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Jeff CrosbyOut in the grassroots, workers are mighty angry at the thought their health care benefits could be taxed in a health care reform plan. |
Obama, Harry and Guy |
Gov. Sarah Palin’s “small-town” narrative has just about run its course. Lots, maybe most, of the people I know are from a small town, or their parents or grandparents were from small towns. Of course, they may be from small towns in Italy or San Marcos or Guatemala—not sure if those places would qualify as “the real America” to Palin. My own family is from places like Oskaloosa, Iowa, New England, N.D., and Chillicothe, Mo. I love my small-town Midwestern relatives (even the Republicans, which is probably what most of them are). They are warm, generous people, and I don’t recognize them in the spiteful Palin at all.
But Palin claims the small town folks are the ones who do the hard work and fight the wars. So don’t we work here in the small city of Lynn, Mass.? And how come it seems like every other family in my local union has a kid in the 10th Mountain Division?
The “small-town” pitch is an appeal to the past, to a romanticized, simpler time. And like images of Palin’s “Joe Six Pack,” most white people think of “small towns” as populated by white people. There are no big-city ghettos in small towns.
An encyclopedia on race relations could be written about this election. First, Obama’s rise indicated that we are in a “post-racial” political world. (“Whew! Glad we don’t have to keep talking about that little problem of race anymore! We’re past all that.”) Second, it turns out he had an outspoken minister whose life’s work could be reduced to a misleading sound-bite. (Who do these black folks think they are to be angry? Haven’t they been getting the breaks all along?) Bill Clinton found out he wasn’t the first black president after all, and suddenly Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was cast as the candidate of the white working stiffs. So much for the post-racial election.
The racial angle can be overdrawn. White men voted for conservative Republicans in every presidential election since 1972, even when the Democrats were white, too. It’s partly the white professional chattering class that likes to point a well-groomed finger at the lower species of red-necks (or “inner-city” people of color) and attribute everything that is backward to working-class people. (Sometimes I find myself wishing they’d outsource a few more lawyers and economists, and then we’d see who the Neanderthal “protectionists” are.)
And partly it’s the confusion that reigns every four years, when nearly all candidates who are chasing votes have dug out their L.L. Bean flannels and their worker/farmer forbearers, and it all gets a little confusing. And white union members may, of course, vote for Sen. John McCain out of respect for his military record or for some other reason.
But there is something real here, too. At each meeting of our IUE-CWA Local 201 Legislative Committee and at labor council meetings, we asked the question:
What role is race playing in this election, and what should we do about it?
Some comments from our white co-workers included: “If Obama wins, the blacks will think they’re better than us [whites].” Or, “If Obama wins, he’ll just be for the blacks.”
It’s as though there is something to lose. The assumption is that right now whites have an edge over blacks and other people of color, and Obama might take that away from “us.” And, of course, there is some truth to the first part of that assumption.
My grandfather, Guy Crosby, was, for a time, a member of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. The by-laws of his union from his time, of which I have a copy, say clearly that to be considered for membership you had to be white. And that existed right up until I was a teenager in the 1960s, when the civil rights movement put an end to the legal exclusion. Earlier in the century, blacks were driven out of the union by force. Fourteen black railroad workers were killed, and the brotherhoods became all white for decades.
My dad, Harry, was a navigator in a B-17, which flew over Germany in World War II, in the all-white 100th Bombardment Group of the Army Air Corps. There were racial attacks on black soldiers and race riots during World War II in small towns as well as large cities like Detroit.
This is part of our history. It doesn’t mean that my grandfather didn’t bust his tail in the hot sun building railroad bridges. He did, and he earned his money. My dad was a hero. He flew his required 25 missions in a unit that had among the highest casualties in the entire armed forces, then kept on flying until the end of the war.
But Guy got a job that he could not have enjoyed if he was not white. Harry was able to get officer training and access to the G.I. Bill benefits that were harder to come by if you were black. These are simply facts, and should not be hard to accept. Racial/financial advantages come down at least through a generation or three.
For workers, one way of looking at the issue of race in this election is that whites are again being asked this question:
Can we repudiate and get beyond this history? Are we so afraid of losing the advantages that Guy and Harry had, which continue in subtler form, that we will vote for “whiteness,” so “they” don’t get to thinking that they are as good as “us”?
Our union movement has another chance to make a choice: inclusion or exclusion. Union volunteers have been going house to house, job site to job site, desk to desk or machine to machine, in the hospitals and construction sites and factories, talking about Sen. Barack Obama. And often this has meant talking about race, even when it made people uncomfortable.
As this blog goes up, just a few days before the election, it looks like more and more white union members will vote for Obama in large numbers. Alongside our exclusionary history, sometimes mixed with the most vicious forms of white supremacy, there has always been an inclusive, anti-racist trend in our movement. This is the tendency that is being called to the fore during this election. White union members are being asked to vote for their own interests as workers, and in a sense, not to vote for being “white.” And it looks like they are going to do so, it looks like justice and inclusiveness will win.
