose. Thus, from the beginning of slavery, the masses of whites have supported programs that were contrary to their economic interest as long as those policies provided them with a status superior to that of blacks. Professor Kimberle Crenshaw suggests that race consciousness makes it difficult, at least for whites, to imagine the world differently.' It also creates the desire for identification with privileged elites. By focusing on a distinct, subordinate "other," whites include themselves in the dominant circle - an arena in which most hold no real power, but only their privileged racial identity. Consider the case of a dirt poor southern white, shown participating in a Ku Klux Klan rally in the movie Resurgence, who declared: "Every morning, I wake up and thank God I'm white." For this person, and for others like him, race consciousness, manifested by his refusal even to associate with blacks, provides a powerful explanation of why he fails to challenge the current social order.

Racism embodies the biological relationship between humans and systems of power. It is impossible to evaluate peace in civil society with racism—it structures all inequalities and is the root cause of violence and warFoucault ’76 /// Foucault, Michel. "Societies Must Be Defended." Lectures at the College De France. Picado New York, 1975. Web. 26 July 2017. <http://rebels library.org/files/foucault_society_must_be_defended.pdf>. LADI//KDWhat in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower. Racism also has a second function. Its role is, if you like, to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: "The more you kill, the more deaths you will cause" or "The very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more." I would say that this relation ("If you want to live, you must take lives, you must be able to kill") was not invented by either racism or the modern State. It is the relationship of war: "In order to live, you must destroy your enemies." But racism does make the relationship of war-"If you want to live, the other must die" - function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise of biopower. On the one hand, racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship: "The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more Ias species rather than individual-can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate." The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer. This is not, then, a military, warlike, or political relationship, but a biological relationship. And the reason this mechanism can come into play is that the enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population. In the biopower system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race. There is a direct connection between the two. In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance, or in the first line a biopower, and racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism

alone can justify the murderous function of the State. So you can understand the importance-I almost said the vital importance-of racism to the exercise of such a power: it is the precondition for exercising the right to kill. If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words, a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist. When I say "killing," I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on. I think that we are now in a position to understand a number of things. We can understand, first of all, the link that was quickly-I almost said immediately-established between nineteenth-century biological theory and the discourse of power. Basically, evolutionism, understood in the broad sense-or in other words, not so much Darwin's theory itself as a set, a bundle, of notions (such as: the hierarchy of species that grow from a common evolutionary tree, the struggle for existence among species, the selection that eliminates the less fit) naturally became within a few years during the nineteenth century not simply a way of transcribing a political discourse into biological terms, and not simply a way of dressing up a political discourse in scientific clothing, but a real way of thinking about the relations between colonization, the necessity for wars, criminality, the phenomena of madness and mental illness, the history of societies with their different classes, and so on. Whenever, in other words, there was a confrontation, a killing or the risk of death, the nineteenth century was quite literally obliged to think about them in the form of evolutionism. And we can also understand why racism should have developed in modern societies that function in the biopower mode; we can understand why racism broke out at a number of .privileged moments, and why they were precisely the moments when the right to take life was imperative. Racism first develops with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide. If you are functioning in the biopower mode, how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations? By using the themes of evolutionism, by appealing to a racism. War. How can one not only wage war on one's adversaries but also expose one's own citizens to war, and let them be killed by the million (and this is precisely what has been going on since the nineteenth century, or since the second half of the nineteenth century), except by activating the theme of racism

The alternative is accepting the primacy of race. Misattributing racial identity conceals racism and the true drivers of American social inequality. Hill 96 – Herbert Hill, Department of African-American Studies and Industrial Relations Research Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of Black Labor and the American Legal System (“ THE PROBLEM OF RACE IN AMERICAN LABOR HISTORY”, Reviews in American History 24 (1996) 189-208, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Accessed Via JSTOR) RMT Much recent labor history has been devoted to studies of black workers and to the racial practices of labor unions. With some noteworthy exceptions, however, contemporary labor historians have failed to confront the funda- mental issue: the historical development of working-class identity as racial identity . Many labor historians continue to underestimate the depth of American racism. They fail to understand its deep roots in a precapitalist past in Europe and America and consequently underestimate the resistance to the elimination of racist practices and institutions in labor movements no less than in society at large. From John R. Commons and Selig Perlman in the early years of the twentieth century to the work of Philip Taft in the 1960s, what

usually passed for labor history was really union history. With few exceptions, traditional labor history consisted of institutional studies of labor organizations based largely on an examination of union records. If traditional labor historians and economists such as Commons, Perlman, Taft, and others identified with the Wisconsin School mention black and other nonwhite workers at all, it is as a problem for white labor unions. This is hardly surprising given Commons's expressed views on what he called "race differences." Additionally, Commons believed that labor unions were only appropriate for Caucasians, that the backward nonwhite races were lazy, could not compete, and therefore did not need unions. Selig Perlman undoubtedly represented the views of this group of labor historians when he wrote that "the most important single factor in the history of American labor" was its success in excluding what he called "Mongolian labor" from the work force and in securing the adoption of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first racist immigration law in American history.' The central point about the Commons school, whose views corresponded to the racial policies and practices of the leadership of the American Federation of Labor, is that they were overtly racist and made no excuses or apologies for their position. Charles H. Wesley, Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, Herbert R. Northrup, and Philip S. Foner produced very different critical studies and stood apart from the prevailing tendency.2 In reaction to the traditional school, a new group of labor historians began to emerge in the late 1960s. Aware of the limitations of the older group and critical of their methods, Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery, among others, generated a social history based upon a revived populist Neo- Marxism. In their revolt against the "old labor history" they proposed to "study the people": in short to do for American labor history what E. P. Thompson had done for English labor history. The contributions of this group, who were much more sophisticated in their view of social processes than their predecessors, represent a significant advance over the work of the earlier labor historians. Nonetheless, Gutman and his followers regarded the race question as a subsidiary feature of class development. Thus their approach, still largely predominant in labor studies, while generally sympa- thetic to black workers, treated their collective identity and their racial group interests as an interference in the formation of a unified working class and regarded the issue of race as an impediment to the class struggle. This school tends therefore to overlook or excuse the racist practices of organized labor and to mythologize aspects of labor history in order to make it conform to ideological requirement. Nell Irvin Painter puts it in a nutshell when she writes that "the new labor history has a race problem." This explains, she argues, how David Montgom- ery could celebrate the machinists as "the embodiment of the fine American republican tradition, without mentioning that they were ardent lily-whites whose union's constitution prohibited black memberships until 1948." De- scribing Sean Wilentz's Chants Democratic, a representative work of the new labor history, as a "flawed study," Painter points out that Wilentz makes a hero of a labor leader who is a racist and anti-Semite .... Wilentz fails to embed race in his analysis, which given the central place that racism occupies in American culture, is necessary in labor history as in much of American studies. ... Neither Montgomery's late nineteenth and early twentieth- century industrial workers nor Wilentz's antebellum New York workers make sense when their contexts (in their social as well as economic aspects) are distorted through the deletion of black workers and white racism. Labor historians committed to the belief that racial conflict among workers is a consequence of class relations or an expression of "false consciousness," celebrate the episodic occurrences of interracial solidarity while ignoring the overall historical pattern. If the evidence for their case proves inconclusive, then it is suggested that many more unspecified examples will be uncovered by further diligent

research. Wishful thinking about the white working class and the primacy of ideological goals over analytical integrity tend to be characteristic of the new labor history.Thus Who Built America? (1989), the textbook that is the epitome of the new labor history approach, confidently declares that "Decades of conflict about the status of slavery [having] ended;.., a new drama pitting capital against labor was about to begin" (p. 415). But the conflict about the status of blacks in American society was

not ended by emancipation, and the legacy of slavery was to continue through the segregation era into the contemporary period. Race in fact remains the fundamental and enduring division in the nation, whereas if we are to believe Who Built America? two hundred and fifty years of slavery were merely the prelude for the class struggle. The argument that class is the essence of history is exemplified by the work of Marxist historian Barbara J. Fields, who states that "class refers to material circumstances .... Race, on the other hand, is a purely ideological notion." For her "white supremacy is a slogan, not a belief."5 According to Fields, the reality of class exists independently of consciousness, whereas the idea of race is merely a social construct and hence of lesser importance. In her effort to find a place for race in orthodox Marxist doctrine she assigns to class a theoretical category of primary significance, while placing race in a derivative role. This is, of course, another version of the Marxist formula regarding base and superstructure, and it ignores the actual, material effects of race in many different contexts. It also ignores the fact that class is no less a construct than is race. Fields is also criticized by Howard Winant, who writes that she "fails to recognize the salience a social construct can develop over half a millennium ... as a fundamental principal of social organization and identity formation." Winant believes that "at the level of experience, of everyday life, race is a relatively impermeable part of our identities. U.S. society is so thoroughly racialized that to be without racial identity is to be in danger of having no identity."7Many labor historians and others whose interpretations are based upon Marxist assumptions have long been imprisoned by an ideology that requires them either to ignore the racism of the white working class or to rationalize it by attributing it to manipulation by employers-what Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright has called "a divide-and-conquer strategy," whose analysis, he acknowledges "has perhaps been the central theme in Marxist treatments of the subject."8 Marxist theory fails to recognize the primacy of race in the development of the American social order and, as a consequence, Marxists and those influenced by Marxist ideology deny or minimize a force which has no place in their theory. Putting racial identity and social meaning at the center of analysis makes possible an understanding of race and working-class behavior that has been lacking in much of labor history. Once the notion of a fixed, objectively determined, polarized class structure is abandoned, it becomes clear that many forces interact with race in a variety of ways and that no single rigid principle such as the idea of class struggle can account for working-class behavior.

The concept of racial formation as developed by Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their book Racial Formation in the United States (1986) provides a valuable analytical perspective along these lines. They begin with the premise

that race is a fundamental organizing principal of social relations, irreducible to any other social force. It operates they argue, as an "unstable and 'decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggles" (p. 68). They suggest that race is not a fixed entity, but rather a cluster of meanings and that the process of racialization confers racial meaning on identities , practices , and institutions . This perspective manages to avoid two of the fallacies that bedevil most other attempts at the conceptualization of race in labor history.

It avoids the dominant tendency that fails to treat race on its own terms but rather as a consequence of something else of "real" ontological status that has full conceptual independence. At the same time, it avoids reifying the concept of race as an ahistorical essence moving across time and space, unaffected by changing economic, political, and ideological considerations. Thus the con- cept of racial formation provides a useful foundation for a critical examina- tion of race as it acquires different meanings, depending on specific historical circumstances. Quite clearly, it is necessary to move beyond the limitations of class analysis in order to realize the full potential of social theory as it applies to race, and to free the analysis of race and class from the restrictive framework of Marxist ideology. Furthermore, as we come to the end of the twentieth century, it is evident that the theory that is grounded in the belief that the industrial working class will be the source of a great social transformation is untenable .

