Photo by AnaManzar08 | CC BY 2.0
White Workers Have Double Consciousness
White workers have at least a dual identity — we are both workers and white. The history of white working class community organizing as told by Amy Sonnie and James Tracy in Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times suggests that on-the-ground organizing requires us to engage white identity. We will not succeed in “organizing our own” unless we reckon with the whole person as they actually live and think.
In most radical working class or marxist thinking, class is the primary factor cutting across all other positions such as race, gender, sexuality, or empire. In this view, class is not really an identity but a relation to production, that is to say an objective fact waiting to be discovered as science discovers nature. This approach imagines workers as economic beings that should react rationally to their class interest, if only explained or experienced in just the right way.
I do not dismiss the important work done by socialists or others in addressing race issues. Instead I hope to reflect on history and enrich organizing method and strategy for anyone aiming to confront the way that race and class are tangled and intertwined. Most socialist groups today do highlight the struggles of women, gays and lesbians, blacks and latinx people and embrace “intersectionality” but organized around class as the “primary…