It has focused white workers’ ire on the wrong enemies – those with the least power (non-white workers and the poor) instead of the moneyed elite, which wields its wealth and power to cripple and destroy lives and the common good. It has joined them in spirit and political allegiance to rich fellow whites who couldn’t care less about working class people of any color. It has injured those workers’ material status by undermining their capacity to enhance their economic and political power by joining in solidarity with nonwhite workers.
#Death november 11 2015 skin#
It has helped cloak white workers’ subordinate and expendable status, which never disappeared despite the advantages white skin privilege has conferred relative to non-whites. The satisfaction has always been a terrible lie. observed in 1968, racialized capitalism has given its Caucasian proletarian prey the “satisfaction of…thinking you are somebody big because you are white.” DuBois’ account in 1935, anti-black racism grants lower and working-class whites a “public and psychological wage” – a false and dysfunctional measure of status used to compensate for alienating and exploitative class relationships. working class risen up to destroy the capitalist system and the pitiless masters who have treated the laboring masses with murderous contempt? Part of the answer lay in the way that American capitalism has encouraged the white majority of workers to, in historian David Roediger’s words, “define and accept their class position by fashioning identities as ‘not slaves’ and ‘not blacks.'” By W.E.B. Most, if not all the workers Debs was thinking about in this oration were certainly Caucasian. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.” I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I remember all the hardships and privations of that earlier day…I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories of the men in the mines and on the railroads. “At fourteen I went to work in a railroad shop at sixteen I was firing a freight engine on a railroad. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs’ statement to a federal judge readying to sentence him for violating the Sedition Act in 1918: And listen to the following passage from the great U.S. If you want to glimpse some of what I mean, read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or Harriet Arnow’s stunningly beautiful and tragic novel The Dollmaker – a harrowing tale of an Appalachian family’s migration from Kentucky to Detroit during World War II. It’s been viciously exploited, disrespected, deceived, divided, repressed, and otherwise and generally abused from the United States’ colonial origins through the present day. The white working class has never had it easy in American history.
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