1NC – K PriorThe K is prior – the primacy of race shapes analysis of success throughout labor history Hill 96 – Herbert Hill, Department of African-American Studies and Industrial Relations Research Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of Black Labor and the American Legal System (“ THE PROBLEM OF RACE IN AMERICAN LABOR HISTORY”, Reviews in American History 24 (1996) 189-208, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Accessed Via JSTOR) RMT That race continues to pose a dilemma for many working in labor history is demonstrated by the two closing interpretive essays in a collection pub- lished in 1989 devoted to "The Problems of Synthesis" in labor historiogra- phy, one by the doyen of contemporary labor historians, David Brody, and the other by the distinguished historian Alice Kessler-Harris.35 What is remark- able about these two essays is that neither of them regards the issue of race as significant. Indeed, Brody criticizes what he regards as the overemphasis on race in one of the papers included in the collection while Kessler-Harris calls for making gender the primary focus for future labor studies. That these two eminent historians ignore race as a critical factor in labor history underscores how theoretically superficial much of the past work in the field has been and confirms Ira Katznelson's acknowledgment of "labor history's loss of elan, directionality and intellectual purpose," leading him to declare that "Engaged history, in possession at least of the conceit of making a difference has moved elsewhere, to other subject areas. Increasingly, a growing number of scholars are rejecting labor history's impoverished tradition; they are recognizing the critical problems of identity and the primacy of race in their analyses and questioning many of the assumptions that have long dominated the study of labor history . The publication in 1990 of Alexander Saxton's The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, followed in 1991 by David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, indicates that another perspec- tive in labor history is emerging. Saxton's remarkable study places race at the center of nineteenth-century American history and examines with consider- able insight the long-term consequences of white supremacy as a major ideological force within the working class. In a book that examines the social and psychological forces that led workers to define themselves as white, Roediger moves beyond the dominant tendency to reduce working-class behavior to economic and class forces . In his analysis of the social psychology of racism among white workers he writes that "racism is not a matter of bread alone, but is in addition a way in which white workers have come to look at the world " ( p. 10). Roediger

explains that "Working class formation and the systematic development of a sense of whiteness went hand in hand for the U.S. white working class," declaring that "race has at all times been a critical factor in the history of U.S. class format. Bruce Nelson's studies of the racial practices of industrial unions among longshoremen in California, shipbuilders in Alabama, and steelworkers in Georgia, constitute a significant advance in our understanding of the racial practices of CIO unions in many different contexts.37 Nelson is producing a body of work supported by impeccable research that challenges the conven- tional wisdom regarding race, class, and organized labor. Eric Arnesen, in his research on the activities of the railroad brotherhoods that forced black workers out of railway employment, recognizes "the white trade union movement's active role in the construction of working-class racism," and that race was the defining characteristic of the railroad brotherhood. A generation of black scholars has emerged that continues to enrich labor studies with original and often provocative work that represents a break with traditional labor history. Among these are Nell Irvin

Painter, Joe William Trotter, Earl Lewis, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Julie Saville. The books by Peter Gottlieb and James Grossman on the black migrations to Pittsburgh and Chicago are valuable contributions as are works by Yuji Ichioka, Thomas Sugrue, Kevin Boyle, Tomas Almaguer, and Henry M. McKiv The appearance of Love and Theft (1995) by Eric Lott is a significant step forward in our understanding of the powerful psychological forces at work in a culture of white supremacy, and Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White (1995) is certain to be recognized as a major contribution to the study of race and ethnicity in labor history. Timothy Messer-Kruse has completed an important doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison entitled The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition (1994), and Paul Taillon, also at Wisconsin, is working on a ground-breaking study of gender and race in the developing culture of machinists at the end of the nineteenth century. The major schools of American labor history are distinguished by their respective attitudes toward race, and the recent books by Saxton and Roediger, together with the work of a new generation of labor historians, suggest that we are at the beginning of the next stage in social science studies of work and the worker: one that is characterized by the effort to place labor studies within a larger historical context, one that does not neglect the psychological, cultural, and ideological forces in workers' lives. This is a perspective that rejects the reductive and ideologically restrictive approaches of the past, and that recognizes finally the complexity of identity and the centrality of race in American labor history .

1NC – Turns CaseThe K turns the case – the links prove the benefits of unions will not go to those who need them most.Garden and Leong 13 - Charlotte Garden* & Nancy Leong**Assistant Professor, University of Denver Sturm College of Law ““So Closely Intertwined”: Labor and Racial Solidarity” http://www.gwlr.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Leong.pdf) RMT Recent economic and political events have intertwined labor and race more closely than ever. Though the Great Recession officially ended in 2009,228 its effects linger in the form of the “jobless recovery”229 (though the unemployment rate fell from a high of ten percent in 2009 to near eight percent in 2012230) and an increasing poverty rate.231 But the recession has not affected all Americans equally. When it began in 2007, unemployment rates rose more quickly for blacks than whites.232 This is especially concerning when one considers that unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos are generally higher than those for whites even under normal economic conditions.233 Moreover, the recession’s formal end brought minimal relief for blacks.234 Even when geographical areas or particular industries begin to recover lost jobs, those jobs often do not go to minorityworkers . 235 This situation may be partially attributable to employers’ recession-time decisions to cancel programs designed to increase employee diversity.236 Finally, poverty rates among black and Hispanic Americans are also more than twice the rate for white Americans— above twenty-five percent, compared to around ten percent for whites.237These statistics are of obvious concern to civil rights groups, but they also strike at core labor values in three ways. First, it is axiomatic that when a unionized worker loses her job, it hurts not only that union worker, but all union workers: as the saying goes, “an injury to one [is] an injury to all.”238 Second, general principles of labor economics hold that wages tend to stagnate in the face of large reserves of unemployed workers.239 Under these conditions, unions will likely find it difficult to win wage increases for represented workers, and it may become easier for employers involved in labor disputes to find replacement workers. Third, although union strength is depleted whenever unemployment rises, the loss is particularly great in the case of black workers, who have been “the strongest supporters of unions since the 1930s.”240 Unions are much more likely to win NLRB elections in majority-minority workforces: unions are elected in only forty percent of elections held in bargaining units of one to forty-nine percent workers of color, whereas they win fifty-six percent of elections in units of more than seventy-five percent workers of color.241 Thus,.when proposed bargaining units include people of color in significant numbers, union organizing is more likely to succeed.

1NC – FrameworkRacial analysis is a gateway issue for political analysis – racial marginalization will constantly replicate itself unless we change our paradigm. Soss and Brusch 08:Joe Soss [University of Minnesota] and Sarah Brusch [UW Madison]. August 27, 2008. 'Marginalization Matters: Rethinking Race in the Analysis of State Politics and Policy'. Presented at annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. http://myweb.uiowa.edu/skbruch/pdf/MarginalizationMatters_APSA08Final.pdf LADI//ELWe are also drawn to a positional approach because of its strong resonance with theories of citizenship that emphasize status and standing as well as patterns of incorporation and exclusion. In American politics today, racial minorities are more than just objects of policy action or threats to the interests of white actors. They are incorporated in complex ways as citizens and institutional actors, and they are divided in important ways by these same

developments (Cohen 1999; Strolovitch 2007). To understand the sources and consequences of public policy in the U.S., we must draw race and citizenship into a common frame of analysis that attends to the positioning of actors vis-à-vis

institutions and one another. 44 The root of our empirical argument is that racial categories position actors in ways that vary across the states; these differences can be measured in theoretically appropriate ways; and the use of such measures can advance the analysis of state policy choice. Our key findings are neatly summarized by our title: marginalization matters. Under welfare reform, the adoption of tough sanction policies has been more likely in states where socioeconomic disparities between blacks and whites are larger, where important socioeconomic institutions and statuses are less accessible to blacks relative to whites, and where black populations are more polarized into isolated groups at the socioeconomic top and bottom. Strong sanctions are also more likely to be adopted when blacks make up a higher percentage of the welfare caseload. Yet this effect is diminished considerably when black state residents achieve socioeconomic incorporation on terms closer to white state residents. Across diverse measures of racial position, we consistently find that states are most likely to adopt punitive sanction policies when blacks are prevalent in welfare caseloads and level of racial marginalization are high (as measured by Disparity, Marginality, or Dispersion). Only one of our positional measures fails to produce significant results in this analysis. As students of politics, it is a bit unsettling that this measure is Political Exclusion, but we also see good reasons to question the null results. Of the four measures presented in this paper, Political Exclusion is by far the least satisfying. In addition to being based on only two indicators, it is also limited by a measure of representation that fails to capture the relative institutional positions of blacks and whites. Prior research has suggested that black representation in state legislatures can matter greatly for policy choices related to welfare and criminal justice (Fording 2003; Fording and Yates 2005). Group biases in political participation have also emerged as a significant predictor of welfare policy choice in some research (Avery 45 and Peffley 2005). Against this backdrop, it seems best to deem our present results for Political Exclusion inconclusive. Race is a social construction that has powerful and real consequences for politics. These consequences are not reducible to the racial attitudes that individuals hold or the potential for minorities to threaten the interests of majorities. They flow more fundamentally from the ways that racial classifications organize social relations, define social positions, and frame social understandings in particular political locales. In the United States today, race continues to shape the political landscape in ways that matter greatly for policy design and implementation. Yet it does not do so in a uniform way as one looks across various dimensions of social relations and jurisdictions for policymaking. Students of politics have rich theoretical resources at their disposal that can do much to clarify differences in the field of racial positions and specify how these differences affect policy processes. By pursuing such questions more vigorously, we will be in a better position to understand the disheartening political

dynamics that so often arise from race, and perhaps even to change them.

Links

Link – HistoryOpenly racist unions used exclusionism to discriminate against Asian workers.Leah F. Vosko 6 (Precarious Employment: Understanding Labour Market Insecurity in Canada, 2006) CXThis precarious status was maintained by well-thought-out racist and sexist ideologies that characterized these groups as subhuman and unfit to be members of the nation. And these ideologies were institutionalized in both laws and policies. People of colour were said to be so inferior that they were biologically and culturally capable of working under subhuman working conditions, at super-exploitative wages (Creese 1992; Muszynski 1984; Ward 1978), thereby threatening the wages and working conditions of white male workers of the nation. They were viewed as threats to the nation by their otherness and as threats to the organized working class by their racialized capacity and supposed “willingness” to work at wages below those paid to white workers. Creese (1992) documents that white unionists considered Asians to be “unorganizable ,” leading unions to adopt a strategy of exclusionism (Das Gupta 1998; Leah 1999; White 1990). In so doing, they contributed actively to precarious employment among workers of colour as well as to their social precariousness. They spearheaded such groups as the Anti-Chinese Union, the Asiatic Exclusion League, and the White Canada Association. In addition to lobbying white politicians to restrict the entry of non-white workers to Canada, they also instigated popular hostility and violence against them (Das Gupta 1998). By excluding workers of colour and, in some cases, reaching collective agreements that instituted labour standards differentiated by race , white unions took part in reproducing a racially segregated labour market. Creese (1992) writes that unions representing white tailors, garment workers, laundry workers, and restaurant workers were the most vociferous against Chinese and other Asian workers, who were paid much less because of employer racism and the lack of union protection . Instead of including Asian workers in existing unions in order to eliminate the wage competition, these unions took an exclusionary stance. The Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, for instance, remained exclusionary until 1938, when a Chinese organizer was hired for one month.

Union officials limited the number of black workers in unions and encouraged violence against minority workers.Satnam Virdee 00 (A Marxist critique of black radical theories of trade-union racism, 2000) CXA central component of this indigenous racism was that migrant labour represented a source of cheap labour that threatened the economic security of ‘white’ organised labour (Stephens 1956; Pinder 1961; Wright 1968). In those industries where racialised workers were perceived to represent a direct economic threat to ‘white’ organised labour, trade-union officials employed exclusionary practices motivated by racism to restrict and sometimes exclude altogether, the employment of racialised labour. Hence, the action taken by trade unions to defend the economic interests of their members (and the resultant sectionalist trade-union consciousness) developed in ways that were racist (Moore 1975; Fryer 1984; Wrench 1987; Ramdin 1987). The use of racism and exclusionary practices was particularly evident amongst those workers employed in the transport industry and the declining areas of textile production and foundry work (Duffield 1988) where Fryer (1984376) shows ‘white trade unionists resisted the employment of black workers, or insisted on a “quota” system limiting them to ... about 5 per cent’. When such racist practices came under threat of being breached, ‘white’ workers took industrial action to defend them. In February 1955, in the West Midlands, ‘white’ workers at the West Bromwich Corporation Transport system began a series of Saturday strikes in protest against the employment of an Indian trainee conductor. Also in 1955, ‘white’ transport workers in Wolverhampton decided to ban all overtime from 1 September in protest against the increasing employment of ‘black’ labour. The local union contended that the 5 per cent quota which had been informally agreed with management had been breached because 68 of the 900 total workforce were ‘black’ workers (Wrench 1987; Ramdin 1987:200). There were also other racist exclusionary practices agreed between ‘white’ trade unionists and employers which served to impact adversely on ‘black’ workers: the principle of ‘last-in, first out’ was not applied at a time of redundancy if it meant that ‘white’ workers would lose their jobs before ‘black’ workers (Wrench 1987:165). The outcome of such racism and exclusionary practices was that migrant labour came to occupy a distinctive position in class relations - as a racialised fraction of the working class located at the bottom of the English class structure (Phizacklea and Miles 1980118; Miles 1982365). Racist sentiment and action were not just evident within the trade unions and in the workplace. On numerous occasions, they translated into wider racist political mobilisation and violence towards ‘black’ migrants. Some of the more notorious incidents in the 19503 included the racist riots against ‘blacks’ in Nottingham, Dudley and Notting Hill (Fryer 1984). The established political parties, Conservative and Labour, did little to combat such racism, and, on occasions, actively courted the racist vote (Solomos 1993). Such a constellation of racist sentiment and imagery exercised a near hegemonic hold over the ‘white’ English population during the 19505 and 19603, with an almost total absence of organised opposition to such racism from within the working class itself (Joshi and Carter 1984: 55).

