Abstract
African American labor and working-class history is a key field of research, knowledge, and inspiration for building a stronger and more viable contemporary labor movement within and beyond the borders of the United States today. But Black labor history as an intellectual discipline is deeply rooted in the early twentieth-century struggle against the emergence of the White supremacist order in American society. Both lay and professional Jim Crow era White writers treated Black workers as intellectually “inferior” and incapable of adapting to the labor requirements of the industrial machine. Accordingly, they defined Black workers as “expendable” and justified the employment of Black workers in the most precarious bottom rungs of the nation's expanding urban industrial economy.
The first generation of African American labor historians—including Charles Wesley, Abram L. Harris, Sterling Spiro, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others—countered such racist perspectives on African American workers and prepared the groundwork for the rise of anti-racist treatments of Black workers during the mid to late twentieth century. Building upon but moving well beyond the insights of their early twentieth-century counterparts, recent scholars of Black labor history not only demonstrate how Black workers labored under the “special handicaps of race and color,” in addition to the prevailing obstacles that hampered the lives of all wage earners in capitalist America. They also address the challenges that Black workers encountered in building their own communities in the face of rising class, gender, and ideological divisions and conflicts within their own ranks: first during the transition from slavery to freedom and later during the Great Migration and the rise of the urban industrial working class.
Emergence of the industrial working class established the socioeconomic, political, cultural, and institutional foundation for the growth of the Modern Black Freedom Movement. The long Black freedom struggle abolished the segregationist order and ushered in the gradual emergence of a new, “affirmative action,” equal opportunity regime that promised to eradicate the American system of caste and racial apartheid. For a brief moment during the late twentieth century, in addition to inching up a notch on the occupational ladder, rising numbers of middle and better-off working-class African Americans moved from the inner cities into better housing and living conditions in the suburbs. Nationwide the percentage of Blacks living in suburban areas increased from no more than about 10 percent in 1970 to 23 percent by the turn of the new millennium. During the first two decades of the 21st-century, suburbanites increased to an estimated 36 percent of all Blacks living in the largest metropolitan areas (Bartik, 2021). Consequently, many ordinary citizens, journalists, policy makers, scholars, and social justice activists celebrated these developments as tangible evidence of the gradual fulfillment of the democratic promise of America for all its citizens.
But the road to a new anti-racist social order remained woefully incomplete as COVID-19 touched down in America in 2020. Meanwhile, as the industrial economy collapsed and White resistance to the gains of the Modern Black Freedom Struggle intensified during the final years of the twentieth century, progress toward a more inclusive class and racially integrated political economy dramatically declined. Much of the African American movement into the suburbs, for example, involved the increasing suburbanization of poverty and new forms of racially and class-stratified urban places. Police violence against unarmed African Americans escalated across metropolitan areas, including most notably the murder of Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. African Americans were also insufficiently integrated into the expanding digital age economy; and, most recently, the onset of the deadly coronavirus pandemic took a disproportionate toll on the lives of Black people.
In the beginning of 2022, the pandemic had claimed the lives of over 825,000 Americans. This figure represented more deaths than all lives lost in every war in the country's history. Demographers predict an increase to one million pandemic-related deaths in the United States, perhaps even before this issue reaches print. African Americans and Latinx people stand in the eye of the pandemic storm. They occupy the bulk of “essential” jobs as food service, transport, and healthcare providers. They cannot routinely shelter at home and work remotely compared to their White counterparts. Nationwide, only 20 percent of Black workers occupy jobs where they can work from home compared to 30 percent for White workers. Moreover, as economists and public policy analysts Gwendolyn L. Wright, Lucas Hubbard, and William Darity, Jr. note, Covid-19 “intersects and reflects social disparities” in virtually every aspect of African American life, including especially jobs, education, housing, and justice before the law (Wright et al., 2022).
A special issue of interdisciplinary essays, “More Expendable than Essential,” illuminates the nation's arrival at this pivotal moment in African American and U.S. labor and social history. It not only deepens our understanding of the deleterious impact of the coronavirus on African Americans and their communities. It also advances useful theoretical, methodological, and empirical evidence for building a new and more inclusive anti-racist labor movement moving forward.
