The first moments of a recent documentary about Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Rebels With a Cause, recall one of the signal images of the 1960s civil rights struggle: police training torrents of water from fire hoses on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama. According to its makers, the student New Left and the antiwar movement derived their principal inspiration from the struggle for black freedom.
In this phase of the movement blacks and their allies sought three rights: integrated public schools; desegregation of public accommodations such as trains and buses, restrooms and water fountains, restaurants and, in much of the South, the right to walk down a street unmolested; and perhaps most important, voting rights. Nearly forty years later the Birmingham confrontation reminds us not only of the violence of Southern resistance to these elementary components of black freedom but also how clear-cut the issues were. The simple justice embodied in these demands had lurked on the margins of political life since the 1870s betrayal of black Reconstruction by politicians and their masters, Northern industrialists. Not that proponents of black freedom were quiescent in the interim. But despite some victories and defeats, mainly in the fight against lynching and legal frame-ups, these demands remained controversial and were largely sidelined. In 1940 Jim Crow was alive and well in the South and many other regions of America.
World War II and its aftermath changed all that. Under threat of a March on Washington by A. Philip Randolph of the Sleeping Car Porters union and other black leaders, in 1941 President Roosevelt issued an executive order banning discrimination in military-industry hiring. But when millions of black veterans returned from the war and found that America had returned to business as usual–even as the United States was embroiled in a cold war, claiming to be at the forefront of freedom and democracy–pressure mounted for a massive assault on discrimination and segregation. Shrewdly looking forward to an uphill re-election battle, President Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces, and the turbulent 1948 Democratic convention passed the strongest civil rights plank of any party since the Radical Reconstruction laws of 1866. Consequently, the party suffered the first of what became a long line of defecting Southern political leaders when Strom Thurmond bolted and ran as the Dixiecrat Party candidate for President. In the early 1950s the NAACP mounted a series of legal cases against school segregation that culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, sustaining the plaintiffs’ claim that the historic Court doctrine of “separate but equal” was untenable. The Court agreed that school integration was the only way to guarantee equal education to black children. The next year an NAACP activist, Rosa Parks, refused to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus–a disobedience that sparked a monumental boycott that finally ended in victory for the black community. In 1962, flanked by federal troops, James Meredith entered the University of Mississippi, and, under similar circumstances, a black woman named Autherine Lucy broke the color bar at the University of Alabama.
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As important as these breakthroughs were, they were regarded by some as only the first stage of what was considered to be the most important phase in the struggle– achieving black voting rights as a prelude to overturning white-supremacist economic and political domination of the South. Many on both sides of the civil rights divide were convinced that the transformation of the South by ending black exclusion was the key to changing US politics. The struggle for voting rights proved as bloody as it was controversial, for it threatened to reduce the Democratic Party to a permanent minority. In summer 1964, in the midst of a major effort by civil rights organizations to enroll thousands of new black voters, three field-workers were murdered and many others were beaten, jailed and in some cases forced to run for their lives. Fearing further losses in the less-than-solid South, the Kennedy Administration had to be dragged kicking, if not screaming, to protect field-workers in various civil rights groups. Indeed, it can be argued that beginning with the 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, and perfected to an art form by Richard Nixon, the right’s infamous Southern Strategy was the key to Republican/conservative domination of national politics in subsequent decades. But driven by the exigencies of the Vietnam War as well as the wager that the Democrats could successfully cut their losses by winning the solid backing of millions of black and Latino voters, Lyndon Johnson’s Administration rapidly pushed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts through Congress. By 1965 a century of legally sanctioned black subordination apparently came to an end. The Democrats won black loyalty, which to this day remains the irreducible condition of their ability to contend for national political power.
Today the predominant commentary on the state of race relations in the United States no longer focuses on discrimination but on the consequences of the economic and cultural chasm that separates black and white: white flight from the cities; the formation of a black middle class, which in pursuit of a better life has tended to produce its own segregated suburban communities; and the persistence of black poverty. For after more than three decades of “rights,” the economic and cultural reality is that the separation between black and white has resurged with a vengeance. Housing segregation is perhaps more profound than in the pre-civil rights era, and the tiering of the occupational structure still condemns a large percentage of blacks and Latinos to the bottom layer. What’s more, the combination of the two has widened the educational gap that pro-integration advocates had hoped would by now be consigned to historical memory. In the wake of achieving voting rights and passing antidiscrimination laws, some now worry more about whether blacks will maintain access to the elite circles of American society, especially in education and the economy. Others have discovered that, despite their confidence that legal rights are secure, the stigma of race remains the unmeltable condition of the black social and economic situation.