Unions are inherently racist, giving them a right to Unionize justifies systematic violence against Chinese American body. It is not just a white black binary question.(http://immigrants.harpweek.com/ChineseAmericans/2KeyIssues/TheAntiChineseHysteria.htm,

The Anti-Chinese Hysteria of 1885-1886 Ever since the Chinese came to the United States, the

prejudice against them sometimes culminated in violence. The physical hostility became particularly virulent in the 1880s. During this period, Chinese communities were harassed, attacked, or expelled in 34 towns in California, three in Oregon, and four in Nevada. Property of the Chinese in America, worth millions of dollars, was damaged or

destroyed in mining regions in Alaska, Colorado, South Dakota, and other states or territories. The worst occurrences of violence were

in Denver, Los Angeles, Rock Springs (Wyoming), and Tacoma and Seattle (Washington). Labor disputes were often the spark for anti-Chinese riots. In 1875, the Union Pacific Railroad Company first hired Chinese as strikebreakers in its Rock Springs mines in the Wyoming

Territory. The bitterness this caused between the (largely immigrant) white miners and the Chinese festered for a decade before exploding in the fall of 1885. The attack on September 2 by 150 armed white men against the Chinese miners had calamitous results for the Chinese community: 28 deaths, 15 wounded, the expulsion of several hundred, and property damage of nearly $150,000. After the Rock Springs riot, anti-Chinese violence quickly spread to other areas in the West. On September 11, Chinese were attacked in Coal Creek; on October 24, Seattle’s Chinatown was burned; on November 3, a mob of 300 expelled the Chinese in Tacoma before moving on to force similar expulsions in smaller towns. The Washington governor requested federal assistance to restore law and order and on November 7 President Grover Cleveland sent the U.S. military to Seattle and Tacoma to suppress the riots. The Wyoming Territorial government established an

investigating committee, but it was controlled by the anti-Chinese labor union, the Knights of Labor. The Chinese government sent their own officials on a fact-finding mission, guarded by federal troops, and demanded reparations from the U.S. government. President Cleveland believed that the federal government was not responsible, but

agreed to the compensation as a gesture of good will. In 1887, Congress approved the indemnity legislation. Cleveland was appalled by the violence, but he had reached the conclusion that the anti-Chinese prejudice was so deeply entrenched in the West, and the Chinese and American cultures were

so different, that the Chinese would never be assimilated. It was the government’s duty, therefore, to protect

the Chinese resident in the U.S. and to prevent the immigration of more Chinese through a new treaty to be negotiated between the American and Chinese governments.

Link – FarmsWe must use the aff as a starting point to which we question why Unions have not been successful. Though Unions advocate that they bargain for the oppressed its just another tool for the elites to widen racial tensions among one another especially in context of farm Unions. Wise ’15 (http://www.timwise.org/2015/04/how-racism-explains-americas-class-divide-and-culture-of-economic-cruelty-an-excerpt-from-under-the-affluence/ The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Jeopardizing the Future of America (San Francisco: City Lights, 2015).That the United States has long had a less complete system of social safety nets than most other industrialized nations is by now well established. Despite a brief period of substantial government intervention on behalf of the poor and unemployed from the 1930s through the 1960s, for the past forty-five years there has been a steady retrenchment in these efforts, fueled by a persistent and increasingly hostile rhetoric aimed at such programs and those whom they serve. While the fact of less adequate safety nets is evident, a clear understanding of why the U.S. has been so much stingier than others in our provision for those in need is less clearly appreciated. Among the most prominent explanations, especially offered up by liberals and those of the political left, is the historical weakness of the labor movement and the lack of a labor-based party in the U.S. Stronger labor movements in Europe have been able to wrest concessions from the owners of capital and political elites that have been harder to come by here: more complete unemployment compensation, and better health care and educational guarantees most prominently. It’s an argument with significant historical resonance, But it still begs the question:

why? Why has it been so much harder for labor unions to gain strength in the United States? Why has there been no effective labor party to develop in America, even as they have been quite common elsewhere? Why have working class consciousness and the political movements that typically flow from that consciousness been generally weaker here than in other nations? Although there are likely several answers to these questions, there can be no doubt that among the biggest is the role of racism in dividing working class folks along lines of racial and ethnic identity. The development of the class structure in the United States has been, from the beginning, interwoven with the development of white supremacy. Indeed, a fair reading of those dual histories suggests that white supremacy and the elevation of whites as whites above persons of color, even when both shared similar class positions, has been critical in the shoring up of class division. Race, in other words, has been a weapon with which elites have divided working people from one another and prevented white working folks from developing a strong identification with their counterparts of color. Unless we address racial inequity and racism—and especially as lynchpins to the maintenance of economic inequity and class division—it will be impossible to solve these latter issues. Sadly, most Americans appear not to comprehend this truism. So, for instance, in a recent survey, while eighty percent claimed the government should focus “a lot” or “great deal” of effort on addressing economic inequality, only twenty-six percent said the same about the issue of racism and racial inequity, suggesting that the connections between the two are not well understood. The Role of Race and Racism in the Dividing of the American Working Class The history of whiteness as a wedge between working class persons, and as a key element in the perpetuation of economic inequity, goes back to the early colonies in the Americas. As theologian and scholar Thandeka explains, discussing the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: The legislators (in the Virginia colony) also raised the status of white servants, workers, and the white poor…Until then the European indentured servants had lived and worked under the same conditions as the African slaves, the chief difference in their status being that the Europeans’ servitude was contracted for a specified period whereas the slaves, and their progeny, served for life. In 1705, the assembly required masters to provide white servants at the end of their indentureship with corn, money, a gun, clothing, and 50 acres of land. The poll tax was also reduced. As a result of these legally sanctioned changes in poor whites’ economic position, they gained legal, political, emotional, social, and financial status that depended directly on the concomitant degradation of Indians and Negroes. The decision to elevate poor and landless Europeans above blacks and indigenous peoples was a conscious one, made so as to vouchsafe the position of the elite relative to the masses, which position was threatened by the possibility of cross-racial, class-based rebellion. Collaborations between poor Europeans and Africans, and militant resistance to economic oppression, had frightened the Virginia planter class during Bacon’s Rebellion in

1676, leading to the passage of the above-mentioned laws granting so-called whites privileges previously denied to the poor. Fear of further cross-racial alliances led to the abolition of European indentured servitude altogether in the first decade of the eighteenth century, much as it had led colonial leaders in the British West Indies to halt the importation of Irish servants to the island of Nevis, due to previous rebellions against the elite fomented by a combination of poor Europeans and African slaves there. To limit the prospects for working class and peasant-class consciousness across racial lines, colonial elites passed further laws requiring plantation owners to employ a certain number of whites for every African they held in bondage, thereby yoking white employment opportunities to the institution of slavery. Other laws barred blacks from certain trades altogether, in effect reserving those for whites, further linking the enslavement of blacks to the relative elevation of whites, even those without land (1) Still other laws required whites to serve on slave patrols and help control blacks, thereby creating the perception among even poor European peoples that they were members of one big team, along with the rich. It was a powerful trick. After all, logic would suggest that poor and landless Europeans should have recognized the economic harm done to their own interests from enslavement. Obviously, if a plantation owner has to pay a white person to work on their farm but can force the black person to do it for free because he owns them, the employment and wage base for white workers is effectively undermined. But by way of these laws meant to create racialized status for poor Europeans (now and for the first time called white), elites managed to elevate such peasants just sufficiently to make their objective class interests literally pale in comparison to their racial ones. It was this elevation of whiteness at the expense of class interests that helped convince most white southerners to support secession and the maintenance of the institution of slavery. Even though the wealthy were able to escape military service during the civil war if they owned a sufficient number of Africans—a class privilege one might expect to rankle poor whites who would have to take up the slack and risk their own lives to protect the power of the planter elite—working class whites typically fell in line, fighting and dying to protect a way of life the benefits of which were mostly enjoyed by persons unlike themselves. Indeed, the southern elite knew that only by seceding from the union and rebelling openly against the anti-slavery Republican party of Lincoln, might poor whites be kept in line. Three-quarters of southern whites didn’t own slaves; as such they might not be as committed to the system’s maintenance, or that of white supremacy—the institution that confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens called the “cornerstone” of the breakaway government. In 1859, giving voice to concerns that poor and landless whites may prove insufficient support for elite interests in the face of class-conscious anti-slavery forces, one South Carolina politician exclaimed: “I mistrust our own people more than I fear all the efforts of the Abolitionists (2).” It was for this reason that southern lawmakers often tried to pass laws encouraging all whites to own at least one slave and even offering tax breaks and financial incentives to make such ownership possible. Why? Because, as one Tennessee planter explained it: “The minute you put it out of the power of common farmers to purchase a Negro man or woman…you make him an abolitionist at once (3).” In 1860, Stephen Hale of Alabama wrote to the Governor of Kentucky in his official capacity as Commissioner to that state, in an attempt to convince the latter of the propriety of joining the Confederate government. Therein, he appealed directly to the importance of maintaining white supremacy even for the non-slaveholding class: If the policy of the Republicans is carried out…and the South submits, degradation and ruin must overwhelm alike all classes of citizens in the Southern States. The slaveholder and non-slave-holder must ultimately share the same fate—all be degraded to a position of equality with free Negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life…Who can look upon such a picture without a shudder? What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters, in the not distant future, associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped, by the Heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed? Even in the North, these kinds of appeals were common. During the Civil War, Democratic politicians in places like New York appealed to Irish working-class racism, warning that if slaves were emancipated, it would cause blacks to flood northward to “steal the work and the bread of the honest Irish (4).” In short, the elite sought to sow fear of racial equality, appealing to whiteness as a virtually corporate identity, even as most poor whites, south and north, would have been better off financially had enslavement been abolished. Linking the degradation of people of color to the elevation of whites was a narrative and material strategy deployed so as to create a very particular kind of class-consciousness in the majority population: a class-consciousness that would prioritize one’s racial class (or perhaps more properly, caste) over economic station. After the civil war, industrial capitalism and the organizing of working class folks both North and South followed the developing racial script. Convinced that integrated labor federations would somehow “degrade” the quality of work or the social status of white workers, most labor leaders expressed openly racist and hostile views about blacks and Asian labor, about Mexicans and all workers of color. Furthermore, people of color were kept from most of the largest trade unions for generations, as white workers sought to elevate their racial status above their class interests (5). As one Texas railroader put it, faced with the prospect of admitting blacks to his union: “We would rather be absolute slaves of capital than to take the

