White Nationalism, the Working Class, and Organized Labor

Erik Loomis

First Published December 31, 2019

 

The uptick of open white nationalism since 2016 has rightfully alarmed the many millions of Americans who find racial violence repellent. The murder of Heather Heyer by white supremacists in Charlottesville, the rapid expansion of hate groups, the murder of two people defending an immigrant from an attack on the Portland light rail, the concentration camps on the border, and the gunning down of twenty-two people by an El Paso shooter emboldened by Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric are just a few examples of the return of naked racial violence. This white nationalism, or the belief that the United States should be a white-dominated state that keeps minorities in a distinctly subordinate position, has become part and parcel of the American right over the past several years, personified in Donald Trump, his advisor Stephen Miller, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the nation’s immigration enforcement agency. Racial revanchism has been a major, though not the exclusive, driver of the conservative movement as the twenty-first century has advanced.
The media has framed the white working class as central to this resurgence, often without much evidence. The connection between Trump’s election, the rise of white nationalism, and the disaffection of the white working class has become a near truism in major media publications. Yet the media has failed to question the truth of this. Many “authentic white working-class voters” in stories about Trump voters have later proven to be Republican operatives or part of organized right-wing groups. These same media organizations never seem to interview white working-class voters who did not vote for Trump. They are simply erased from the conversation.
There is no question that Trump had strong connections with at least some white working-class voters, with more union households voting Republican than in any presidential election since 1984.¹ Most important, these votes came in the most deindustrialized parts of the country. But there is not much evidence at the present that the rise in white nationalism is an especially white working-class phenomenon. In terms of active participation, going to right-wing rallies, intimidating immigrants on the border, and joining fascist organizations, it is at least as much angry white middle-class and wealthy people as working-class whites. Working-class whites have moved increasingly away from the Democratic Party in recent decades, to great political consequence in 2016, while highly educated whites are slowly moving toward Democrats. But the fundamental category shift seems to be education, not income, as non-college educated but financially successful whites have also dramatically moved toward the Republicans. Moreover, data suggest that working-class whites believed Trump was significantly more economically liberal than the Republican Party as a whole.² Yet, white nationalism definitely has some appeal in working-class communities and that its appeal is probably growing. Recent books, such as Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness, demonstrate how racial resentment combined with economic instability and a sense of loss has led large swaths of the Midwest’s white workers toward an embrace of racial revanchism and an affirmation of gun culture. It has also led them to elect politicians who cut their own social services.³

Racial revanchism has been a major . . . driver of the conservative movement as the twenty-first century has advanced.

However, the debate, so often reduced to “why don’t these workers vote their own interests,” is itself skewed. Thomas Frank, most famously among the many others who have explored this question, fails to understand that in fact we all have multiple and sometimes competing interests that motivate our choices and our actions. For many people, perceived racial self-interest is and has long been a powerful force.⁴ American workers often display some sense of class solidarity. But the question becomes to what extent those workers will prioritize that class consciousness over ideas of racial solidarity, religious concerns, homophobia, or beliefs in misogyny. At the polling booth, for example, a white worker may reject her union’s political endorsement because of her belief that abortion is a sin or because she hates immigrants. Or a Latina worker may be influenced by her union’s endorsement because the candidate supports immigrant rights.

Economic Decline Rekindles White Nationalism

The economic desperation in many working-class communities contributes to the appeal of white nationalism. Having spent a great deal of time in the last decade in the small economically depressed town of Clarion, Pennsylvania, I have witnessed the level of hopelessness brought on by the closing of factories and the shift to low-wage jobs of the sort provided by Walmart. In Clarion, Confederate flags abound. Hopelessness and its consequences include the use of opioids, an embrace of gun culture, growing racial resentment, and blaming others for a wide range of problems. The Republican Party has capitalized on this desire to scapegoat others, adopting it as an electoral strategy in an impoverished county that went for Trump with over 70 percent of the vote.
The story of a town like Clarion is one that can help us connect deindustrialization with white nationalism. But it is only a piece of the story. What connects it—and what is especially dangerous given the economic position of the working class—is nostalgia, the most politically reactionary of all human emotions. What helps Trump make emotional connections to large swaths of the white working class is an imagined vision of the 1950s—one with a robust industrial economy in which whites ruled the racial roost, women knew their place in the home, and men could tell a racist joke without having their children or strangers admonish them. While this nostalgic narrative is mostly mythology, it contains enough economic truth to provide cover for the racism and misogyny that make up the rest of Trump’s appeal. For many white workers, nostalgic visions of the white dominance of American society very much include economic domination. This helps to explain the misplaced anger among whites over affirmative action programs that seem to give people of color a leg up, while in fact these programs just level the playing field a bit.