But even voting rights are in jeopardy. What are we to make of the spectacle of mob intimidation of election officials and the brazen theft of thousands of black Florida votes during the 2000 presidential election–so egregious it led the NAACP to file suit? Or the ideological and political mobilization of a conservative Supreme Court majority to halt the ballot recount of George W. Bush’s razor-thin lead? Or the refusal of a single member of the Senate, forty-eight of whom are white Democrats, to join mainly black House members in requesting an investigation of the Florida voting events? Vincent Bugliosi has persuasively shown that Gore’s lawyer did not use the best arguments at the Court [see “None Dare Call It Treason,” February 5]. And then there’s the Congressional battle over George W. Bush’s nomination of John Ashcroft as Attorney General, during which Ted Kennedy concluded that he could not muster the votes to sustain a filibuster and had to be content with joining forty-one of his colleagues in a largely symbolic protest vote against confirmation. Ashcroft’s nomination was perhaps the Bush presidency’s blatant reminder that the selection of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell for leading foreign policy positions should not be understood as having any relevance to the Administration’s stance on domestic racial politics. Contrary to progressives’ expectation that the Democratic Party would constitute a genuine opposition to what has become a fairly strident right-wing government, as the events since November 7 have amply demonstrated, the Democrats seem to know their place.
These events–calumnies, really–cast suspicion on the easy assumption that the civil rights struggle, even in its legal aspect, largely ended in 1965. The deliberate denial of black suffrage in Florida was a statement by the Republican minority that it would not countenance the Gore campaign’s bold maneuver, in tandem with the AFL-CIO and the NAACP, to register and turn out tens of thousands of new black and non-Cuban Latino voters. As if to acknowledge his indiscretion, after it became clear that he “wuz robbed,” Gore ordered his supporters not to take to the streets; instead, he contented himself with a weak and ultimately unsuccessful series of legal moves to undo the theft. Thus even if their hopes for victory always depended on blacks showing up at the polls in the battleground states, including Florida, Gore and the Democratic Party proved unwilling to fight fire with fire. In the end the right believes it has a royal right to political power because it is grounded in the power of Big Capital and the legacy of racism; the Democrats believe, in their hearts, that they are somehow illegitimate because of their dependence on blacks and organized labor.
Yet inspired by the notion that the United States is a nation of laws, some writers have interpreted the 1960s judicial and legislative gains to mean that the basis has been laid for full equality of opportunity for blacks, Latinos and other oppressed groups. (I speak here of those like Ward Connerly, Glenn Loury and Shelby Steele.) They cite affirmative action as evidence that blacks may be able to attain places in the commanding heights of corporate office, if not power. But they forget that Nixon utilized affirmative action to derail efforts, inspired by the 1960s civil rights victories, to dramatically expand funding for education and other public goods. In the context of Nixon’s abrogation of the Bretton Woods agreement, which destabilized world currencies, and the restructuring of the economy through the flight of manufacturing to Third World countries and capital flight from those same countries, affirmative action was the fig leaf covering the downsizing of the welfare state. As the political winds blew rightward, welfare “reform” became a mantra for Nixon’s successors, from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan through Bill Clinton. Needless to say, providing spaces for black students in a handful of elite colleges and universities was not, in itself, a bad idea. That affirmative action accompanied the Reagan tax cuts, ballooning military spending, the gradual end of an income floor for the unemployed and severe spending cuts in housing, public health and education demonstrated its purpose: to expand the black professional and managerial class in the wake of deindustrialization–which left millions of industrial workers, many of them black and Latino, stranded–and the hollowing out of the welfare state, which in contrast to the 1960s gains widened the gap between rich and poor.