negro into our lodges as an equal and brother.” The great sociologist, W.E.B. DuBois wrote extensively about the importance of working class white racism in the early labor movement, and how white workers saw their short-term interests as being served by racial bonding against persons of color, given the white supremacist society in which they were living. Even as such racism diminished the strength of the labor movement in the long term, since employers could use workers of color to break strikes, or hold the prospects of hiring replacement workers of color over the heads of whites to limit the militance of union demands, it made sense in the short run. Emphasizing the “psychological wage” of whiteness even in the face of inadequate real wages, DuBois explained that as regards the white worker: …while they received a low wage they were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference…because they were white. They were admitted freely, with all classes of white people, to public functions…The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts dependent upon their votes treated them with leniency…(6) Not only in regard to black labor, but also that of Chinese railroad workers, whites found their class status elevated by way of racial subordination. When tens of thousands of Chinese were brought to America to help lay the transcontinental railroad, white workers were pacified by promises that far from taking white men’s jobs, Chinese “mudsills” would create a need for new foremen who would exercise authority over the Asian newcomers. During a Congressional investigation into the use of Chinese labor in the 1870s, Charles Crocker—who was a Board member of the Central Pacific Railroad Company—explained the way in which the exploitation of Chinese workers had elevated white labor: I believe that the effect of Chinese labor upon white labor has an elevating instead of degrading tendency. I think that every white man who is intelligent and able to work, who is more than a digger in a ditch…who has the capacity of being something else, can get to be something else by the presence of Chinese labor…after we got Chinamen to work, we took the more intelligent of the white laborers and made foremen of them. I know of several of them now who never expected, never had a dream that they were going to be anything but shovelers of dirt, hewers of wood and drawers of water, and they are now respectable farmers, owning farms. They got their start by controlling Chinese labor on our railroad (7). Discussing DuBois’s analysis, historian David Roediger notes, “the pleasures of whiteness could function as a ‘wage’ for white workers.” That is, “status and privileges conferred by race could be used to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships (8).” The problem of course was that by opting for the “property” of whiteness (as UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris has termed it), white workers and their labor unions managed to trade class interests for racial ones, and in so doing limited the ability of unions as unions to elevate the labor struggle here to the levels that were seen elsewhere. The whites turned into foremen on the railroads may have benefitted from their newfound middle-management positions, but for most whites, who were not so elevated, the promise of advancement was little more than a trick; it was ultimately a way to dampen class-based discontent and keep white workers in line as the go-between, running interference for the white elite against workers of color. Racism ultimately created real material advancement for a few, but at the cost of splitting the economic coalitions that would likely have otherwise developed. It is in much the same way that the late nineteenth century Populist Party (an early iteration of a labor/farmer party in America) was ultimately weakened by racism, when white workers in the movement were turned against workers of color by blatant appeals to white supremacy. This history matters: it is one thing, after all, to note the relative weakness of labor in the U.S. when compared to labor organizing in other nations—something about which most all on the left are quick to do—but it is quite another to confront the role that racism has played in that comparative weakness and then seek to address it directly. Consider, for instance, how much more vital the American labor movement could have been, had it not fallen prey to the kind of racism voiced in the main publication of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1910, regarding Mexican labor from over the border: Cheap labor, yes, at the sacrifice of manhood and homes and all that go to build up and sustain a community. Cheap labor—at the cost of every ideal cherished in the heart of every member of the white race, utterly destroyed and buried beneath the greedy ambitions of a few grasping money gluttons…True Americans do not want or advocate the importation of any people who cannot be absorbed into full citizenship, who cannot eventually be raised to our highest social standard (10). In short, rather than embrace Mexican labor and bring them into the unions—where they would then have helped to form a broader force of workers—here, the leaders of the nation’s largest union federation were suggesting that the enemy was other working people. They were willing to make permanent outsiders of brown-skinned “foreign” labor—ostensibly to better fight the money-grubbing of the elite, whom they recognized as using Mexican workers for less pay—never noticing that in so doing they would force an alliance between those workers of color and the employers, while doing little to help themselves. Again, racism ultimately weakened the position of all workers relative to capital. So too was

the sorry process repeated with regard to blacks. In 1917, the horrific anti-black pogrom that touched off in East St. Louis, Illinois, in which 150 were killed, including thirty-nine children, was sparked by the hiring of blacks by companies there, seeking to break white unions. By promising job opportunities to blacks willing to move from the south, these companies took advantage of union racism and sought to pit struggling blacks against struggling whites. And it worked: When large numbers of African Americans made the journey to East St. Louis, settling in there in hopes of steady employment, white anger grew, not against the bosses who were using both groups of workers, but against the burgeoning black community, finally erupting in an orgy of violence (11). By the 1920s, playing upon the unwillingness of white unions to integrate, managers in the stockyards and packing houses actually helped create an all-black union—but one that was actually beholden to the company and its leadership. Led by an African American promoter named Richard Parker, the “American Unity Labor Union,” worked to sow suspicion of the dominant white labor movement and white workers, all so as to benefit the interests of company elites. Announcing that the black union did not believe in strikes, and that all differences “between laborers and capitalists can be arbitrated” (and mixing in a dose of pseudo-black nationalism so as to promote race pride and unity) Parker’s group did the bidding of capital, something that was only possible because the white unions had sought to remain segregated in the first place (12). Elsewhere, in places like New Orleans, employers began hiring Irish and then Italians to replace blacks in canal building and hospitality jobs like restaurants and hotels, as well as barbering, janitorial work and catering (13). Though none of these positions paid exorbitant wages, they provided new economic niches for recent white immigrants, once again creating a link, both material and psychological, between the subordination of African Americans and the relative elevation of whites; it was a link that held despite the fact that those white workers remained well subordinated in the larger class structure by economic elites who, in the end, cared little more for them than those persons of color whose mistreatment had been longstanding.

Link – KantKant’s philosophy of universalizability is rejected by most contemporary philosophers on the grounds of Categorical Racism which excludes Black bodies. Farr 02 [Arnold Farr (Ph.D. University of Kentucky) “Can a Philosophy of Race Afford to Abandon the Kantian Categorical Imperative?”)] LADI//PCThe term “categorical racism” as used by Victor Anderson in Beyond Ontological Blackness is defined thus: Categorical racism appropriates a species logic in which every individual member of a species shares essential traits that identify the member within the species. No accidental or particular instances of individuation (historical, economic, manners, or customs) can disconnect the individual member from the species for the individual necessarily or categorically belongs in the species if it shares all essential traits identifying the species.2 Racism, sexism, and many other forms of domination can be said to be based on what Anderson has called “species logic.”3 Anderson claims the EnlightJOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 33 No. 1, Spring 2002, 17–32. © 2002 Blackwell Publishers, Inc. enment and Romantic cultures of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland, Germany, and France developed a philosophy of difference that differentiated European consciousness from others.4 “European intellectuals sought to disclose European genius as an explanatory category for the progressive, historical movement of the modern age.”5 Anderson and others are right in their claim that Kant’s racist attitude is based on a form of “species logic.” Indeed, the Enlightenment itself is permeated with racist attitudes and attempts to scientifically justify such attitudes. In On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, Tzvetan Todorov examines the development of scientific racism in the French Enlightenment. Scientific racism is based on “species logic” insofar as it attempts to prove the inferiority of non-European races and thereby ranks groups of people in such a way that Europeans are viewed as the highest manifestation of humanity, whereas other groups are relegated to a subhuman status. In such a scheme, Europeans embody the universal, the ideal of humanity.6 This notion has led many contemporary theorists to reject the notion of the ideal humanity or universal values since these values are by and large European. The problem may be stated in terms of the following propositions: Proposition 1. Europeans embody the highest principles and values of humanity, and are the most intelligent of the species. Proposition 2. All other races are subhuman to the extent that they do not fully embody the intelligence and values that are characteristic of humanity in its highest form. Proposition 3. Other races do embody an undeveloped human essence that must be cultivated and perfected. Proposition 4. Since Europeans embody the most perfected form of humanity, they will determine the course of history (the progress of humanity). Proposition 5. Non-European races should submit themselves to the ideal, the cultured, the bearers of history, the white European male. These five propositions sum up categorical racism and are consistent with Kant’s attitude in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. In this text Kant makes several claims about the inferiority of African people. One of the passages cited by Anderson and also discussed by Cornel West7 reads as follows: The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the tri- fling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in 18 Arnold Farr the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color.8 This passage shows that Kant is guilty of “categorical racism.” That is, all people of African descent are relegated to one single category and devalued as a group. No consideration is given to possible individual differences, historical circumstances, etc. People of African descent are thought to be by nature inferior to whites. That Kant was a racist is by no means contested here..

Impacts

Prior QuestionRacism is a prior ethical concern Memmi 2k – Albert, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris, Albert (RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165) jwangThe struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One

cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim

(and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated ; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition . The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in

question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is “ the truly capital sin. ” fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of

humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall,” says the bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality . Because, in the end, the

ethical choice commands the political choice . A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.

NeolibThe free market is sustained off of the exploitation of non-white populations—present day examplesSavali ’14 /// Kirsten West Savali, 9-17-2014, "'You Can't Have Capitalism Without Racism': On The Economist and Bruce Levenson," HuffPost, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-west-savali/you-cant-have-capitalism-_b_5809628.html LADI//KDLast week, The Economist‘s controversial review of Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism sparked intense outrage due to the clear racism dripping from every word. The unnamed writer, who probably had “Dixie“ playing softly in the background as he typed, took umbrage at Baptist’s assertion that the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans was the bloody foundation of capitalism in the United States. Instead, he opines, we should look at the bright side: Slaves were valuable property, and much harder and, thanks to the decline in supply from Africa, costlier to replace than, say, the Irish peasants that the iron-masters imported into south Wales in the 19th century. Slave owners

surely had a vested interest in keeping their “hands” ever fitter and stronger to pick more cotton. It gets worse. Due to this vested interest in the “supply” of prime African property, according to The Economist, surely plantation owners treated them better than those cheap Irish peasants and Baptist should be ashamed of himself for crafting such a biased portrayal of the peculiar institution: Some of the rise in productivity could have come from better treatment... Mr. Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy. The hypothetical speculation that less

violence against enslaved Africans equaled “better treatment” and, subsequently, higher productivity, is not only vile and asinine, it is a study in white privilege and systemic racism — and that is never “objective.” Rather, it is advocating for the reframing of slavery as something that can be accurately measured by mere dollars and cents. Once The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates criticized the review on Twitter, the outrage spread like wildfire. That fire was further flamed when The Economist issued a half-hearted apology claiming that they had withdrawn the review, when, in fact, they simply edited the page where it originally appeared then linked to another page where it could still be read in its entirety. We were apparently supposed to believe that this was “in the interest of transparency” and had nothing to do with capitalizing on the review through increased page views and ad revenue. Just as the social media backlash — best evidenced by the creation of the scathing #EconomistBookReviews hashtag — began to slightly fade, news broke that Atlanta Hawks co-owner Bruce Levenson self-reported a racially charged email he wrote back in 2012 and planned to sell his controlling stake in the struggling team as penance. In the email, Levenson attempted to frame low Hawks season-ticket sales as a by-product of Southern White racism fueled by a proliferation of Black stereotypes: My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a significant season ticket base. Please don’t get me wrong. There was nothing threatening going on in the arena back then. I never felt uncomfortable, but I think Southern Whites simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they were in the minority. On fan sites I would read comments about how dangerous it is around Philips yet in our 9 years, i don’t know of a mugging or even a pick-pocket incident. This was just racist garbage. When I hear some people saying the arena is in the wrong place I think it is code for there are too many Blacks at the games. I have been open with our executive team about these concerns. I have told them I want some white cheerleaders and while I don’t care what the color of the artist is, I want the music to be music familiar to a 40-year-old White guy if that’s our season tixs demo. Read full email here. Levenson swiftly drew comparisons to racist former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling and NBA commissioner Adam Silver issued the following statement: Mr. Levenson notified me last evening that he had decided to sell his controlling interes/t in the Atlanta Hawks. As Mr. Levenson acknowledged, the views he expressed are entirely unacceptable and are in stark contrast to the core principles of the National Basketball Association. He shared with me how truly remorseful he is for using those hurtful words and how apologetic he is to the entire NBA family—fans, players, team employees, business partners, and fellow team owners—for having diverted attention away from our game. I commend Mr. Levenson for self-reporting to the league office, for being fully cooperative with the league and its independent investigator, and for putting the best interests of the Hawks, the Atlanta community, and the NBA first. Let’s be clear: The email was a strong indictment of Southern white racism more than an expression of personal bigotry. It is fact that there are white people who will avoid venues because they’re “too black.” As reporter Robby Kelland said to the Daily Beast: “Levenson isn’t wrong with what he said. He made some poor choices of words and, to me, comes off as out of touch more than racist ... The Braves are moving out of downtown Atlanta to go to affluent Cobb County to make the wealthy White fans more willing to go to games.” It is also fact that disparities in income — more than 1 in 4 blacks live in poverty, while less than 1 in 10 whites do — potentially means that black attendees are less apt to spend money on snacks and team merchandise. These facts in and of themselves are not racist, but they are predicated upon a racist system and as Levenson said in his apology: We all may have subtle biases and preconceptions when it comes to race, but my role as a leader is to challenge them, not to validate or accommodate those who might hold them. That’s what privilege does; it

allows space — demands space — for the perpetuation of racist systems. And as Malcolm X taught us: “ You can’t have capitalism without racism .” Instead of focusing on the fact that of the 12 Hawks seasons preceding his 2012 email only three of them were winning,

Levenson decided to kick around the idea that maybe too many black people on the Kiss-cam were keeping wealthy, white, potential season ticket-holders away. Instead of noting that Atlanta is a city with professional football (Falcons), baseball (Braves), and through the 2011 season, ice hockey (Thrashers), which may just — don’t quote me now — cause a significant decrease in white season-ticket holders, Levenson noted that there were fewer

fathers and sons at the games, due no doubt to the disproportionate rate of black attendees. But that is how capitalism and racism in the United States work, right? In a predominately black city with a predominately black team playing a predominately black sport, it makes good business sense to push black audiences to the margins while brainstorming on ways to further capitalize on black labor and tap into white racism in a league where most of the owners are white. Though some have quickly drawn comparisons between Levenson and Sterling based solely on his email, those comparisons deflect from the treacherous and stealthy nature of racism. Just as it was easy to point to V. Stiviano’s recordings as proof of Sterling’s racism, while ignoring his extensive, documented record of housing discrimination against blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles, the systemic implications of Levenson’s words, the casual and perhaps inadvertent positioning of blackness as a problem to be solved, should be much more frightening.