. . . [T]he rise in white nationalism is . . . at least as much angry white middle-class and wealthy people as working-class whites.

But other than the channeling of racism into the more organized networks of white nationalism—a notable development for sure—what is really new here? A brief review of the relationship between race and work in America helps elucidate the present and suggests the current phenomenon is not an aberration. The fundamental labor system of European colonialization of the Americas, from New York southward to Argentina, bound Native Americans and Africans into forced labor for European profits. New England’s unique history barring slavery after the American Revolution has obscured for generations of Americans the centrality of slavery to the nation’s founding. Moreover, many New England fortunes came out of the slave trade—from those made in textile production to those garnered by financing and marketing of the products of slavery and those who owned the ships involved in the transatlantic slave trade. While the nation’s foundational labor system was split between a slave South and a free-labor North after American independence from Britain, even among many anti-slavery northerners, the real problem with slavery was not what it did to black people, but how it affected their fellow whites. In short, they worried that slavery created a stratified society that led to an indolent wealthy class living off the work of African Americans, leaving no room for the middling white farmer and worker who made up the core of northern society. They looked at the poverty and political powerlessness of the poor southern white and saw a frightening world they believed the slaveholding class wanted to expand across the nation.

White Supremacy and the History of Organized Labor

After the Civil War, the organized labor movement began developing, with white supremacy at its core. As David Roediger and many historians following him have explored in depth, connections between work, citizenship, and whiteness have long been at the core of American working-class ideology.⁵ The first major national law spawned by the American labor movement was the Chinese Exclusion Act, in 1882, which originated in the Workingmen’s Party of California and spread nationally. Western workers used violence to expunge from their workplaces the Chinese, culminating in the 1885 Rock Springs massacre, when Wyoming miners slaughtered at least twenty-eight Chinese miners.
While the Knights of Labor made tentative alliances with black workers, the Knights barred Chinese and “Hungarians”—a catchall term for eastern Europeans—workers from the union. The American Federation of Labor took a vociferous anti-immigrant stance for decades. A 1902 pamphlet titled “Meat versus Rice,” a racist rant against allowing Asian workers to compete with white Americans, was coauthored by AFL leader Samuel Gompers, himself a Jewish immigrant from England. Employers routinely used black workers as strikebreakers, knowing that racial animosity would undermine class solidarity. The antipathy of unions toward black workers and the exclusion of blacks from their ranks made African Americans skeptical of unions for many years.
The rise of industrial unionism in the 1930s did finally bring black workers into unions in large numbers, but they were often stuck in lower paid, danger-prone positions in factories. And they were largely excluded from leadership roles within their unions. The CIO’s attempt to organize the South in Operation Dixie after World War II washed up on the rocky shoals of white supremacy, with southern employers and politicians using race-baiting and anti-Semitism to taint the industrial federation as a bastion of Jewish organizers in support of civil rights. The indifference of most AFL-CIO leaders to civil rights after the merger of the two federations in 1955 did not suggest a change was to come.

