Gun enthusiasm is rooted more in racial suppression than in the Second Amendment, Bill Fletcher Jr. told an audience at the SeaTac Hilton in April. From their banquet-room chairs, more than 100 union organizers and labor scholars leaned in, eager to catch every word of Fletcher’s highly anticipated diction.
They had gathered for the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association’s 50th Anniversary Conference, where social justice issues collide with labor history during a three-day series of presentations and documentary film screenings.
A panel that afternoon was the third time in six months that Fletcher, who lives in Maryland, shared a Seattle-area stage with Kent Wong, director at the University of California Los Angeles Labor Center.
That’s because figures at the forefront of a burgeoning labor movement, one that calls for broad workforce unity in order to achieve better conditions for all working people, have found excitement in Seattle’s recent working-class victories.
It’s where labor activists banded together for the first successful Fight for $15 campaign. It was one of the first jurisdictions to require that employers offer paid sick time to workers. And, more recently, Seattle has joined a growing number of cities that require fair scheduling practices.
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Fletcher is considered one of the nation’s leading labor intellectuals. His thought-provoking and at times controversial lectures prove authentic as he seeks to bring historical context to ongoing labor struggles in a tumultuous political climate.
Since he was a young man, Fletcher has been deeply engaged in America’s labor and class politics. His parents instilled a respect of unions in him at a young age. Later in life, he came under the influence of the Black Panther Party and its focus on the working class and poor, as well as the late Dr. Ewart Guinier, who was chairman of Afro-American studies when Fletcher studied at Harvard.
Fletcher has held leadership positions at labor organizations such as the AFL-CIO and SEIU, and most recently was president of TransAfrica, a foreign-policy advocacy group in Washington, D.C. He’s written several books about labor, including “They’re Bankrupting Us! And 20 Other Myths About Unions,” and is a syndicated columnist and media commentator, as well as consultant at RoadMap.
Street Roots sat down with Fletcher while he was in SeaTac to learn about his views on today’s labor struggles and the relationship between race and capitalism in America.
Emily Green: You said something interesting during your speech: You said guns are important because of racial suppression, not because of the Second Amendment. I was hoping you could elaborate on that.
Bill Fletcher Jr.: Absolutely. One of the problems is that the right wing has – and some people are not right wing but just really into guns – has advanced a notion that the issue of gun ownership and why people feel so strongly about it has to do with protecting Second Amendment rights. What we have to understand is that the importance of gun rights really goes back to the 1600s, with the colonization of the United States and the introduction of racial slavery – and that gun ownership became synonymous with whiteness and with not being a slave.
A slave could not own guns, Indians weren’t supposed to have guns, except under certain circumstances. So the idea of gun ownership was proof-positive that I’m a free white man. The Second Amendment, all that does is it essentially codifies it. There are different interpretations about what the Second Amendment says, but regardless, it definitely advances the idea of a militia and an armed population.
Why do you need an armed population? Well you need it when you have slavery and you have to enlist people in slave patrols and to put down slave insurrections. You need it to keep your Indians at bay.
What’s happened over time, because of gun ownership being identified with being free and white, there is a visceral connection to it that goes beyond the issue of basic rights. You could not look at the hysteria that emerges around gun ownership and conclude that that has to do with some provision of the Constitution. It’s much deeper.
If it were about the Second Amendment, then the NRA would have come out adamantly in support of the family of (Philando) Castile, the guy that was killed in Minnesota who was a legitimate gun owner, who was killed by the cops. If this was about the Second Amendment, then the NRA should have been outspoken in condemning that, right? Because Castile told (the police) he had a gun, but no, it’s not about that.
E.G.: Do you think the labor movement would be the best place to bridge the current political divide?
B.F.: This is a very hard question. (Long pause.) You may not like what I have to say. I’ve concluded over time that roughly a quarter of the population is lost and can never be regained. They’re gone. There are these science fiction movies where people get bitten by zombies, and at a certain point it’s like they’re not coming back to humanity. Roughly a quarter of the population is lost, and they are the core of the Trump phenomenon. They are the core of the very strands within right-wing populism.
On top of that segment there are those who are probably redeemable, who voted for Trump. It’s complicated because they voted for someone who they knew – because I don’t think most people are stupid – they knew this guy was a racist. They knew he was a misogynist. They knew that he had been through several bankruptcies, so all the stuff about him being a great businessman was bullshit. They knew he was an adulterer. They suspected he had ties with the mob. But they voted for him.
What does that mean, when people do that? For me, what it means is they’re not a priority to try to work with. I’m interested in working with the two-thirds of this country that are sane.