Institutionalized racism is so deeply embedded in the fabric of our everyday lives that it can rear its ugly head anywhere from an Economist book review that whitesplains slavery — which was not simply a free-market exercise during which enslaved Africans were treated better as time went by, but a fluid, structural dynamic that continues to shape and inform everything from the Prison Industrial Complex to the extrajudicial killing of black people in the United States at least once every 28 hours — to the front offices of the Atlanta Hawks.

These issues collide upon the realization that the author of The Economist review is “advocating” for exactly what is detailed in Levenson’s email: The revisionist rendering of a capitalist system built and maintained on the brutal exploitation of black labor, while simultaneously privileging whiteness in such an insidious way that, on paper, contempt for black life is framed as a smart business decision. And once it’s understood that racism is deemed good for this nation’s bottom-line and always has been, the true danger of being black in America becomes clear.

Every Instance KeyA rejection of racism is a definitive characteristic of humanity— our endless fight for existence and value is tinted by inequality, we must reject racism at all costsMemmi ’97 /// Memmi, Albert. Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Paris “pg. 163.” RACISM, 1997. (DRGCL/B1048) LADI//KDThe struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved. Yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge.

Alternative

2NR – PermutationThe permutation sidelines the problem of race. Labor interests historically have favored white workers over other minorities. Interest convergence is not solidarity. Hill 96 – Herbert Hill, Department of African-American Studies and Industrial Relations Research Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of Black Labor and the American Legal System (“ THE PROBLEM OF RACE IN AMERICAN LABOR HISTORY”, Reviews in American History 24 (1996) 189-208, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Accessed Via JSTOR) LADI//RMT The idealization of the racial practices of CIO unions, a major preoccupa- tion in recent labor history, is exemplified by David Brody, who describes "the early CIO as an interracial movement."29 But the fact that blacks were admitted into CIO unions because it was in the self-interest of whites to do so did not make it an "interracial movement." Interracial organization requires that fundamental shifts in institutional arrangements be made; above all it means sharing power. But the leaders of the CIO and their affiliated organiza- tions were unwilling to accept blacks as equal partners in the leadership of unions, to share control with nonwhites and to permit them to share in the power that is derived from such institutional authority. In contrast to the craft unions of the AFL, CIO unions admitted blacks, but CIO affiliates engaged in a variety of discriminatory practices after blacks had been admitted. In 1955, just before the merger between the AFL and the CIO, Horace R. Cayton, coauthor of Black Workers and the New Unions (1939), which hailed the CIO, summarized the black workers' experience with CIO unions:

In retrospect, the history of Negro workers and the CIO is a history of exaggerated hopes and broken promises . In the 1930's we very much

wanted to believe that a great change was taking place, that the rise of the CIO would mean a real break with the racism of the old AFL, and that a new interracial labor movement was about to be born. Of course, that would have been of great importance. But it never happened . Even in

the early days of the CIO, Negroes were usually in a subordinate position, very rarely permitted real leadership responsibility and as time went on many of the CIO unions just ignored the official anti-discrimination policy. At the beginning they needed us to help build their unions, but once they became strong and powerful the old racism reasserted itself . The CIO is a sorry mess ... that's why they are going back into the AFL.

While the racial practices of CIO unions varied greatly, they all found it necessary, at their inception, to accept black workers into membership in order to organize their respective industries such as steel, auto, rubber and packinghouse, among others. In industries where there was a significant concentration of black workers, establishing control over blacks had been essential for conducting effective collective bargaining. If blacks had been forced to remain outside of organized labor or limited to separate all-black unions, they would have constituted a serious threat to the emerging industrial labor organizations. Admission into union ranks was the most effective method of achieving control of the black labor force. But once such control was established, many unions used their power to structure racial inequality, by denying blacks equal promotion and seniority rights and limiting them to unskilled jobs in segregated labor classifications. The Steelworkers Union, which had a substantial black membership, was willing to improve conditions for black workers within segregated job structures, but because it functioned primarily for whites it did not challenge racist job patterns imposed by employers. On the contrary, for decades it used its power to preserve and expand them. In so doing it guaranteed that the higher-paying, cleaner, and healthier jobs, with opportunities for advance- ment into skilled classifications, would be reserved exclusively for whites.

Provisions in union contracts stipulated that black workers' seniority would be operative only in segregated classifications, thus ensuring that they could not compete with whites for jobs. Accordingly, the union developed as the institutional repository of white job expectations. This is the common pattern that emerged in Title VII litigation against the Steelworkers Union and other industrial unions regarding their racial practices. A 1986 study by Robert J. Norrell of the role of the Steelworkers Union in the development of discriminatory employment patterns in the steel industry of Birmingham revealed that the union "agreed to a system of segregated lines of promotion that preserved white supremacy and expanded seniority rights of white workers .... Black laborers were put on occupational ladders that led nowhere." The study also points out that "the unions gave white workers new power to enforce job discrimination, thus severely curtailing black opportunities. The gains made at blacks' expense provided whites with a clear economic stake in preserving racial discrimination." After providing detailed examples. Norrell goes on to explain that

white workers used the power gained in the organizing struggles of the 1930's to maintain and even to expand their economic advantage in the mills. Therein lay a harsh irony: the organization made possible by interracial solidarity now yielded greater restrictions on black opportunity than existed before the 1930's.31 In retrospect it is evident that the Steelworkers Union and other

industrial unions often functioned to perpetuate white supremacy in the workplace.

The experience of many black workers within the CIO was expressed by a black steelworker employed at the Atlantic Steel Company plant in Atlanta, where the United Steel workers of America had repeatedly negotiated agreements limiting black workers to segregated labor departments with a dual system of seniority and job classification based upon race.32 When the union first came, most of the whites were afraid, but we Negroes, we wore the CIO button. We were the first to come out it started here .... But now they--the whites-get all the benefits and we are left behind again. Turned out CIO meant one thing for the whites and another thing for us. The union don't handle our grievances, we are stuck, with jim crow seniority, back-breaking jobs and we get less pay than they do. We can't get promoted to the good white jobs. White boys just hired off the street get treated better than we do after twenty years. That's what we get for bringing in the union here.3 More than a quarter of a century of litigation under Title VII reveals that what racial exclusion was to craft unions, segregated lines of job assignment and seniority were to the industrial unions, and that casual informal discrimi- nation in employment became more rigid and enforceable as a result of codification in labor-management contracts. The CIO policy on race was at best an expression of abstract equality in contrast to the pattern of exclusion and segregation within the AFL, and by the time of the merger between the CIO and the AFL in 1955, CIO racial policy had become an empty formality. The dynamic period of industrial organizing was over and the CIO leadership now had much in common with the conservative AFL bureaucracy. Robert Zieger, in his history of the CIO, writes that by the 1950s " the CIO relegated African American workers to the margins ."34 What is significant however, is the way black workers seized upon every opening provided by some industrial unions to take the lead in creating militant local labor organizations. The exception to the failure of interracial unionism within the CIO was the United Packinghouse Workers of America, where large numbers of black workers were strategically concentrated with their own leaders before union organization. The UPWA was responsible for important advances in the employment status of black packinghouse workers, and from

its inception it functioned as an interracial organization, with black members sharing major national and local leadership positions.

Framework

2NR – FrameworkOppression is a priority to deconstruct in public institutions Chang ’02 /// Chang, Mitchell J. "Perservation or Transformation: Where's the Reall Educational Discourse on Diversity?." The Review of Higher Education 25.2 (2002): 125-140.  LADI//KDHistorically, postsecondary   institutions did not willingly embrace, let¶   alone collectively defend, diversity-related efforts.   It took heavy- handed   intervention by the federal government to open wider the doors of higher¶   education to students of color. This change and subsequent institutional¶   alterations now considered under the rubric of diversity varied in the ease   with which different campuses implemented them; but it is fair to say that much ongoing administrative resistance   (Altbach, 1991; Olivas, 1993; Trent, 1991a) and prolonged acrimonious   debate   (Levine, 1996) characterized the¶ typical campus dealing with diversity issues. Institutional conflicts typically¶ occurred because, as Hurtado (1996) observed, “These diversity issues¶ often required fundamental changes in premises and practices at many levels”¶ (p. 27), which, according to Chan (1989), threatened the very structure¶ of power both within and outside the university.¶ Because the diversity agenda and its related efforts seek to effect change¶ at almost all levels of higher education, it has been described as a “transformative¶ enterprise” (Nakanishi and Leong, 1978; Wei, 1993). In this view, diversity¶ initiatives are not simply innocuous extensions of preexisting¶ institutional interests but are instead efforts that challenge and seek to¶ transform traditional institutional practices and arrangements toward making¶ education more equitable, diverse, and inclusive, as well as more open¶ to alternative perspectives (Hirabayashi, 1997). Perhaps because the transformative¶ aims associated with diversity tend to challenge existing arrangements,¶ colleges and universities have not done all that they must do to¶ maximize the educational benefits associated with diversity (Allen, 1992;¶ Chang, 1999b). Hurtado (1996) held that “both resistance and change are¶ inevitable parts of the major transformation that is under way in the mission¶ of postsecondary institutions—a mission that includes diversity as a¶ key component” (p. 29). Therefore, she maintained, some   tension and conflict¶   are likely at the level of deep institutional change in   the history of individual campus diversity efforts.   In an educational setting, however, tension and conflict are not necessarily problematic for learning (Gurin, 1999), unless¶   they prevent campuses from successfully implementing a multifaceted approach to diversity.¶ Given that the transformative aims often clash with deep-seated institutional¶ assumptions and values, the educational benefits associated with diversity¶ emerge, more often than not, out of institutional transformation¶ and not out of preexisting ways of operating and behaving. In other words,¶ educational benefits for students emanate from changes that challenge prevailing¶ educational sensibilities and that enhance educational participation. Accordingly, retired Harvard professor   Charles Willie pointed out in an interview that   the educational significance of diversity is best   observed when viewed as “the foundation for institutional change and self-correction”   (qtd. in Buchbinder, 1998)   and not as an uncritical manifestation of preexisting institutional values and ideals.   As such,   diversity calls into question   not only how learning is viewed and what is valued, but also   how learning should be assessed.   In the next section, I will discuss further how the diversity agenda¶ seeks to transform higher education’s

Scholarship has an obligation to account the nature of oppression. Freire ’68 /// (Paulo Freire. Educational Revolutionary. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. Pg 46- 47) LADI//KD

The oppressed suffer from the duality   which has established itself   in their innermost being.   They discover that   without freedom they cannot exist authentically.   Yet, although they desire authentic

existence, they fear it.  They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized.  The conflict lies in   the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided ; between ejecting the oppressor within or

not ejecting them; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between peaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and re-create, in their power to transform the

world.  This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must take into account. 

