Let's Talk About the Economic Roots of White Supremacy

[Nevilledog]

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David Stein
@DavidpStein
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“If we understand Jim Crow as a system of labor suppression as well as racial oppression, we can see more clearly how key elements of the Jim Crow order survived the end of formal segregation and racist disenfranchisement.” - @jbouie

The Dixiecrats: College students at the 1948 Southern Democratic Convention.
nytimes.com

Opinion | Let’s Talk About the Economic Roots of White Supremacy
It’s not just about racism.
7:21 AM · Sep 25, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/24/opinion/labor-union-racism-history.html

No paywall
https://archive.ph/WMH39

In my Tuesday column on the political incentives within the Republican Party, I made an analogy to the struggle over civil rights in the midcentury Democratic Party. I brought up the Dixiecrats and mentioned their opposition to labor rights as well as civil rights.

Let’s talk about that.

Most Americans tend to think of Jim Crow almost exclusively in terms of racist oppression of Black Americans, but the Jim Crow system was as much about the preservation of a particular economic order as it was about the racist subjugation of Black people. In fact, the two were intertwined. By disenfranchising, segregating and terrorizing Black people, Southern elites could fragment and segment the entire working class as well as maintain a large pool of exploited, low-wage labor.

Yes, most ordinary white Southerners were also invested in a racist social order. But the degree of that investment — the extent to which it was either challenged or nurtured — was structured by the reality of institutional white supremacy. Jim Crow helped produce racists (and reproduce racist ideologies) as much as it was produced by them.

But that’s a bit of a sidebar. The larger point is that Southern elites were both virulently racist and fanatically opposed to organized labor, especially the broad-based industrial unions that tried to organize across racial lines. By even attempting to organize Black workers alongside white ones, unions like the Industrial Workers of the World in the early part of the 20th century and the Congress of Industrial Organizations during the period of the New Deal threatened to undermine the entire Jim Crow system, which rested on the total domination of the economic order by capital as well as racial segregation. (The C.I.O.’s postwar effort to unionize the South, “Operation Dixie,” failed for many reasons, not the least the ferocious opposition of white business and political elites in the region.)

*snip*

[niyad]

1. KNR and bookmarking. For later.

[JoeOtterbein]

2. K n R with...

...(shame n tears)

[Shoonra]

3. The economic underpinnings of Jim Crow

One of the effects of segregation of restaurants, country clubs, other kinds of clubs, hotels, and even bus seats was the prevention of any discussion, esp business discussion, between a white man and a black man. This prevented any chance of a black man forming a profitable association with a white man. This kept the bulk of the money in white hands.

[uponit7771]

4. K&R