If only the most naïve believed that in time racism would disappear, many have misread William Julius Wilson’s 1978 book The Declining Significance of Race to argue that black inequality is not a sign of the persistence of institutional or structural racism but is a remnant. On the contrary, Wilson claims that the persistence of black poverty may not be a sign of discrimination in the old sense but an indication of the vulnerability of blacks to structural changes in the economy. Race still frames the fate of many blacks, but there is also a crucial class dimension to their social situation: Despite having acquired comprehensive legal rights, both deindustrialization of many large cities and black as well as white middle-class flight have left working-class blacks in the lurch. Once, many had well-paid union jobs in steel mills, auto plants and other production industries. But since the mid-1970s, most urban and rural areas where they live have become bereft of good jobs and local services. There are not enough jobs to go around, and those that can be found are McJobs–service employment at or near the minimum wage. Cities also lack the tax base to provide citizens with decent education, recreation, housing and health facilities, and basic environmental standards like clean air and water. Lacking skills, many blacks are stuck in segregated ghettos without decent jobs, viable schools, hope or options.
To make things worse, the neoliberal policies of both Democratic and Republican governments have drastically slowed public-sector job growth and have eliminated one of the main sources of economic stability for blacks and Latinos. In fact, during his campaign Al Gore boasted that he was an architect of the Clinton Administration’s program of streamlining the federal government through layoffs and attrition, which was undertaken to facilitate “paying down the debt.” The private sector was expected to pick up the slack, and it did: In many cases laid-off public employees joined former industrial workers in the retail trades and in low-paid construction and nonunion factory jobs.
But the problems associated with race/class fail to detain some writers–e.g., John McWhorter and Stephen Carter. Having stipulated black economic progress without examining this claim in any depth, their main concern is how to assure that blacks obtain places in the elite intellectual and managerial professions. As if to stress the urgency of this problem, they adduce evidence to show that despite the broad application of affirmative action, blacks have fallen back in educational achievement. For example, while celebrating the civil rights movement’s accomplishments, in Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, his book about the question of why black students still lag behind whites in educational attainment, linguistics professor McWhorter discounts the salience of racism. McWhorter allows that although some police brutality and discriminatory practices such as racial profiling still exist, these regrettable throwbacks are being eradicated. Accepting the federal government’s definition of poverty (now $17,650 a year or less for a household of four), McWhorter minimizes these problems by citing statistics showing that under 25 percent of America’s black population lives in impoverished conditions, a decline from 55 percent in 1960. Of course, these federal standards have been severely criticized by many economists and social activists for substantially understating the amount that people actually need to live on in some of America’s major cities.
While $17,650 may constitute a realistic minimum standard in some rural areas and small towns–and even then there is considerable dispute about this figure–anyone living in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Oakland, Washington or Atlanta–cities with large black, Latino and Asian populations–knows that this income is far below what people need to live on. The United Way’s regional survey of living standards found that households of three in New York City require at least $44,208 to meet minimum decent standards. While the amounts are less for most other cities, they do not run below $25,000, and most of the time they are higher. In many of these cities two-bedroom apartments without utilities cannot be rented for less than $800 a month (plus at least $100 for telephone, gas and electricity)–more than half the take-home pay of a household earning $25,000. In New York City the rent is closer to $1,200, even in the far reaches of the Bronx and Brooklyn. But perhaps half of black households earn less than the rock-bottom comfort level in most areas today.
None of this bothers McWhorter and other black centrists and conservatives. They know that when measured by grades and standardized tests, educational attainment among children of poor black families may fall short because of poverty, insecurity or broken homes. Why, they ask, do black students in the middle class perform consistently worse by every measure than comparable white students, even when, owing mainly to affirmative action, they gain admission to elite colleges and universities? Relying heavily on anecdotes drawn from his own teaching experience at the University of California, Berkeley, McWhorter advances the thesis that, across the class system, blacks are afflicted by three cultural barriers to higher educational achievement that are of their own making: victimology, according to which all blacks suffer from racism that stands between them and success; separatism, a congenital suspicion of whites and of white norms, including high educational achievement; and, perhaps most salient, endemic anti-intellectualism among blacks, which regards those who study hard and care about learning as “nerds” who tend to be held in contempt. To be “cool” is to slide by rather than do well. The point of higher education is to obtain a credential that qualifies one for a good job, not to take academic learning seriously.