Affirmative

1AR Answers

1AR – Race CritiqueRacism is a societal structure that government is deeply intertwined with. Comparing policy solutions with racial formation is necessary for effective analysis and avoids the hijacking of government Lopez 16 - Ian Haney Lopez Ian Haney López is an author and professor at the University of California, Berkeley.(“Unions Must Address Racism” January 12, 2016, https://aflcio.org/2016/1/12/unions-must-address-racism) RMT For unions to recover, they must both fight the injustices done to people of color and simultaneously emphasize the common interests that all working people share. César Chávez knew this when he built a farm worker coalition across race lines, uniting Filipinos and

Mexicans in California’s fields. Martin Luther King Jr . embodied this in joining the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis and in organizing the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. Seeking to build a bridge between labor and the

civil rights movement, King said to the AFL-CIO in 1961, “Our needs are identical with labor’s needs, decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community.”Fostering a shared commitment to challenging racial and economic injustice depends on everyone recognizing that racism is more than prejudice by one individual against another. It has been, and remains, a way to structure society, the economy and government. Consider slavery—the Southern way of life was built to rationalize this barbarism, the economy depended on it, and government was designed to protect it. Though not to the same extent today, racism nevertheless continues to play this structuring role.This is most evident in our politics, especially when viewed from the perspective of the past half-century. Fifty years ago, the civil rights movement transformed the place of African Americans and other non-whites in society, ending formal segregation laws as well as racist restrictions on immigration. In turn, however, these changes contributed to rising anxiety among some made nervous by racial change, and politicians quickly sought to harness and then to foment this seething sense of insecurity . The Republican Party, in particular, though eventually many Democrats, too, began to campaign by scaring voters. They did so by dog whistling: Using coded terms like “inner city crime” and “silent majority” that on the surface did not mention race, but that just underneath coursed with racial power, telling a story of decent whites under threat from dangerous minorities. Today, nobody better symbolizes this toxic politics than Donald Trump .Yet for all its ugliness, this was strategy, not bigotry. Keeping minorities in their place was never the main point. Instead, the goal was to win elections and also to satisfy the demands of the billionaires funding political campaigns. This required stoking resentment, not only against nonwhites, but also against an activist government, which was painted as coddling minorities with welfare while refusing to control them through lax criminal laws and weak border enforcement. In effect, powerful elites used the politics of fear and division to hijack government for their own benefit. Pandering to racial anxiety and enflaming hatred against government, they distracted voters from recognizing the threat posed by increasing concentrations of wealth and power.

Today, the richest 0.1% of Americans holds 22% of the country's wealth—the same share held by the bottom 90% of the population.

These are levels of wealth inequality not seen in a century. As we slowly emerge from the Great Recession, we find ourselves confronting levels of poverty and economic hardship we thought we had left long in the past, with pensions gone, home equity erased, jobs scarce and little promise for our children. Once again, robber barons rule a rigged system, with government and the marketplace in their pockets. In their greed, they are stifling shared economic prosperity, limiting the mobility of current and future generations and endangering our democracy.It’s time to stop segregating the race problem as one that harms only minorities. A deeper conception of how racism structures politics, government and the economy connects minority concerns to the issues faced by all workers. This approach makes clear that when racism triumphs, all workers lose.Dog-whistle politicians constantly warn the racially anxious that liberal government and unions care more about coddling minorities than about protecting hardworking whites. This drumbeat makes it risky for labor to mobilize around nonwhite concerns because it can make conservative accusations ring true to many white workers.But the solution cannot be to avoid race and to exclusively address class interests. To talk solely about economics leaves racial demagoguery unchallenged, allowing it to continue dividing workers. It also leaves workers of color alienated and angry that the labor movement is ignoring the gross injustices they confront.The only way forward is to connect race to class, and class to race—by building an inclusive social movement that silences dog-whistle politics and demands that government put people first.

Unions are necessary to further the interests of civil rights, the plan is integral to the struggle against racism Yeselon 15 – Rich Yeselson worked for twenty-three years in the labor movement as a strategic campaigner. He is now a writer in Washington, DC (“When Labor Fought for Civil Rights”, Portside, 2015, http://portside.org/2017-03-15/when-labor-fought-civil-rights) RMT But this isn’t true. Unions and black workers are closer than they have ever been. And unions are, if anything, less ambivalent bulwarks against racism than they were in the immediate postwar period. The AFL-CIO and African-American organizations and

politicians work together and, for better or for worse, agree on pretty much every policy issue . Even the building trades, pushed for years by the courts and civil rights activists, have responded by opening up their apprenticeship and training programs to women and minorities. Today, there is a higher percentage of black workers who are union members than there are white workers. Ask any organizer of any color and they will tell you that they stand a better chance of organizing non-white workers, blacks especially, than white workers. And the most successful labor campaign in recent years, the SEIU-led Fight for $15 , seeks to organize fast-food workers who are disproportionately non-white . Like

the CIO when seeking to organize the industrial sector during the thirties and forties, SEIU today has both pragmatic and ideological reasons to organize workers of color in the growing low-wage service sector. Similarly, service-sector unions have built powerful alliances in California and Nevada with Latinos. As for white unionized workers, despite all of the stories about how pissed off they are at neoliberal Democrats and how they were attracted to Donald Trump’s trade message, the fact remains that white men in unions have still voted for Democrats at a rate of about 20 percent higher than their non-

union counterparts. (This pattern likely did not hold this year. Exit polls from the 2016 election indicate that Clinton carried the union vote by 51–43, the lowest margin for a Democrat since 1984.)So, while Schiller’s expertly depicted legal conflict seems ineluctable, in fact there is more solidarity between unions and African Americans today than there was a half century ago. He insists that the “weak and unstable foundation” of postwar liberalism provided little to “fleeing working-class whites in a time of economic crisis.” But how could a labor movement, grounded in industrial pluralism, win against management as its numbers declined? Conversely, how could this same declining movement succeed in petitioning the state for compensatory protections precisely at the moment when its political impact, along with its membership, grew smaller?The dueling visions of the law—majoritarian, anti-statist industrial pluralism versus state-assisted redress of individual claims of racial discrimination—as Schiller demonstrates, generated a lot of conflict between unions and civil rights activists. But this conflict didn’t end the labor liberalism driven by the CIO and a few of the AFL unions. The collapse of employment in the key postwar industries and the subsequent decline in union membership is what badly wounded this iteration of labor liberalism. This undermined the Democratic Party’s desire to promulgate full employment and a redistributive economic policy, which meant that the party had an ascendant and growing African-American voting bloc, which simultaneously alarmed white workers at precisely the moment when their economic clout and the unions that provided it were waning.So the new labor liberalism, built with the support of proportionally more non-white workers

(and women), is more progressive than the old pre–civil rights era labor liberalism. If it achieves its powerful new vision, it will be a more humane, cosmopolitan, and egalitarian movement than its predecessor. But as of now, it is a significantly smaller movement and lacks economic and political leverage in key sectors of the political economy. The Fight for $15, however innovative and promising, doesn’t remotely compare to the great CIO victories of the late 1930s and ’40s in terms of its impact on workers, both white and non- white. The unique conditions that engendered labor’s massive growth during this period, barely commented upon by either author, does not necessarily provide a template for contemporary organizing.

The alt is reductionist – Race is not a fundamental organizing principle Wimmer 15 - Andreas Wimmer, is Professor of Sociology and Faculty Associate of Politics at Princeton University (“Race-centrism: a critique and a research agenda” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015 Vol. 38, No. 13, 2186–2205, http://www.columbia.edu/~aw2951/RaceCentrism.pdf) RMT To show that race represents the most fundamental, most powerful structuring principle of inequality, one would have to compare it systematically to other inequality producing processes. For example, recent research by economists based on how individuals with easy-to-trace, rare names fare over half a dozen or more generations, shows that cl ass inequality is extremely resistant to intergenerational change at the very bottom and the very top of the hierarchy (Clark 2014; a fact overlooked by mainstream stratification research that rarely looks at those at the very top and the very bottom, but rather the ‘mainstream’ in between). The increasing gap between income groups and the declining mobility between such groups have been much discussed since Piketty’s (2014) bestseller, and American research shows that this affects blacks and whites equally (Bloome and Western 2011).

Other research with individual-level data on a global scale suggests that one’s country of birth nowadays represents the far best predictor of one’s life chances – much more so than one’s class origins

(Milanovic 2012). Some well-known other research shows that when controlling for test scores , wage differentials between African Americans and whites disappear (Neal and Johnson 1996) – which moves the empirical challenge to explain how these test scores arise and what relative role race and class and geographic location play in their generation. Incidentally, the achievement gap is now wider between social classes than between African Americans and whites (Reardon et al. Forthcoming).To be sure, the question is not whether race can be reduced to class – as in the somewhat dated Marxist interpretations of decades past – or to political closure along national lines, or to some other principle of inequality. The task is not one of reduction but of understanding conjunction . Even if racial forms of classification and discrimination are autonomous from these other processes and need to be understood in their own terms, a point made forcefully and convincingly by all four authors, the question of how they compare to these other forces still needs to be asked and answered. Only an encompassing view – both theoretically and empirically – that looks at the fate of individuals over time and over generations and that takes a series of other major social forces into account can establish whether race indeed trumps.

Unionization increases economic opportunities and social mobility for people of color Agbede 11[Folayemi Agbede (Center for American Progress). The Importance of Union for Workers of Color.] LADI//PC

Unions bolster o ppor tunities for all workers in our country. They encourage political participation and offer access to the middle class, as a recent report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund explains. But unions and their benefits are especially important for communities of color, for whom unionization has long been a critical component of their economic mobility. Workers who lack the collective leverage that unions provide are more distanced from the middle-class earnings and resources their unionized peers have, and this is particularly true for workers of color. Indeed, numbers show that most nonunion, nonwhite public-sector workers today fall farther below the median income of their white

coworkers than they would with a union safety-net. And workers of color, including Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and Pacific Islanders, are often concentrated at the low-end of the wage spectrum—jobs which often benefit the most from the protection of unions. [1]In lower-wage industries where union busting dramatically tempers access to competitive benefits, workers of color slide even farther down the wage scale. In the case of Wisconsin, and the impending attempts to decimate unions’ collective bargaining power in Indiana and Ohio, people of color are increasingly being shut out of decent work and incomes

because of weakened standards and lowered wage floors. These shutouts undermine the concentrated efforts that slowly inched workers of color toward closing the racial wealth gap that plagues low and middle-income people of color the most. Although some wage gaps have been narrowed, it remains evident that the middle-class status-markers of competitive industry wages, comprehensive healthcare , and retirement benefits continually prove elusive for workers in lower-wage industries and public-sector work. Where workers of color are occupationally segregated—statistically crowded out of higher-wage, predominately white worker occupied jobs—available positions are decreasingly unionized (if at all) in addition to being low-income-earning positions with little to no benefits.[2] In this context, the success of unions in boosting socioeconomic mobility becomes inarguably apparent.

Without union leadership and protection, many people of color—with particular

historical emphasis on African Americans—would not have accessed the middle class. [3] Black workers fought hotly contested, deadly fights for access to unions in order to secure basic protections and

economic equity. The successful unionization of integrated workplaces over the last 140 years not only increased the wages of African Americans—who were otherwise making nickels to white workers dollars —but it also raised the overall floor for antidiscriminatory labor standards in hiring and benefit distribution. African-American workers collectively leveraged their arduous labor in exchange for safer conditions and better compensation by forming and joining unions— gaining standard protections historically denied to American workers descended of America’s enslaved. What gains African

Americans have made through union protection and collective bargaining aren’t as accessible for other groups because of diminishing unionization. On one hand, many Latinos, who have been in the United States for generations, have been able to leverage the same gains as their African-American counterparts by joining unionized workforces. On the other, as established and newer Latino communities continue to grow in the United States, many of the 23 million Latinos presently in the workforce stand a different, lower chance for middle-class means than they did in the past. For new Americans, such as recent Latino immigrants and their first-generation American children, the concurrent decrease in unionization rates, the rise in Latino workforce growth, and Hispanic over-representation in low-wage work spells peril. The hard-fought access to unions that improved the economic standing for African-American workers could afford the same opportunities to immigrants and their children. In the absence of unions’ protective force, however, transient workers searching for immediately available work signal to predatory employers that they are economically vulnerable and desperate. In addition to having fewer economic levers, Latinos in the United States are less likely to have college degrees than white and African-American workers, and are crowded out of the increasingly college degree-based sector of good jobs. Where unions lower wage inequalities for workers without college degrees, the steady decline of unionization ratesmake Latino workers increasingly vulnerable in the quest for fair and beneficial employment. Conclusively, without access to competitive pay in the public sector, collective bargaining and employer-provided benefits, the

incomes of marginalized groups in the workforce would be even lower than their current amount. Workers of color’s access to the middle class will be infinitely narrowed without unionization. This is why workers of color and their allies must defend unions in the face of a growing, state-by-state onslaught. Where unions are defended, they can be restored and improved by the fierce engagement of members of color. As unions reach a pivotal point in their American history, this is the time for workers who stand to lose so much to fight for them, win for them, and make them even better for the future.

