Expectations for President Obama are high. A friend told me of a sick relative in a small Midwestern industrial town. The relative’s specialist was at a conference, and the only possible replacement in town did not have privileges at this particular hospital. The ER nurse told the patient, “Obama’s going to change all that.”
When the patient’s scans did not arrive from a neighboring town as promised, a different nurse shared a hopeful thought: “That won’t be a problem anymore with Obama as president.”
And the patient, a white working class woman in an overwhelmingly white town, added, “I’m so proud of my country for electing a Black man.”
It’s hard to overstate the breakthrough of electing the first African-American president of the United States. The labor movement did more than its part. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka’s speech on race at the Steelworkers convention became a YouTube sensation.
Union campaigners struggled mightily over how to deal with the fear that some white workers had about voting for a Black man. Some members of my Communications Workers local made comments like, “If Obama wins, the Blacks will think they are better than us,” and “If Obama wins, he’ll just be for the Blacks.” Or, as if in Obama’s defense, “You know, he’s half white!”
The unions’ results were impressive: 76 million phone calls and 14 million doors knocked by 250,000 volunteers produced a 68 percent to 30 percent vote for Obama among union members, according to results reported by the AFL-CIO.
Non-union white men favored McCain by 16 points, but union white men voted for Obama by 18 points. Similar numbers surfaced for union gun owners and union veterans. For the most part, union members did not vote for “being white.”
THE CHANGE WE SEEK
Still, caution is in order. In their conversations with fellow members, most union campaigners tried to pivot away from race back to economic issues in order to gain white members’ votes. The kind of social movements against racism that can change the direction of the country—let alone provide the impetus for a “new New Deal” that sets union hearts to beating—simply do not exist at this point.
Electoral campaigns are notoriously cyclical and personality-driven, almost by definition unsustainable.
So nobody in the labor movement is saying we have laid racism to rest. “This election,” as Obama himself put it, “is not the change we seek. This election is an opportunity to seek change.” To advance against racism within our movement, here are a couple of suggestions.
First, talk about race should not be confined to the shadows and condemned as “divisive” or “playing the race card.”
When we discussed our work in my local’s legislative committee and in the labor council, we included the question, “What role is race playing in this campaign and what should we do about it?” People at first were close-mouthed and downplayed the issue, afraid of offending anyone, looking like a racist, or admitting publicly what they were hearing at work.
But by the end of the campaign, the conversations became concrete, with frank discussions about how to change attitudes or flush out present but unspoken prejudice. We should keep the discussion about race in the United States on the table, under the lights.
DEEPER EDUCATION NEEDED
Second, progress will be unsustainable and reversible without some depth. Education is needed about white supremacy in this country, a whole system of privileges and barriers, and its effect on the labor movement. Changing the subject back to economic concerns may have won an election, but it isn’t enough.
After my union added four “diversity seats” to the national executive board in 2007 to expand representation of women and people of color, I interviewed white stewards and executive board members to determine how they viewed the change.
The results were inspiring. These activists aggressively supported the new seats, based on general union principles. “We’re all union,” they argued. “It’s to right a wrong.” And they were confident we could win support from a majority of whites in the local, and were willing to do so—even though they believed their non-union white neighbors, their families, and their white co-workers would not agree with them.
What also became clear is that union leaders—including myself—had not provided these activists the tools and information needed to win over other workers. Very few had any idea that there were once segregated unions, or that Black workers had been driven out of industries (and unions), in some cases by violence. They had little or no knowledge of the racial conflicts that have divided some unions since labor’s earliest days.
Few understood current patterns of segregation and exclusion, or the link between white supremacy in Southern states and the low level of union density there. (Even today, the states of the old Confederacy cast the lowest percentages of white votes for Obama.)
Racism wasn’t just “the olden days,” or “slavery days.” My grandfather, Guy Crosby, was a member of a railroad brotherhood that eliminated Blacks by murder. Until I was a young teenager, its bylaws barred Blacks from joining.
My father was a World War II hero—in an all-white Army Air Corps as a navigator on a B-17.
My grandfather busted his hump building railroad bridges, and he earned his money. My father flew on after his required 25 missions until the war was over—braving the highest casualties of any branch of the armed forces. Both of them benefited from jobs, training, housing, education, and other benefits that were not accessible to Black workers (or veterans). We need to talk about our own and each others’ families.
The labor movement made some important strides during the Obama campaign in directly addressing race in America. The door is open—or perhaps it’s just ajar. Let’s walk on through.
Jeff Crosby is president of IUE-CWA Local 201.