Labor and Economic Restructuring

The relationship between race and the labor movement has changed over the past half-century. But that has often happened more at the leadership level than among the grassroots and it has coincided with large-scale economic restructuring that severely undermined the industrial working class, especially in those critical electoral states that went for Trump in 2016. There are three main reasons for this shift. First is the growth of public-sector unionism. With government employment long one of the few places African Americans could get relatively steady work, the rise of public-sector unionism by the late 1960s brought a lot of black workers into unions.
Second is the impact of immigration. Shifts in U.S. immigration policy and immigration law have had profound effects on the labor movement. In The Great Exception, Jefferson Cowie argues that, in part, the labor movement was successful in the 1930s because the working class was not fighting over immigration, which had been severely curtailed by the Immigration Act of 1924. A quota system, the National Origins Formula established in that law, placed the sharpest restrictions on non-Western Europeans.⁶ The Immigration Act of 1965, known as the Hart-Celler Act, abolished the National Origins Formula, allowing greater numbers of non-Europeans to enter the United States. As a result, the American working class became incredibly ethnically diverse in the next half century.
There is no question that the rush of immigrants from Latin America and Asia after 1965 profoundly changed both the nation and the labor movement. Between 1970 and 2000, mass migration catapulted the Mexican-born population in the United States from 760,000 to 9,177,000. Many unions began to view this huge influx of immigrant workers, both documented and undocumented, as a new constituency ripe for organizing to resuscitate a declining labor movement. Major campaigns, such as Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) Justice for Janitors, announced a new era of immigrant organizing in America.
Third, deindustrialization followed by corporate wars against organized labor decimated the heart of the existing labor movement, turning unions such as the United Mine Workers (UMW) of America, the United Steelworkers (USW), and the United Auto Workers (UAW) into shells of their once powerful selves. Automation began replacing sizable numbers of union workers by the 1960s. The Border Industrialization Program, a 1965 Mexican program to create an industrial zone on the U.S. border to attract American companies with low wages, began the process of American companies outsourcing union jobs to lower wage countries. By the 1970s, a trickle became a flood. The so-called “Black Monday,” when the largest steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio closed in 1977, served as a national symbol of disappearing jobs. Deindustrialization received a new level of legal protection with the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, notably signed by Democratic president Bill Clinton. All of this decimated union membership and union power, with enormous political implications. Unions have been the only organizations in American history to channel the voices of working people into politics in a way to improve everyone’s economic situation. With so many unions eviscerated and with Democrats, the theoretical party of the workers that in the 1940s had brought unions to the center of government power, indifferent to the fate of workers, a vacuum was created. For some workers, that vacuum has been filled by white nationalism, anti-immigrant fervor, and racism.

Unions have been the only organizations in American history to channel the voices of working people into politics in a way to improve everyone’s economic situation.

Deindustrialization changed what the union movement looked like, with government and service workers now making up a much larger percentage of the movement. The unions that have grown in recent decades are those that continue to invest in large-scale organizing and whose growth has been among workers of color, most notably the SEIU, today the nation’s second largest union.
The era of deindustrialization also came with wide-scale outsourcing and capital mobility, with corporations closing factories in the United States, only to reopen them in the Global South. Neither Democrats nor Republicans had any answers for unemployed industrial workers in the Midwest and Northeast except for cheap bromides about reeducation and suggesting that workers move to where the jobs are. What this did was open up the space for disaffected white workers to place blame for the problems in their lives elsewhere.
What white nationalists do is to interpret these economic, racial, and social changes in the United States as an apocalypse for whites. They focus on what once seemed like outdated forms of racial panic, such as “race suicide” or the idea that whites are being outbred by immigrants, an idea that had its day in the time (and the words) of Theodore Roosevelt. These notions allow working-class people to channel the very real anger they feel about their equally real economic dislocation, growing poverty, and hopelessness for the future. These resentments existed long before Trump came around to channel them. Long before Trump, there was plenty of evidence of anger and racism within white working-class communities that could twist into white nationalist sentiment. Thomas Sugrue’s discussion of how the Detroit white working class reacted to integrated public housing projects in Detroit at the height of the New Deal by voting out liberal New Dealers is just one of many examples of an underlying white nationalism that has long existed in the working class.⁷ Sociologists and anthropologists continue to depict this. For instance, Maria Kefalas’ 2003 study of white ethnic enclaves in southwest Chicago, Working-Class Heroes, provides a window into the bitterness and resentment of white ethnic workers waiting for someone to conduct their anger.⁸ Moreover, as Monica McDermott, among others, has shown, working-class whites have long maintained racist animus toward minority populations.⁹ Short of joining a specific group, embracing white nationalism or white supremacy is not an either/or phenomenon. It is a sliding scale of disaffection, anger, and hatred, all of which Donald Trump and the modern Republican Party have unquestionably tapped into. But these elements have existed in the white working class since its formation.
Even in these times of more racially progressive unions, the connection between organized labor and a nationalism that is not-so-subtlety coded white has long been obvious. Buy American campaigns are one example of this. Workers have routinely responded to globalization through demonizing overseas workers. UAW workers smashed Toyotas as a response to Japanese imports in the 1970s, but that did nothing to save their jobs. A few years ago—when the Bakery, Confectionary, and Tobacco Workers Union was in a fight with Mondelez (which now owns Nabisco)—the union created a racially tinged cartoon about capital mobility moving their jobs to Mexico. The cartoon made a brief mention of bad working conditions there, but otherwise resorted to portraying Mexicans as people in sombreros, effectively dismissing their needs as workers in favor of a Buy American campaign. This may be a minor example, but it demonstrates the continued power of nationalism over international solidarity at a time when the rapid growth of the Latino population is one of the powerful triggers of white nationalism.
Another example of the connection between a white-coded nationalism and the working class is union-branded clothing. While some unions have clothing that represents union colors, for many other unions, the clothing is as much an exercise in patriotism as it is in solidarity or union pride. Clothing for many unions is drenched in the American flag, bald eagles, and expressions of an aggressive Americanism that reinforces white-coded values in American society. This overly masculinized patriotism may be part of working-class culture, but it also speaks much more to white workers than to others. It is difficult to see the new unionists in home health care work or the middle-class members of teachers’ unions in this clothing. Again, this issue may seem minor but actually forces us to ask questions about the relationship between different sectors of the working class and ideas of American values. Are union shirts emblazoned with assertive expressions of a chauvinism that has so often excluded workers of color a tacit engagement with white nationalism? Or is sensitivity to these symbols part of a broader left that has turned away from overt signs of patriotism and embraced an internationalism and criticism of America’s behavior abroad that both divides it from the left of the New Deal era and from much of the contemporary white working class, a divide that the historian Michael Kazin has bemoaned?¹⁰ It at least suggests a part of the disconnect between white working-class culture and elite liberal culture that provides white nationalists another potential avenue into working-class support.