And we’ll all have a better chance for everything from health care, to union growth, to peace.
If exclusiveness and prejudice lose, we win.
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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
8 Comments
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I know Jeff and I know how much he has been enthralled by this election.
A lot of it stems from his constant decade-stretching fight against neo-libralism that permeates everything he does in life.
We marched together with many people of color in hundreds of demonstrations and all of us always stood as equals.
As far as what we have learned from all this, that is open to question.
The membership of our local once prided itself on how radical we were within the IUE chain. Now, we are older and I hope it is wisdom that guides and motivates us.
I believe race is still an issue in America, but not because the working stiffs and small-town Americans really want it to be, but becuase the small percentage of people with the most power find it convenient for it to be so.
If, as he says, we win by rejecting exclusivness or simply by rejecting economic policies that were finally outrageous enough to wake up jaded American voters to realize thier self-interest, then I believe we will have taken a major step towards the type of class consciousness that created the union movement in the first place.
I told a guy over coffee this morning…it’s much more likely to make things go wrong for the right reasons than right for the wrong ones. If this applies to Obama’s presidency then I think we are still headed in the right direction.”
Bill Clinton was the first “black president”?
TD
I am actually pretty optimistic, TD and TomJoe. I did a paper for a school class trying to figure out what our white leaders in our local 201–mostly stewards–thought about the proposal at our CWA convention to create 4 “diversity seats” on our Executive Board, since we had gone decades without much change. The hard-core union activists not only supported it, even though they said their white non-union neighbors and family and co-workers probably would not. And they said they would work for it and felt confident that they could turn their co-workers around. And their reasons were very similar, “It’s to right a wrong.” And “We’re union, and we have to be one.” It showed me there is a lot to build on for our movement even on tough issues.
–Jeff
Jeff, thanks for putting these issues in perspective. This is so instructive, to remember how our history affects us today, and we got where we are based on so much of what went before, Michael Jacoby Brown
I can relate to Jeff’s article. During this campaign I struck up a conversation with a co worker a couple of months ago who told me he was upset that Local 201 had endorsed Obama for president. His reasoning was that Obama did not wear a lapel flag pin and that Obama refused to salute the flag while pledging allegiance. Both things have been proven to be false. No amount of arguing was going to change this mans mind. I ran into the same guy today, he saw that I was wearing an Obama for President pin, this time he told me he couldn’t vote for Obama because he was going to take away his guns. Again a falsehood. People are pitter pattering around trying to convince themselves they have a valid reason not to vote for the black guy. Its that simple. My own close to home experience takes me to my father who is also a WWII vetran, grew up during the depression and will not be caught dead voting for Obama. His reasoning is one: Obama’s father was a “Playboy” so he must have come from an unstable home and upbringing and two: Obama is for abortion. Wrong again. It is going to be more than interesting how things turn out on Tuesday.
Keep in mind, TomJoe, what I said about white men voting Republican since 1972. The Republicans have set themselves up as the Party of Whites. The haters weren’t going to vote Democratic anyway. The union people are going to come through, I think, and we’ll be better having gone through this for the future.
–Jeff
First let me say greetings from battleground Ohio. Second let me say hello to Jeff. We have not spoken in far too long and I miss him dearly. Third, I am sorry to admit that for some union members here in northeast Ohio the idea of voting for a black man is too much to bear. I have been ashamed of some of the language that has been used by life-long Democrats to describe Senator Obama and his positions. Forth and most importantly though, they are in the minority in my opinion and they are going to be overwhelmed by those of us who have long ago put tribalism aside and base our decisions on what is right for our families and right for our brothers and sisters in the Labor Movement. Keep the faith, we are almost there. It has been a long road this time around but the feeling I know we’ll have on Wednesday will be worth it’s weight in gold!!!
I agree, and its good to hear you are still battling. And if things go as well as I expect them to among union members for Obama, and he wins, we’ll have won something more than just an election. There’s something about being a union member…..In the CWA we are focusing on two issues, Health Care and Employee Free Choice Act, so we are in as strong a position as possible to push Obama and Congress (or I hope not McCain) on those two after Nov. 4. (Well, first with maybe a day off or two.) I just got back from New Hampshire AFL-CIO headquarters today (Sat.) knocking on doors with a busload of Ironworkers, plus teachers, autoworkers, painters, AFSCME, etc. Another great day in the neighborhoods….
Exclusion and prejudice lost. Obama won
He was successful in also reaching out to latinos, who in turn came out and voted in record numbers this election. As it turns out, even in Florida, where Obama won by 191,560 votes, approximately 634,500 where cast by Latinos. (http://www.naleo.org/pr11-07-08.html)
Now, already 3 days after the election we’ve seen his first “press conference.” Bush has been president for the majority of my adult life and so in hearing Obama speak today it was refreshing to hear an emphasis in such a forum for an economic plan that seeks to address the needs of working class people. Did I just hear him open up his economic agenda by stating the need for a “rescue plan for the middle class that invests in an immediate effort to create jobs”? Wow.