I think that we need to consolidate the sane in order to win over that segment of the Trump vote that have not been lost to the dark side of the force. And that will happen – and it relates to this issue of social justice unionism – that will happen to the extent that we start building progressive alliances that are fighting for power that have an alternative vision of where this country needs to go.
As such, the status quo is unacceptable as a response to right-wing populism. There is no future in that. That doesn’t mean that some people who advocate the status quo can’t be won over, but progressives and people on the left need to be advocating for a different direction. And I’m not even talking about, as a socialist, the ultimate direction of socialism. There are things that could be done right now, whether it’s single-payer health care, investment in housing, using eminent domain for economic development, all these things. Fair-trade policies could be advanced. That’s the way we’ll win them over because one of the things you have to keep in mind about the Trump voters is why are they still with Trump?
Think about it, when you have all of these revelations, the corruption in his administration – this is a guy who’s running around talking about “crooked Hillary,” right? And all this corruption! And people are sticking with him. Why? For one fundamental reason: because they look at Trump as addressing what they believe to have been the greatest mistake in U.S. history, and that was the election of a black president. Therefore, despite the fact that this guy is a racist, misogynist, egomaniac, he’s not black, and he’s reversing, and trying to reverse, everything that this black president – who, by the way, was certainly not a leftist; I wouldn’t even call him a progressive; he’s a liberal – but reversing everything that that black president did because they want to wipe the slate clean.
E.G.: We’re seeing teacher strikes in states where they have “right to work” laws. By eroding unions, are we actually galvanizing a labor movement?
B.F.: I want to answer that in two different ways. I’m not one of those who believe the worse things get, the better they are. I don’t believe that that happens. The worse things get, the worse things get, and they can keep getting bad.
The slogan of the communist party of Germany in 1932 was “after Hitler, us” because they believed that Hitler was going to expose himself to be a charlatan. And that people would then say, “OK, got it!” Didn’t quite work out that way.
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So, it’s important that we understand that when things get worse, people can respond in a number of different ways, and some very bad ways are to turn inward, basically to just fight for survival.
The second part is that I think that this eruption among teachers’ unions needs to be seen on a continuum that starts with the Arab Spring and then goes to the Madison (Wis.) uprising and then goes to Occupy, and then we start to see the uprisings after Trump was elected. There’s a certain continuum of these insurgencies where resistance is growing, and it could translate into a new movement. But I don’t think it will happen on its own.
That’s what I was trying to get to on the issue of leadership (during his speech earlier that day), because that example I gave about Italy – I think a lot about that: It’s like, damn! They seemed like they were on the verge of a socialist revolution in 1919, and three years later, you’ve got Benito (Mussolini). It’s like, what happened? How is that possible? And there are plenty of other examples of things like that having happened.
History is very unforgiving about lost opportunities. At certain moments, there are windows that are opened, and if you don’t jump through that window, at that time, the window shuts, and it’s very hard to open that window up.
I’ll give you an example. The defeat of the populist movement in the 1890s, the window was open, there was a moment there where there could have been an incredible transformation of the United States. We blew it. Part of it was racial, part of it was that William Jennings Bryan led the populist into the Democratic Party, and there she goes. And then we had Plessy v. Ferguson (the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld racial segregation laws), and we were stuck with that for 50 years. That’s why urgency is critical.
This is the thing I love about history, is it’s unpredictable. Even though you can say that it’s a continuum, you can only say that in hindsight. You can’t say that prospectively. But when you see these things emerge, then you can put things together and realize their connections.
So, what is the implication? We need new leadership. We need left leadership. We need a broad united front. What these teachers’ unions are doing is phenomenal, in particular in reaching out to parents and everything else, but what we need is to hear from the steelworkers union, or the painters, or the carpenters, saying, “Yeah, we’re with the teachers. We’re ready to throw down.”
We need them to be thinking about, for example, in Oklahoma, in West Virginia, how do we go forward? What’s our platform in the next election? What do we do? It’s not enough to just win. It’s like, how do we deepen this? When we see that, then we’ll know if we have a new labor movement.
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E.G.: Finally, I was hoping you could speak about racism’s role in capitalism and your thoughts on whether we can have a capitalist society without it.
B.F.: No. I will speak about it, but my answer is no.
One thing that many forces in the black freedom movement did not appreciate was that you can’t get rid of racism without getting rid of capitalism. And one of the things that many white progressives and leftists don’t appreciate is that you can’t get rid of capitalism unless you take on racism.
