Identity Politics and its Discontents

I wrote an article in November 2018 that questioned whether using the term “white privilege” helps or hurts building a working-class movement to promote racial justice and reverse runaway inequality. I suggested then that the broader universal language of labor solidarity and human rights, rather than identity, might be more effective.

The response? I got kicked out of two progressive organizations, and the left newsletter that had been running my articles turned me away. (Thank you to Common Dreams for picking me up.)

Below is an edited version. (For the full version see here.)

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Should progressives deploy the concept of "white privilege" to build and deepen a movement for economic and racial justice?

Ultra-radicals in the late 1960s, extremely self-conscious about how skin color impacted the everyday actions of white people, including themselves, answered strongly in the affirmative.

Self-styled revolutionaries, like the Weathermen, used the term "white skin privilege" as a putdown of less radical activists. The attack implied that you weren't fit for revolutionary struggle against global imperialism and white supremacy because you hadn't owned up to, and given up, your racial advantages. For radical Weathermen and women, this owning up could only be accomplished through excruciating criticism/self-criticism sessions (derived from Maoist practices).

As Angela Nagle wrote in Current Affairs (Feb. 2017):

“Based on Maoist struggle sessions, these were used to root out subconscious racism and sexism within their own psyches. Individuals were reportedly hazed for up to twelve hours without a break until the white radicals confessed their deep white supremacism, homophobia and misogyny to their fellow white radicals thus achieving catharsis through their own admission of guilt.

Later, the term took on a broader meaning: If you were white, the term charged, you were born with basic privileges that people of color just didn't have.

The Racial Bribe

This idea grew out of the historical term "racial bribe," which described how plantation and merchant elites in the South kept poor whites and blacks divided against each other by making sure Jim Crow segregation offered certain privileges to whites based entirely on skin color. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote:

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. (See Adolph Reed Jr., "Du Bois and the Wages of Whiteness." Nonsite.org, June 2017)

"Scientific" Racial Hierarchies

As industrialization accelerated and immigrants were drawn to the U.S., racial hierarchies became a refined instrument to divide the workforce, in large part, to prevent labor unionization.

Hiring charts were created based on the most advanced "race science." (See John E. Bodnar, Roger Simon and Michael P. Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960.)

On one such chart created in 1925, for the Central Tube Company in Pittsburgh, ranked 36 different ethnic groups based on 37 alleged innate skills. Each group, whether a nationality like Armenian or a religion like Jewish, was considered a "biological race.” American White, Irish and Lithuanians topped the list. Armenians, Mexicans and Jews were on the bottom.

One goal of promoting these divisions was to prevent a repeat of a unionization drive that had led to a five-month steel industry strike in 1919 and involved more than 250,000 workers. Although the union was brutally defeated, management learned that the best way to maintain control of the workforce was to chop it up into as many groups as possible, each in different jobs with different wages.

The Language of Labor Organizing

During the height of CIO union organizing during the 1930s, the path forward was obvious. A good number of the white workers at the top of the racial hierarchy became leaders in the battle for unionization. They made the case that the divisions based on racial bribes were harmful to the entire workforce. They were proven correct and the wages and working conditions of virtually all unionized industrial workers significantly improved. As labor historian Michael Goldfield wrote

“Thus, even in the North, even when there were not large percentages of African-American workers, many white industrial unionists saw the fight for racial equality as a key to their own struggles for justice, dignity, and a living wage."

Union organizers confronted these pervasive divisions by opening a progressive dialogue with the most favored groups. The idea of white privilege didn’t fit, because many of the groups who received higher wages based on their “racial attributes” were classified as non-white by the race scientists.

Racism did not vanish from unionized workplaces or from labor unions themselves. But the message of solidarity helped unions organize America's core industries. (See Michael Goldfield, "Race and the CIO: The Possibilities for Racial Egalitarianism During the 1930s and 1940s.")