LinksStatistically, the decline in Unionization was correlated with the decline of African American Unionization Rates. Zipperer 16 [Ben Zipperer (Equitable Growth). African American Workers are Hurt More by the Decline in Union and Manufacturing Jobs.] LADI//PCThe sources of income growth and mobility in the U.S. labor market have changed dramatically over the past several decades. Good-paying union jobs and manufacturing employment were once a prominent foundation for the country’s middle class, but these jobs have been eviscerated in recent history—with a disproportionate effect on African Americans. Since the 1980s, union membership has plummeted for all demographic groups across the United States. For black workers, however, union jobs have disappeared

significantly faster than they have for white workers. (See Figure 1.) Figure 1 Share This: In 1983—the earliest year for which

we have comparable data—31.7 percent of black workers were union members or covered by a union contract, compared to 22.2 percent of white workers. By 2015, however, union representation rates for black and white workers had fallen to 14.2 percent and 12.5

percent, respectively. While this was a steep decline for white workers (a drop of 43.6 percent), the fall for black workers was substantially sharper (a drop of 55.2 percent). Research shows that the decline of unions is a significant cause of rising wage inequality among male workers. Recent work also demonstrates a strong correlation between union membership and intergenerational earnings mobility. African Americans may be disproportionately losing these positive benefits of unionization. A major reason for the fall in unionization has been the large decrease in manufacturing employment, due primarily to long-term downward trends among rich countries but also to a large trade deficit. Yet the overall decline in the role of manufacturing has actually been more acute for African Americans than it has been for white workers. (See Figure 2.) Figure 2 Share This: Prior to the 1990s, both black and white workers were equally likely to be employed in manufacturing. In 1979, the share of African Americans working in manufacturing was 23.9 percent, essentially the same rate for white workers of 23.5 percent. In 1990, both of these rates had fallen but remained the same for black (18.4 percent) and white (18.3 percent) workers. After

the early 1990s, however, black and white representation in manufacturing industries began to diverge. As of last year , the share of African Americans in manufacturing was only 8.6 percent, compared to 11.2 percent of white workers. In other words, a black worker was 23.2 percent less likely to have a manufacturing job than a white worker—a substantial blow considering that manufacturing jobs typically pay higher wages than other industries. Manufacturing employers aren’t hiring African American workers like they did in prior years. Even though the black share of the overall U.S. workforce grew between 1979 and 2015, the black share of the manufacturing workforce did not increase commensurately during that time and actually declined from 9.5 percent in 1979 to 9.2 percent in 2015. The combination of the downturn in manufacturing jobs and the decline in unionization has disproportionately affected African American workers. As we pursue policies to improve the quality of work, we should prioritize those which benefit the groups who have lost more of the good jobs that the labor market used to provide.

Empirically, Asian American Workers use unions as an outlet to successfully demand better conditions. Pastor 11 [Christina Pastor (Former Fi2W Business and Economics Reporting Fellow). Asian Immigrants in the Labor Movement: From Hawaii’s Plantations to Wisconsin’s Public Sector.] LADI//PC This should not be surprising. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) were not only the fastest growing racial group in America over the past decade, they are also among the fastest growing ethnic groups in organized labor, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “As a share of the union workforce, only Latinos are growing at a rate faster than

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,” said Nicole Woo, Director of Domestic Policy at CEPR and an author of the center’s recent report. Like Latinos, the number of Asian Americans in unions has surged as their numbers in the overall workforce have risen. In

2009, one in every 20 American workers was Asian, whereas 20 years ago, the ratio was one in 40. Asian workers consider unionizing and its tool of collective bargaining ways to help raise wages and improve conditions in the workplace, Asian

labor leaders say. According to the CEPR report, “even after controlling for workers’ characteristics, including age, education level, industry and state, unionized AAPI workers earn about 14.3 percent more than non-unionized AAPI workers with similar

characteristics. This translates to $2.50 per hour more for unionized AAPI workers.” Unionized Asian workers are also

16 percent more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and 22 percent more likely to have a retirement plan than their non-unionized counterparts. Contemporary Asian workers view the situation in Wisconsin as a throwback to the union movement’s initial struggles in the 1800s. Collective bargaining was introduced in 1886 following the founding of the American Federal of Labor. “Wisconsin is a horrible attack on the rights of workers,” prominent Chinese-American labor leader and educator May Chen told Fi2W. “The idea that workers are lazy and public sector unions are costing the country too much money is a little bit ridiculous considering how important government workers are,”

she added. ASIAN AMERICANS IN THE LABOR MOVEMENT The entry of Asian Americans into the labor movement was not immediately recognized. Marlene Kim, a professor at the University of

Massachusetts says for a long time, a stereotype of Asians persisted as reserved, uncomplaining immigrant family

providers who did their jobs diligently, worked long hours, went home at the end of the work day, and collected their pay checks. They were not seen as aggressive or politically militant, even though many participated in strikes as far back as the 1800s. “Like other racial minorities during the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, Asians were relegated to the jobs that no one else wanted – those that were the lowest-paying and that had the worst working conditions,” writes Kim in a report titled Organizing Asian Americans into Labor Unions. At that time, Asian Americans mainly worked in industries like agriculture,

mining and railroad constructions that hired a lot of low-wage immigrant workers. Even then, under the radar, Asian workers were organizing for better conditions and wages. One of the first large scale protests was the 1867 Central Pacific Railroad workers strike in California where about 2,000 workers idled in their camps and refused to work. May Chen, a leader in the Chinatown strike of 1982 May Chen, a leader in the Chinatown strike of 1982. (Photo: Cristina DC Pastor) Other protests followed, including the 1875 Chinese garment workers strike in San Francisco and a series of strikes involving Japanese and Filipino plantation workers in Hawaii demanding higher wages and better housing conditions in the early 1900s. Historically, the New York Chinatown strike of 1982 was one of the largest Asian American worker strikes with about 20,000 garment factory workers marching the streets of Lower Manhattan demanding work contracts. Chen, then affiliated with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, was one of the strike organizers. “The Chinatown community then had more and more small garment factories,” she recalled. “And the Chinese employers thought they could play on ethnic loyalties to get the workers to turn away from the union. They were very very badly mistaken.” Most of the protests included demands for higher wages, improved

working conditions and for management to observe the Confucian principles of fairness and respect. By many accounts, the

workers won. The strike caused the employers to hold back on wage cuts and withdraw their demand that workers give up their holidays and some benefits. It paved the way for better working conditions such as hiring bilingual staff to interpret for workers and management, initiation of English-language classes and van services for workers. Today’s Asian American Union members. “The problem faced by an Asian worker is immense, and it’s everywhere,” said Maf Misbah Uddin, president of Local 1407, affiliated with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Uddin said it creates an unjust atmosphere in the workplace. “We work harder so we can get a promotion, but promotions do not come to us most of the time.” With his Local 1407 union representing New York accountants, statisticians and actuaries, or about 125,000 municipal workers, Uddin, a Bangladeshi immigrant, is one of the highest ranking Asian labor leaders in the country. Maf Uddin, President of Local 1407 Maf Uddin, President of AFSCME-Local 1407. (Photo: Sarah Kate Kramer) The benefits of unionizing are not always quantifiable in terms of wages and

benefits, but they can be just as important, said Uddin. “Across the country where Asian workers are neglected or abused, we are improving the working conditions for our people. Asian workers have realized unions are their best options.” Chen concurs. “It is very much an appreciated goal of many Asians to get a job, become a union member and have some security benefits,” she said. Chen, who is one of the founders of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance or APALA, added, “if there is no union, Asians want to have one.” Founded in 1992, APALA is the only national organization of Asian American labor unions. It claims to represent about 660,000 union members nationwide. While Chinese, Japanese and Filipino workers were active in unions in earlier eras, Chen said she is seeing younger Vietnamese and Koreans swelling today’s union ranks. A lot of Asians work in the private sector, from garments factories to banks, but there are also many working in the public sector, such as the Post Office, hospitals, city and municipal governments and public schools, she added. “A lot of the young organizers come from a really diverse background of Asian nationalities,” she said. “That’s very positive. It gives the labor movement the ability to speak to and reach out to those populations.” Uddin said unions have made headway among South Asian Indians and Pakistanis in New York,

and there are potentially thousands of future Asian union members. “45,000 taxi drivers, 15,000 construction workers, and more than 10,000 street vendors ready to organize,” he said. Back in Wisconsin, APALA is ramping up efforts to organize the Asian Pacific American community not only against the anti-collective bargaining law (currently being blocked by a judge) but to ensure their voices are heard in the crowded political arena. “We are not only fighting back against these attacks but also reminding our base of the upcoming elections in 2011 and 2012,” said Gregory Cendana, executive director of APALA.

Decrease in Union membership makes lawmakers lazy when it comes to worker’s rights – the plan solves by increasing unionization rates. Greenhouse 11 [Steven Greenhouse (The New York Times). ”Labor’s Decline and Wage Inequality.”] LADI//PCThe decline in organized labor’s power and membership has played a larger role in fostering increased wage inequality in the United States than is generally thought, according to a study published

in the American Sociological Review this month. The study, “Unions, Norms and the Rise in U.S. Wage Inequality,” found that the decline in union power and density since 1973 explained a third of the increase in wage inequality among men since then, and a fifth of the increased inequality among women. The study noted that from 1973 to 2007, union membership in the private sector dropped to 8 percent from 34 percent among men and to 6 percent from 16 percent among women. During that time, wage inequality in the private sector increased by more than 40 percent, the study found. While many academics argue that increased inequality in educational attainment has played a major role in expanding wage inequality, the new study reaches a surprising conclusion, saying, “The decline of the U.S. labor movement has added as much to men’s wage inequality as has the relative increase in pay for college graduates.” The study adds that “union decline contributes just half as much as education to the overall rise in women’s wage inequality.” The study was written by Bruce Western, a professor of sociology at Harvard University, and Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at the University of Washington. The two professors found that the decline of organized labor held down wages in union and nonunion workplaces alike. Many nonunion employers — especially decades ago, when unions represented more than 30 percent of the private sector work force — raised wages to help avert the threat of union organizing.

Moreover, the study argues that when unions were larger and had a far greater voice in politics and society, they played a more influential role in advocacy on wages across the economy, for instance, in pushing to raise the minimum wage. “In the early 1970s, when one in three male workers were organized, unions were often prominent voices for equity, not just for their members, but for all workers,”

the two professors wrote. “Union decline marks an erosion of the moral economy and its underlying distributional norms. Wage inequality in the nonunion sector increased as a result.” The two professors note that the decline of unions is part of a common account of rising inequality that is often contrasted with a market explanation that includes technological change, immigration and foreign trade. They argue that the market explanation usually understates the role of organized labor’s decline on increased inequality. The study notes that in the 1970s, some skilled-trades unions and construction unions helped to increased inequality through exclusionary practices that reinforced racial and ethnic inequalities. But the study said that, over all, unions in the United States had been an important force for reducing inequality — although not as much as unions in Europe, which have more influence in politics and society. The authors found that the biggest factor in the decline in unions’ power and density was job growth outside traditional labor strongholds like manufacturing, construction and transportation. They added that another important reason for the decline of organized labor was that “employers in unionized industries intensified their opposition” to

unionization efforts. They noted that as unions have grown weaker, there has been less pressure on lawmakers to enact labor-friendly or worker-friendly measures. “As organized labor’s political power dissipates,” the authors wrote, “economic interests in the labor market are dispersed and policy makers have fewer incentives to strengthen unions or otherwise equalize economic rewards.”