You won’t end racism until we’ve ended capitalism, but in order to end capitalism, you have to engage in the fight around racism. Because what happened in the very foundation of this country was the interpenetration of race into the construction of capitalism. The settler colonialism, who was defined as legitimate and illegitimate – the construction of racial slavery out of indentured servitude as a mechanism as both social control – as well as obtaining incredible amount of unpaid labor, was necessary for the construction of capitalism.
It’s what Marx talked about in terms of primitive accumulation, and what David Harvey talks about in terms of accumulation by dispossession. All of these things were critical, and so you can’t remove the stains of racism without addressing capitalism.
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The problem with the Bernie Sanders campaign, which I supported in general, was that race was not central to Bernie Sanders’ narrative; neither was gender. This great book called “The Many-Headed Hydra” puts it all together, about the way that race and gender were there from the very beginning.
It wasn’t like there was some sort of pure capitalism that was developed, and then all of a sudden someone said, “Let’s bring in this racial thing.” What the British did, though, is that they introduced a certain form of racism that was based upon what they had succeeded doing in Ireland with the racialization of the indigenous Irish population. What most people in the United States don’t understand, and what most Irish-Americans don’t understand, is that when the British said that the Irish are an inferior race, they meant it.
When I went to Ireland in 1988, I’d hear this term, “anti-Irish racism.” Now, as this African-American radical from the United States who always associated racism with color, it was like, “How the hell is ‘Irish’ racism?”
Walking around Northern Ireland, as my father would say, “No bout-a doubt it.” You could see it. It penetrated everything in terms of the way Irish were treated, in Northern Ireland and in Britain. But not when it comes to the United States. So what happens in the United States? They become white people. They are no longer an inferior race as they were in Ireland.
Now, when you become white people, you have to prove it. There is a probationary period for all European immigrant groups during which time they are not considered white. For the Irish, it went on for a while, in part because the English hated the Irish, and the Irish, when they first came here, always stirred up trouble. It was really remarkable. They’d give guns to the Indians, help the slaves and all this stuff – it was wonderful.
The problem is after the potato famine, they came en masse, and they made a decision to become white people, which meant helping to suppress the Indians, helping to suppress the African-Americans. That was the price of admission. That wasn’t part of the narrative of the Sanders campaign. We have to introduce that narrative; it’s got to be part of everything we talk about. People have to understand that. Otherwise there’s no emancipation, there’s no victory, because race becomes the skeleton in the graveyard, the hand comes out from the grave and grabs you by your ankles and won’t let you out of the graveyard. That’s where we are.
E.G.: Can you explain what you mean when you speak about “social justice unionism”?
B.F.: Let me do it in reverse. In the late 19th century, Samuel Gompers, out of the cigar workers union, an immigrant, former socialist, rose to lead the newly formed American Federation of Labor, and he rejected his socialist background and rejected a certain current in trade unionism and advanced what has come to be known as “bread and butter unionism” or “pure and simple trade unionism.” The idea was that unions should fight for wages, hours and working conditions, they should not form or try to form a labor party; they should deal pragmatically with the existing party structures, and among other things, they should constantly reaffirm their patriotism to the United States. Particularly after 1898, what that meant was supporting U.S. foreign policy. That brand of unionism became hegemonic in the United States. It didn’t mean that there weren’t other currents – Industrial Workers of the World had a very different approach to trade unionism and the left wing within what came to be known as the Congress of Industrial Organizations had a different notion – but Gompers’ view was really the dominant force.
With the Cold War of the 1940s, the left wing in the labor movement was, to a great extent, crippled; in some cases absolutely destroyed, and Gompersism rises.
Social justice unionism is a unionism that says we need a movement for the class, a movement that goes beyond fighting for individual bargaining units and not just defending those people who happen to be union members. It’s a trade unionism that envisions a labor movement of the working class. Clearly, that includes fighting for wages, hours and working conditions, but it also includes fighting for the broader interests of the working class, whether that is the homeless, the unemployed, people that frequently find themselves in the informal (gig) economy. It’s a different vision of unionism, and it says that all of that is part of a labor movement.
Gompers rejected that. For Gompers, the labor movement and the trade union movement were synonymous, and the trade union movement happened to be, during his time, largely white and dominated by males, so the social justice unionism is embracing diversity and a fight for power.
The final point is that we need a movement that is proactive and that puts an agenda for working people at the heart of its political and legislative efforts. That does not necessarily mean setting up a third party. That’s a whole other discussion, but it means whether you are operating within the Democratic Party, nonpartisan situation, or a third party, that the issue of a working people’s agenda needs to be central.
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.