Up From Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History

Arnesen, Eric

doi:10.1353/rah.1998.0001

Cited by 25 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…72 Thus, Eric Arnesen concludes that 'the party's authoritarian structure and devotion to the Soviet Union meant that politics could overwhelm principle, and that as genuinely important as civil rights were to leaders and rank-and-file communists alike, they too could be sacrificed to other goals'. 73 Yet, because both communists and anti-communists were political realists, and since there were very few principles that even liberals would not sacrifice to the cause of union power, this argument must rest on which principles were sacrificed and how much compromise was made. It is certainly necessary to detail instances of communist expediency and doctrinal shifts, but it is reductionist to imply that such episodes simply represented an authoritarian ethos or 'Stalinism' in the unions.…”

Section: The Comintern and The 'Negro Nation'/'native Republic' Thesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Communists and black freedom movements in South Africa and The US: 1919–1950

Johanningsmeier

2004

Journal of Southern African Studies

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Journal of Southern African StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:This article compares the interactions of the communist parties of South Africa and the United States with the black working class of each country until 1950. It discusses, in particular detail, the influence of internationalist currents of radical syndicalism on the course and destiny of each party. The analysis also focuses on how each communist movement adjusted its tactics in response to indigenous patterns of black migration, white working-class racism, black radicals' negotiation of recurring tensions between class, nationalist and reformist influences, and the ways in which communist labour activists in each country were limited or empowered by the changing ideological influences of the Communist International. South African and American communists endured periods of sectarian political rigidity and isolation but, ultimately, communist activists' pragmatic and flexible interpretations of working-class dynamics in each country were more important in shaping each party's relationship with blacks than Leninist ideology or the requirements of Soviet or Cold War politics.

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Section: The Comintern and The 'Negro Nation'/'native Republic' Thesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Communists and black freedom movements in South Africa and The US: 1919–1950

Johanningsmeier

2004

Journal of Southern African Studies

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“…For examples of the recent literature on interracial unionism, see Arnesen (1991), Goldfield (1993), Halpern (1994), Korstad (1993), Letwin (1998), Nelson (1992Nelson ( , 1993, Quam-Wickham (1992), Rosenberg (1991), and Stevenson (1993). little reason to gainsay this commonsense: There has long been a consensus that the interracial working-class movement of the late 1930s and 1940s, mobilized through the leftled International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), presupposed deracialization.…”

Section: The Racially Negative Presence Of Interracialism In the Socimentioning

confidence: 99%

Interracialism: The Ideological Transformation of Hawaii's Working Class

Jung¹

2003

American Sociological Review

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review.A normative desire for interracialism undergirds and structures the sociology of race. However, focusing almost exclusively on racial divisions and conflicts, the sociology of race rarely subjects interracialism to explicit analysis. One consequence of this somewhat peculiar situation is that interracialism is understood negatively, as deracialization-the removal of racism. Even the few studies that appear to redress this negativity through explicit analysis reproduce it. Prototypically, there has long been a scholarly consensus that Hawaii's interracial working-class movement of the late 1930s and 1940s presupposed deracialization: that a "colorblind" class ideology, advanced by the left-led International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen 's Union, effaced racial divisions. Refuting this interpretation, this paper demonstrates that a deracializing class ideology was not straightforwardly adopted by Hawaii's racially divided workers. Instead, a leftist ideology of class served as the initial pivot for an affirmative transformation of race, producing an interracial ideology that rearticulated, rather than disarticulated, race and class. The paper concludes with several implications of reconceptualizing interracialism affirmatively. HE SOCIOLOGY OF RACE is quiet, nearly silent, on the concept of interracialism, which I define as the ideology and practice of forming a political community Direct correspondence to Moon-Kie Jung, Department across extant racial boundaries.1 Instead, the sociology of race speaks almost exclusively to racial divisions and conflicts.Despite this near silence, however, interracialism has long been present in and indispensable to the sociology of race. Since the decline of biologistic theories, a commonly shared but largely unspoken assumption has underpinned most explanations of racial divisions and conflicts: the normative desirability of interracialism. A pervasive shadow presence, interracialism functions as the analytically absent but "epistemologically structuring desire" (Kennedy and Galtz 1996: 437). That is, the sociology of race maintains its explicit focus on racial divisions and conflicts, while bracketing interracialism as Joao Costa Vargas for their comments on a much longer manuscript.1 By ideology, I mean simply a power-implicated discourse. I define political community as a social collectivity enmeshed and engaged in relations of power. in the immigration saga of assimilation. Based "almost always [on] an implicit, if not always precisely stated, hypothesis that trends will show a moderation of differences betw...

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“…8 See Hill (1996) and Arnesen (1998) for sharply opposing viewpoints. For examples of the recent literature on interracial unionism, see Arnesen (1991), Goldfield (1993), Halpern (1994), Korstad (1993), Letwin (1998), Nelson (1992Nelson ( , 1993, Quam-Wickham (1992), Rosenberg (1991), and Stevenson (1993).…”

Section: The Racially Negative Presence Of Interracialism In the Soci...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Interracialism: The Ideological Transformation of Hawaii's Working Class

Jung

2003

Am Sociol Rev

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A normative desire for interracialism undergirds and structures the sociology of race. However, focusing almost exclusively on racial divisions and conflicts, the sociology of race rarely subjects interracialism to explicit analysis. One consequence of this somewhat peculiar situation is that interracialism is understood negatively, as deracialization—the removal of racism. Even the few studies that appear to redress this negativity through explicit analysis reproduce it. Prototypically, there has long been a scholarly consensus that Hawaii's interracial working-class movement of the late 1930s and 1940s presupposed deracialization: that a “colorblind” class ideology, advanced by the left-led International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, effaced racial divisions. Refuting this interpretation, this paper demonstrates that a deracializing class ideology was not straightforwardly adopted by Hawaii's racially divided workers. Instead, a leftist ideology of class served as the initial pivot for an affirmative transformation of race, producing an interracial ideology that rearticulated, rather than disarticulated, race and class. The paper concludes with several implications of reconceptualizing interracialism affirmatively.

show abstract

Up From Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History

Cited by 25 publications

References 119 publications

Communists and black freedom movements in South Africa and The US: 1919–1950

Communists and black freedom movements in South Africa and The US: 1919–1950

Interracialism: The Ideological Transformation of Hawaii's Working Class

Interracialism: The Ideological Transformation of Hawaii's Working Class

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