McWhorter is deeply embarrassed by the studied indifference of many of his black students (almost none of whom are economically disadvantaged) for intellectual pursuits and is equally disturbed by their low grades and inferior test scores. In the end, he attributes much of the problem to affirmative action–a “necessary step” but one that he believes ultimately degrades blacks in the eyes of white society. McWhorter admits that he is troubled that he got tenure in four and a half years instead of the usual seven, and that he was privileged in part because he is black. Like another “affirmative action baby,” Stephen Carter, he is grateful for the boost but believes the door should be closed behind him because the policy has morally objectionable consequences, especially cynicism, examples of which litter the pages of his book. Affirmative action “inherently divests blacks and Latinos of the unalloyed sense of personal, individual responsibility for their accomplishments…. The fact that they tend not to be aware of this follows naturally from the fact that affirmative action bars it from their lives: You don’t miss what you never had.” Instead, he wants blacks “to spread their wings and compete” with others on an equal basis. Condemning the thesis of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (in The Bell Curve) that affirmative action should be eliminated because blacks “are too dumb,” at the same time he urges his readers to “combat anti-intellectualism” and victimology as cultural norms.
Before discussing what I regard as the serious flaws in McWhorter’s thesis, it is important to note that it is by no means unique; a growing number of black as well as white pro-civil rights intellectuals embrace it. Having asserted that the legislative and court victories effectively buried the “external” barriers to black advancement, these critics seek answers to the persistence of racial educational disparity within the black community itself–particularly the “culture” of victimization, a culture that, however anachronistic from an objective standpoint, remains a powerful force. Unlike many black conservatives, McWhorter professes admiration for the icons of the civil rights struggle, especially Martin Luther King Jr. and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. But he is not alone in his uncritical assessment of the past half-century as an era of black “progress.” As a result, he discounts the claim that racism remains a structural barrier to blacks’ further advances. Nor is there justification for the politics and culture of separatism; for McWhorter, blacks are shooting themselves in the foot because these values prevent them from overcoming the psychological and cultural legacy of slavery, the root cause of the anti-intellectualism that thwarts black students from performing well in an academic environment. This culture, he argues, is reproduced as well in the black family when parents refuse to take their children’s low or failing grades as an occasion for scolding or punishment and, in the extreme, in peer pressure against the few kids who, as early as elementary school, are good scholars. Academically bright black kids are ridiculed and charged with not being loyal to “the race.”
We have seen this pattern played out in a somewhat different mode among working-class white high school students. In his study of male working-class students in an English comprehensive high school–the term that corresponds to our public schools–Paul Willis describes in his study Learning to Labor how the “lads” rebel against the curriculum and other forms of school authority and thereby prepare themselves for “working-class jobs” in a nearby car factory. We can see in this and many other school experiences the same phenomena that McWhorter ascribes to racial culture. To study and achieve high enough grades to obtain a place in the university is to betray the class and its traditions. One risks isolation from his comrades for daring to be good. But it is not merely anti-intellectualism that produces such behavior; it is a specific form of solidarity that violates the prevailing norm that the key to economic success for the individual working-class kid is educational attainment.
But as a certified good student who, by his own account, suffered many of these indignities at the hands of classmates, this is beyond McWhorter’s grasp. Since he sees no external barriers, anyone who refuses to succeed when he or she has been afforded the opportunity without really trying must be the prisoner of a retrograde culture. And since he defines anti-intellectualism in terms of comparative school performances in relation to whites–and there is no exploration of the concept of intellectual endeavor as such–he must avoid entering the territory of rampant American anti-intellectualism. It may come as a shock to some, but it can be plausibly claimed that we–whites, blacks and everyone else–live in an anti-intellectual culture. Those who entertain ideas that have no apparent practical utility, enjoy reading books without being required by course assignment and play or listen to classical music, attend art museums, etc., are sometimes labeled “Mr. or Miss deadbrains.” Moreover, as many have observed, the public intellectual–a person of ideas whose task is to hold a mirror to society and criticize it–is an endangered species in this country.
McWhorter focuses absolutely no attention on the loss of intellectual life in this sense. His idea of intellectualism is entirely framed by conventional technical intelligence and by a sense of shame that blacks are coded as intellectually inferior. There is little justification of the life of the mind in Losing the Race except as a valuable career tool. So McWhorter cares about educational attainment as a matter of race pride and climbing the ladder. He cannot imagine that working-class and middle-class whites are routinely discouraged from spending their time in “useless” intellectual pursuits or that the disparity between black, Latino, Asian and white school performances can be attributed to anything other than internal cultural deficits.