Protesting and strikes empirically also reduce race wage inequality. Hooks 15[Gregory Hooks (American Sociological Association). “Nations, Empires, and Wars.”] LADI//PCUnions are pathways to social equality in a number of ways. First, unions raise the wages of the lowest-paid workers more, relative to better-paid workers in the same workplace, thereby contributing to wage parity. Second, unions often try to bargain for equal pay for

those whose skills and experience levels are more or less the same, eliminating racial, gender, age, and other biases in pay and treatment. Third, high union densities structure the economic and cultural climate for all workers, union or not, through a spillover effect. For example, when union levels within a given region or industry are high enough, even nonunion employers tend to

increase benefits and wage packages to deincentivize unionization. Finally, unions provide working people with organizational ties to political issues that impact their lives. When unions are strong, they help to elect sympathetic politicians who place constraints on the power of business. Given this, the story

of the rise and fall of unionism has much to tell us about our current predicament. Rosenfeld argues that one traditional union strategem—striking—is rarely done anymore. Large strikes, now nearly eliminated (he says there were almost 500 in the early 1950s, and the count collapsed to five in 2009), are one weapon that unions have given up or traded in. Falling union density rates combined with the hard lessons of the 1980s and 1990s chastened even militant unions into filing grievances instead of taking to the picket lines. However, contrary to some labor scholars who see the resumption of the strike as necessary to rebuild labor’s former glory, Rosenfeld shows that today wage gains have been decoupled from strikes. The numbers are simply too miniscule to make an impact on the economic landscape. The across-the-board rise in inequality that stems from labor’s decline also hides

deeper racial and gender dimensions that Rosenfeld draws out. The disproportionate representation of blacks in the union movement meant that deunionization hit this population especially hard, while also, obviously, increasing racial inequality. By the 1970s black male private sector union membership had hit nearly 40 percent, and black female union rates were double those of white women. Because union workers make more money and enjoy on-the-job protections and benefits packages, these statistics help illustrate how wage gaps between blacks and whites, especially between women, were mitigated during the times of higher union enrollments. Rosenfeld estimates that had unions retained their peak strength, wage differentials between black and white women in the private sector would be 10– 30 percent lower. As wage-setting institutions and political engines for worker empowerment, unions once exerted significant clout in American life. This book’s analysis reveals the collapse of organized labor as a key determinant of our high levels of economic inequality today. However, Rosenfeld’s singular focus on economic inequity unfortunately narrows the broad scope of his title, as unions no longer do many things aside from leveling the wage scale. Workers have always joined unions for reasons other than higher pay— to gain greater control over the labor process, to neutralize a bad boss, and to enjoy greater socio-cultural freedoms, all of which have something to do with social inequality, broadly conceived. Similarly, he makes only one passing reference to the Occupy Wall Street movements, which can be largely credited with raising the issue of inequality in a way that had not happened in decades. The on-the-ground conflicts between labor unions and those movements, the most recent and vocal contemporary proponents of economic redistribution, would have usefully complicated the otherwise simple equation of ‘‘more unions, more equality.’’ Furthermore, readers with an eye for history may object to his characterization of a ‘‘tripartite arrangement,’’ a labor, business, and government nexus during the midcentury decades. This period is central to his argument because it is the high-water mark of wage compression and equality delivered through substantial union membership and a sympathetic state, and it highlights the 168 Review Essays Contemporary Sociology 44, 2 Downloaded from csx.sagepub.com at ASA - American Sociological Association on June 8, 2016 degree to which politics matter for union success. Although this is the common reading, there is significant debate on this issue that goes unassessed in his book. Was there really a tacit agreement that led to better working conditions? Or were unions simply better at fighting? Even during the exceptional postwar decades, Peter Evans (2010) suggests that effective labor organization deserves more credit than a friendly state for labor’s success. C. Wright Mills’ The New Men of Power (1948), to take a classic example, highlighted the deep skepticism trade union leaders held for corporate elites. Nelson Lichtenstein’s more recent work forcefully argues against the existence of an alleged labormanagement accord (see Lichtenstein 2002)

Neoliberalism – Root causeNeolib is the root cause of racism; racism masks exploitative neoliberalismYoung, professor of English at the University of Alabama, 6—Dr. Robert M was a professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama. He passed away in 2010. (“Putting Materialism back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race” http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm)So, then, what is so new in the new social movements? It is certainly very "old" in the way it rehabilitates liberal notions of the autonomous subject. Its newness is a sign of the contemporary crisis-ridden conjuncture in capitalist social relations. This crisis of capital and the ensuing rupture in its ideological narrative provides the historical condition for articulating resistance along the axes of race, class, gender, ecology, etc. Even though resistance may take place in very specific domains, such as race, gender, ecological, or sexuality, among others, this does not mean that the crisis is local. It simply indexes how capitalist exploitation brings every social sphere under its totalizing logic . However, rather then point up the systematicity of the crisis, the theorists of the new social movements turn to the local, as if it is unrelated to questions of globality. With Gilroy and the new social movements, we are returned, once again, to the local and the experiential sets the limits of understanding. Gilroy asserts that people "unable to control the social relations in which they find themselves…have shrunk the world to the size of their communities and begun to act politically on that basis" (245). If this is true, then Gilroy, at the level of theory, mirrors this as he "shrinks" his theory to the dictates of crude empiricism. Rather than opening the possibility of collective control over social relations, which points in an emancipatory direction, Gilroy brackets the question of "social relation" and consequently, he limits politics to the cultural (re)negotiations of identity. If Gilroy deploys the post-colonial racialized agent for displacing class, then Homi Bhabha's postcolonial theory detaches race from political economy by reinscribing race within the problematics of signification. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha's last chapter, "Race', time and the revision of modernity", situates the question of race within the "ambivalent temporality of modernity" (239). In this way, Bhabha foregrounds the "time-lag" between "event" and "enunciation" and, for Bhabha, this produces space for postcolonial agency. Political agency revolves around deconstructing signs from totalities and thereby delaying the connection between signifier and signified and resistance is the effect of this ambivalence. Hence, for Bhabha, "the intervention of postcolonial or black critique is aimed at transforming the conditions of enunciation at the level of the sign" (247). This idealist reading of the social reduces politics to a struggle over the sign rather than the relations of production. Indeed, Bhabha re-understands the political not as an ideological practice aimed at social transformation—the project of transformative race theory. Instead, he theorizes "politics as a performativity" (15). But what is the social effect of this understanding of politics? Toward what end might this notion point us? It seems as if the political now calls for (cosmopolitan) witnesses to the always already permanent slippage of signification and this (formal) process of repetition and reinscription outlines a space for "other forms of enunciation" (254). But will these "other forms of enunciation" naturally articulate resistance to the dominant political and ideological interests? For Bhabha, of course, we "need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences" (1). However, cultural differences, in themselves, do not necessarily mean opposition. Indeed, at the moment, cultural difference represents one of the latest zones for commodification and, in this regard, it ideologically legitimates capitalism. Bhabha homogenizes (cultural) difference and, consequently, he covers over ideological struggles within the space of cultural difference. In short, this other historical site is not the site for pure difference, which naturally resists the hegemonic; for it, too, is the site for political contestation. Bhabha's formalism makes it seem as if ambivalence essentially inheres in discourse. Ambivalence results from opposed political interests that inflect discourses and so the ambivalence registers social conflict. In Marxism and the Philosophy and Language, Vološinov offers this materialist understanding of the sign: Class does not coincide with the

sign community, i.e. with the community which is the totality of users of the same set of signs for ideological communication. Thus various different classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of class struggle. (22) The very concept—ideology—that could delineate the political character and therefore class interests involved in structuring the content of discourses, Bhabha excludes from his discourse. In the end, Bhabha's discourse advocates what amounts to discursive freedom and he substitutes this for material freedom. Like Gilroy, Bhabha's discursive freedom takes place within the existing system. In contrast to Bhabha, Marx theorizes the material presupposition of freedom. In the German Ideology, Marx argues that "people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity" (61). Thus for Marx "[l]iberation" is an historical and not a mental act" (61). In suppressing the issue of need, Bhabha's text reveals his own class interests. The studied preoccupation with "ambivalence" reflects a class privilege, and it speaks to the crisis for (postcolonial) subjects torn between national affiliation and their privileged (and objective) class position within the international division of labor. The ambivalence is a symptom of social antagonism, but in Bhabha's hands, it becomes a transhistorical code for erasing the trace of class. Here, then, is one of the primary effects of the postmodern knowledge practices: class is deconstructed as a metaphysical dinosaur. In this regard, postmodernists collude with the humanists in legitimating the sanctity of the local. Both participate in narrowing cultural intelligibility to questions of (racial) discourse or the (black) subject and, in doing so, they provide ideological immunity for capitalism. It is now very difficult to even raise the issue of class, particularly if you raise the issue outside of the logic of supplementarity—today's ruling intellectual logic which provides a theoretical analog to contemporary neo-liberal political structures. In one of the few recent texts to explore the centrality of class, bell hooks' Where We Stand, we are, once again, still left with a reaffirmation of capitalism. For instance, hooks argues for changes within capitalism: "I identify with democratic socialism, with a vision of participatory economics within capitalism that aims to challenge and change class hierarchy" (156). Capitalism produces class hierarchy and, therefore, as long as capitalism remains, class hierarchy and antagonism will remain. Hence, the solution requires a transformation of class society. However, hooks mystifies capitalism as a transhistorical system and thus she can assert that the "poor may be with us always" (129). Under this view, politics becomes a matter of "bearing witness" to the crimes of capitalism, but rather than struggle for its replacement, hooks call for strategies of "self-actualization" and redistributing resources to the poor. She calls for the very same thing—collectivity—that capitalism cannot provide because social resources are privatized under capitalism. Consequently, Hooks' program for "self-esteem" is an attempt to put a human face on capitalism. Whether one considers the recent work by African-American humanists, or discourse theorists, or even left-liberal intellectuals, these various groups—despite their intellectual differences—form a ruling coalition and one thing is clear: capitalism set the limit for political change, as there is no alternative to the rule of capital. In contrast to much of contemporary race theory, a transformative theory of race highlights the political economy of race in the interests of an emancipatory political project. Wahneema Lubiano once wrote that "the idea of race and the operation of racism are the best friends that the economic and political elite have in the United States" (vii). Race mystifies the structure of exploitation and masks the severe inequalities within global capitalism. I am afraid that, at this point, many contemporary race theorists, in their systematic erasure of materialism, have become close (ideological) allies with the economic and political elites, who deny even the existence of classes. A transformative race theory pulls back into focus the struggle against exploitation and sets a new social priority "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (Marx 31).

PermutationPerm do both. Resistance and engagement must occur in tandem – Crenshaw 88:Crenshaw 88 [Kimberle Crenshaw, Law @ UCLA, “RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW”, 1988, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331] Questioning the Transformative View: Some Doubts About Trashing The Critics' product is of limited utility to Blacks in its present form. The implications for Blacks of trashing liberal legal ideology are troubling, even though it may be proper to assail belief structures that obscure liberating possibilities. Trashing legal ideology seems to tell us repeatedly what has already been established -- that legal discourse is unstable and relatively indeterminate . Furthermore, trashing offers no idea of how to avoid the negative consequences

of engaging in reformist discourse or how to work around such consequences. Even if we imagine the wrong world when we think in terms of legal discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a present world where legal protection has at times been a blessing -- albeit a mixed one. The fundamental problem is that, although Critics criticize law because it functions to legitimate existing institutional arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating function that has made law receptive to certain demands in this area. The Critical emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for liberation leads to the conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided because it reinforces not only the discourse itself but also the society and the world that it embodies. Yet Critics offer little beyond this observation . Their focus on delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest that, once rights rhetoric has been discarded, there exists a more productive strategy for change, one which does

not reinforce existing patterns of domination. Unfortunately, no such strategy has yet been articulated , and it is difficult to imagine that racial minorities will ever be able to discover one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367] excellent account of the civil rights movement, popular struggles are a reflection of institutionally determined logic and a challenge to that logic . 137 People can only demand change in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions that they are challenging . 138 Demands for change that do not reflect the institutional logic -- that is, demands that do not engage and subsequently reinforce the dominant ideology -- will probably be ineffective. 139 The possibility for ideological change is created through the very process of legitimation, which is triggered by crisis. Powerless people can sometimes trigger such a crisis by challenging an institution internally, that is, by using its own logic against it. 140Such crisis occurs when powerless people force open and politicize a contradiction between the dominant ideology and their reality. The political consequences [*1368] of maintaining the contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make things appear fair. 141 Yet, because the adjustment is triggered by the political consequences of the contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent necessary to close the apparent contradiction. This approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable to the civil rights movement. Because Blacks were challenging their exclusion from political society, the only claims that were likely to achieve

recognition were those that reflected American society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology . Articulating their formal demands through legal rights ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a series of contradictions -- the most important being the promised privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial subordination. Rather than using the contradictions to suggest that American citizenship was itself illegitimate or false, civil rights protestors proceeded as if American citizenship were real, and demanded to exercise the “rights” that citizenship entailed . By seeking to restructure reality to reflect American mythology, Blacks relied upon and ultimately benefited from politically inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by granting formal rights.Although it is the need to maintain legitimacy that presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wrest concessions from the dominant order, it is the very accomplishment of legitimacy that forecloses greater possibilities. In sum, the potential for change is both created and limited by legitimation.