The Language of White Privilege

Today, the term "white privilege" often arises in discussions about police harassment. Here are some comments I’ve heard:

"You don't get repeatedly stopped on the road for no reason the way black men do....Your kids don't get followed around in food markets, the way young blacks do....You don't have to worry that your kids will be killed by the police or a vigilante just for walking down the street wearing a hoodie."

It also refers to more general issues that derive from continued racial segregation and income inequality:

"Your kids don't get trapped in underfunded, crumbling inner city schools or have to grow up in dangerous neighborhoods, or get tossed out of school for minor behavioral problems."

And it also relates to the fact that white children tend to inherit more resources because their parents had access to home ownership in the suburbs, something that was systematically denied to black people by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) all the way up to 1968.

But a significant question facing progressives today is whether the use of the term "white privilege" helps or hurts building the kind of solidarity needed to promote racial justice and reverse runaway inequality.

The danger is that "white privilege" comes across as an accusation, even if the speaker didn’t mean it that way. It suggests that you, as a white person, are harboring racism deep within you, a kind of original sin. Because of your white skin, the power structure considers you normal. You get the benefit of the doubt, while others, who are not born into society's white in-crowd, do not. This is a trap, forcing a division between those with white privilege and others fighting for social and economic justice.

This kind of dialogue can also generate defensiveness. No one wants their own sense of justice and fairness called into question. And it raises the perplexing question about what can be done to address innate privileges. Naming something doesn’t necessarily change it.

What are our goals?

We are not fighting to integrate more people of color into the billionaire plutocracy. We are not asking that Anglo drivers be stopped more often by the police for no reason. Nor do we wish that white suburban schools be degraded.

Rather, we should be demanding that the basic human rights enjoyed by white motorists and their children be enjoyed by everyone. We should be demanding income and housing policies that reverse runaway inequality, eliminate poverty, and promote real integration.

Supporters of the term will argue: Doesn't the term "white privilege" help white people become more self-aware and more active?

This should be an empirical question, not an article of faith. Here are the tests:

• Does the phrase help increase white working-class activism to combat racial discrimination at the workplace?

• Does it encourage working-class leaders to ally with racial justice groups?

• Does it make people feel guilty about the accident of their own birth, and therefore become more reluctant to actively participate?

• Worse still, does it reinforce the contemporary movement towards white identitarianism -- the erroneous belief that "white" people per se have common interests that are readily distinguishable from those of other groups.

The Language of Human Rights

If "white privilege" pushes people away, as it did to many in the late 1960s, the language of human rights and solidarity is readily available for use.

• Our shared human right to decent life is being threatened and eroded by Wall Street-driven runaway inequality.

• The right for all children to become well educated today is harmed by the financial strip-mining of our economy.

• Our children's schools are underfunded as corporations and the wealthy shelter their income from taxes.

• We are forced into debt to get our kids through college, because the richest country in the history of the world can no longer afford free higher education (yet all of Northern Europe can).

• Because public institutions (except for jails and the military) are starved for funds, there is no money to end persistent school and housing segregation.

These are not acts of God. They are a product of runaway inequality created by and for financial elites. Clearly, we need a broad-based, multi-issue, multi-group movement to take on Wall Street's insatiable greed.

This is not a claim that we now live in a post-racial society and therefore should ignore racial discrimination and continued segregation. Rather, it is a call to re-enforce the age-old labor union ideal that an injury to one really is an injury to all.

We should all feel aggrieved and spurred to action when anyone is denied their basic human rights, which includes the right to a decent job at decent pay, the right to free health care, the right to an excellent (and free) education, the right to gender and sexual identity equality, and the right to equal justice under the law.

Sustained movement building requires a positive vision and an inspiring call to action. It also requires difficult conversations, including a frank and open dialogue about the utility of the term "white privilege."

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I think we know by now (2025) whether the use of “white privilege” helps build a movement for justice that includes the working class. It does not. Hopefully, we will find that the universal language of human rights fosters solidarity, while also opposing all forms of discrimination.