Scott Malcomson and Thomas Holt have cast different lights on race disparity in the post-civil rights era. Departing, but only implicitly, from Tocqueville’s delineation of the three races of American society–Indian, black and white–Malcomson, a freelance writer and journalist, offers a long, sometimes rambling history, fascinating autobiography and social analysis of the career of race in America. The main historical theme is that racial separatism is interwoven with virtually every aspect of American life, from the sixteenth-century European explorations and conquests that led to the brutal massacres of Native Americans, on through slavery and postemancipation race relations. Malcomson’s story is nothing less than a chronicle of the defeat of the ideal of one race and one nation. Black, Native American and white remain, throughout the centuries, as races apart. Not civil war, social movements or legislative change have succeeded in overcoming the fundamental pattern of white domination and the racializing of others. Nor have territorial and economic expansion allayed separatism and differential, racially burdened access to economic and political power.
Malcomson, the son of a white Protestant minister and civil rights activist, caps One Drop of Blood with a hundred-page memoir of his childhood and youth in 1960s and ’70s Oakland. In these pages, the most original part of the book, Malcomson offers an affecting account of his own experience with race but also renders the history of three major twentieth-century Oakland celebrities–Jack London, William Knowland and Bobby Seale. London was, of course, one of America’s leading writers of the first two decades of the past century. He was famous not only for his adventure stories, which captured the imagination of millions of young adults and their parents as well, but also for his radical politics. He was a founder of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, the student branch of a once-vibrant Socialist Party, which regularly won local offices in California until World War I and spawned the explosive political career of another writer, Upton Sinclair. (In 1934 Sinclair even became the Democratic candidate for governor.) Less well known was London’s flaming racism, a sentiment shared by the archconservative Oakland Tribune publisher and US Senator William Knowland.
Deeply influenced by his parents’ anti-racist politics, Malcomson was enthralled by the movement and especially by the Black Panthers, whose ubiquitous presence in Oakland as a political and social force was unusual–they lacked the same level of visibility elsewhere, even in their period of fame. But the pathos of his involvement is that his main reference group was neither black nor white: Their separation was simply too painful for a young idealist to bear. Instead, he hung out with a group of Asian students who nevertheless emulated black cultural mores. They did well in school but, by this account, nothing much except social life went on there. To satisfy his intellectual appetites, Malcomson sought refuge in extracurricular reading, an experience I shared in my own high school days in the largely Jewish and Italian East Bronx of the 1940s and 1950s.
The point of the memoir is to provide a contemporary illustration of the red thread that runs through his book: The promise of a century and a half of struggle for black freedom, and especially of the end of racial separation and of racism, remains unfulfilled. Malcomson takes Oakland as a paradigmatic instance of a majority black population gaining political office but little power because the city’s white economic elites simply refused to play, until civic disruption forced them (especially Knowland) to acknowledge that their power was threatened by the militancy of new political forces within the black community. With the waning of black power, Oakland, like many other cities, reverted to its ghettos, punctuated in the 1980s and 1990s by a wave of gentrification that threatened the fragile black neighborhoods and, in the wake of high rents, forced many to leave for cheaper quarters. When Malcomson returns home in the late 1990s after a few decades in New York he finds that the experiment of his father and a local black preacher in interracial unity in behalf of community renewal has collapsed, leaving the clergyman with little hope but a firm conviction that since whites were unreliable allies, blacks had no alternative but to address the devastation of black neighborhoods on their own.
Thomas Holt is a black University of Chicago social and cultural historian whose major work, The Problem of Freedom, is a brilliant, multifaceted account of Jamaican race, labor and politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The question Holt asks in his latest book-length essay, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century, is whether W.E.B. Du Bois’s comment that the color line is the problem of the twentieth century remains the main question for our century. Holt addresses the issue from a global perspective on two axes: to place race in the context of both the national and global economies, and to adopt a “global” theoretical framework of analysis that situates race historically in terms of the transformation of production regimes from early to late capitalism. In bold but sharp strokes the book outlines three stages: pre-Fordist, Fordist and post-Fordist.