Clothing for many unions is drenched in the American flag, bald eagles, and expressions of an aggressive Americanism that reinforces white-coded values in American society.

What we ultimately face is a resurgent white nationalism that has at least the potential to draw in large numbers of angry white working-class people who voted for an openly white supremacist presidential candidate in 2016 in critical industrialized counties in purple states. Regardless of just how central white nationalism is to the state of the working class today, how do we as labor activists respond to the very real threat posed by white nationalism? What policies can we promote in the attempt to alleviate this problem?
First, we have to advocate for economic policies that raise the boats for all workers, regardless of race, and that also provide dignity for working-class people without a college education. Both political parties have completely failed to articulate anything useful for people in Flint, Michigan; Youngstown, Ohio; Clarion, Pennsylvania; and so many other places. As the Democratic Party seems to be slowly evolving out of its centrist neoliberal phase, new left-leaning ideas about employment and industrial policy are once again on the agenda. These new ideas include a government job guarantee, a universal basic income, a new generation of labor law, and other programs designed to lift workers out of poverty. These ideas provide a context in which to debate and articulate the future of the economy instead of looking nostalgically to a past we cannot recreate. The challenge now is creating a working-class economy for 2050, not 1950.

. . . [N]ew left-leaning ideas about employment and industrial policy . . . provide a context in which to debate . . . the future of the economy . . . The challenge now is creating a working-class economy for 2050, not 1950.

An economy that provides opportunity to the working class hardly guarantees white nationalism would not appeal to blue-collar whites. For many, it still will, as it has throughout the history of the American labor movement. But for many white working-class people, the perception of decline is not just outright, it is relative to people of color and to perceived erosions of white privilege. These imagined assaults on white privilege range from desegregated schools and jobs to affirmative action programs and the prevalence of Spanish as a language in the workplace and the community. Real hourly wages for workers without a college education have declined significantly since the 1970s and black workers have not made up wage gaps with white men, but the perception among large numbers of white workers is that they suffer because workers of color have taken their jobs.¹¹ Given this dynamic, the best vaccination we have against white supremacy among workers is to give them the power to demand a better life for themselves and their families.
Second, we have to be forthright about both the historic and contemporary racism of white people, and not just white workers. We have to acknowledge that the future of the American labor movement is one of diversity and that there can be no compromise with white supremacy, nor can we countenance naked and cynical appeals to one section of the working class at the expense of others. Despite media portrayals of the working class as exclusively white, the real working class is by far the most diverse sector of the nation. In fact, at this point, the working class is close to majority nonwhite and is already a majority in many cities and some states.

Despite media portrayal of the working class as exclusively white, the real working class is by far the most diverse sector of the nation.

Moreover, the face of the working class will continue to change, even if all immigration ended today. Rolling back the nation to its 1950 demographics is no more productive or possible than a return to its 1950 economy. Organizing again for worker power has to reject any semblance of white nationalism and fight for justice among the actual working class. All attempts to appeal explicitly to the white working class will not only reinforce their perceived special status as workers but also fail to organize the working class as it exists. If this means that some white workers will turn to racist organizations and violence, there is probably not much the labor movement can do to stop it. But we can fight for an economy and society that represents all workers. Any other option is both morally and politically bankrupt.