Fordism was more than a production system based on a continuously moving assembly line where workers performed repetitive tasks. The “ism” in the term signifies that mass production and mass consumption are locked in an ineluctable embrace: If the line makes possible mass production, ways must be found to provide for mass consumption. Fordism therefore entails the formation of a new consumer by means of raising wages, mainly by the vast expansion of the credit system. Now workers could buy cars, houses and appliances, even send their kids to college on the principle of “buy now, pay later.” This practical consideration led to a new conception of modernity.
The advent of consumer society has changed the face of America and the rest of the capitalist world. Before Fordism, which Holt terms pre-Fordism, the US economy was crucially dependent on slavery. Whatever their egregious moral and ethical features, blacks were at the core of both the pre-Fordist and Fordist production regimes. In the slave and post-Reconstruction eras they planted and picked cotton and tobacco; during and after World War II they were recruited into the vast network of industrial plants as unskilled and semiskilled labor. Indeed, they shared in the cornucopia of consumer society, owning late-model cars and single-family homes; in some instances, they were able to send their kids to college. As Holt points out, exploitative as these relationships were, blacks occupied central places in American economic life.
The 1970s witnessed the restructuring of world capitalism: The victories of the labor movement prompted capital to seek cheaper labor abroad; cities like Detroit, Cleveland, New York, Oakland and Chicago, where black workers constituted a significant proportion of the manufacturing labor force, were rapidly deindustrialized. In their place arose not only retail establishments but “new economy” computer-mediated industries like hardware and software production, dot-coms and financial services.
But the reindustrialization of the 1980s and 1990s occurred without the participation of blacks. In industries marked by the old technologies, hundreds of thousands of immigrants made garments, toys and other consumer goods. Lacking capital, African-Americans could not own the retail businesses in their own communities; these are largely owned by immigrants–Koreans, Indians, Caribbean and African merchants. Holt argues that American blacks are now largely excluded from the global economy; they occupy economic niches that are no longer at the center of production, positions that augur badly for the future of race in America. Even the growing black middle class is located in the public sector, which has been under severe attack since the 1980s. Moreover, Holt plainly rejects the judgment of “black progress” that leads to culturalist explanations for the growing economic and social disparity between blacks and whites. He finds:
overwhelming contemporary evidence that racism permeates every institution, every pore of everyday life. Justice in our courts, earnings on our jobs, whether we have a job at all, the quality of our life, the means and timing of our death–all form the stacked deck every child born black must take up to play the game of life.
Holt’s essay ends with the faint hope that racial stigma and segregation will one day be overcome. For now, he insists, race remains, for all African-Americans–not only those suffering the deprivations of ghetto life–the problem of the twenty-first century. But neither Malcomson nor Holt can find sources of resistance. In fact, Holt explicitly gives up on the labor movement–a prime mover within the Fordist regime. It has been severely weakened by post-Fordist globalization. Nor does he identify forces within the African-American movements capable of leading a fight. As other sharp critics of racism such as Paul Gilroy point out, despair overwhelms hope.
The concept that judicial and legislative prohibitions against discrimination are sufficient to erase the legacy of four centuries of social and economic oppression is deeply embedded in the American imagination, always alert to the quick fix. From this view follows the inevitable conclusion that if income and social disparities stubbornly refuse to go away, something must be wrong with the victim. Thus the tricky and misleading term “culture” as explanation, which segues into proposals that blacks “pull up their socks” and reach for the main chance. But those who are passionate in their insistence that the elimination of the structurally induced racial divide will require a monumental struggle have hesitated before the gateway of class politics.
For those like Holt and Malcomson, who are less concerned with whether blacks enter corporate boardrooms than with raising the bottom, there is little alternative to calling on the power of the labor movement to join the fray. It might be argued that organized labor, still dominated by a relatively conservative white leadership, has shown little inclination to mount a fierce defense of black interests. But as unions lose their traditional white, blue-collar base, the labor movement is becoming more black and Latino, and certainly more female. And as its constituency is transformed, there are signs that the top leadership is learning a few lessons. The AFL-CIO’s 2000 call for amnesty for undocumented immigrants was a move of historic precedent. And its attempt to organize low-wage workers is a reversal of past practice. If race remains a central problem of the new century, the way forward is probably to re-establish the race/class alliance that fell on hard times in the 1960s and 1970s. Without it, black freedom is confined to a cry in the darkness.