Equally, and perhaps most important, these essays also plumb connections between the past and present. As such, this volume accents substantial continuities as well as watersheds in the protracted African American fight for human and civil rights from the outset of the nation's history through current White supremacy resistance to the racial justice, social service, and democratic agenda. While there is substantial thematic and topical overlap across the various studies, the most salient continuities between different phases in African American labor and working-class history receive treatment in essays by Augustus C. Wood, Bill Fletcher, and Lou Turner, while Clare Hammonds, Jasmine Kerrissey, and Ashley M. Howard give abiding attention to the twin impact of the pandemic and the spread of racialized and lethal policing across the early twenty-first-century landscape.
In his essay, “Towards a Theory of Super-Exploitation,” Augustus Wood, offers a compelling conceptual framework for future research on African American life and labor during the final years of the twentieth century and the opening of the new millennium. A postdoctoral fellow in the Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and specialist in political economy, social movements, and late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries African American labor and working-class history, Wood builds upon his book in progress on Atlanta, Georgia. He employs the conceptual insights of Marxist scholar Harold “Hal” Baron, sociologist Martin Oppenheimer, historian Earl Lewis, and others; he confirms the utility of proletarianization, dual labor market/split labor market, and “subproletarianization” theories for undertaking fresh new research on African American labor history.
Wood persuasively argues that deindustrialization, gentrification, and the recent ravages of COVID-19 has produced an expanding “subproletariat” of low-paid service workers. These workers occupy a precarious position between the old declining “blue collar” sector of the working class and the persistent bottom-line “lumpenproletarian” illegal sector of the economy (sex workers, drug dealers, etc.). Although the growing “subproletariat” has far fewer resources at its disposal to mount sustained worker resistance movements against the new global capitalist order compared to its more viable industrial era predecessor, Wood nonetheless suggests that this sector demonstrates that a nascent subproletarian labor movement is gradually taking shape, particularly in the hospitality industry. He cites the launch of some 1,500 strikes among these workers between March 2020 and July 2021 alone. As such, he sees subproletarian Black worker activism as a ray of hope for the development of a new anti-racist labor movement moving forward.
Essays by Bill Fletcher and Lou Turner reinforce Wood's ringing call for a more proletarian and radical Black labor history for the emerging age of the coronavirus. In his brief but compelling essay, “Whither the Black Worker?,” Fletcher underscores the diverse constituents that make up the Black working class, tracing this diversity back to the transatlantic slave trade through recent times. A prominent labor movement and social justice activist and senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., Fletcher also accents the problematic history of race relations in the predominantly White labor movement, which he carefully locates in the 1830s and 1840s “when the movement was a White movement within a White republic.”
The emancipation of some four million enslaved people of African descent in the wake of the Civil War did little to transform the labor movement into a multiracial movement against capital. Instead, as Fletcher puts it, the postbellum labor movement “split over the question of workers of color generally, and African Americans and Asians in particular. The question was whether to build an inclusive movement that recognized these sections of the working class—along with Mexicans/Chicanos and Native Americans—or to exclude.” The first postbellum national labor federation, the National Labor Union, not only excluded African American and Asian workers but also opposed the movement to reconstruct the nation and place African Americans on an equal citizenship basis with their White counterparts.
Hence, from the outset of the emancipation era, Black workers established the antiracist Colored National Labor Union and countered the exclusionary practices of the White labor movement. Their ongoing antiracist union organizing activities would inspire the rise of the interracial CIO during the 1930s. Nonetheless, the predominantly White labor movement never fully addressed its racial blind spots even as the Modern Black Freedom Movement took hold. Consequently, as deindustrialization set in during the late twentieth century, the American labor movement entered what Fletcher describes as “strategic paralysis,” unable to embrace broader and more inclusive visions of the movement for a new era.
Meanwhile, the New Right’s conservative attack on the fruits of the Modern Black Freedom Movement (especially growing African American access to good public sector jobs) further undermined the economic foundation of Black families and their communities. In the recent context of the coronavirus, Fletcher also calls attention to the racialized global impact of the pandemic on people of color. As he puts it, “the global North went about hording vaccine in order to ensure the safety of its own populations, accepting that the global South would have to fend for itself . . . . as we have come to see in India, much of the initial thinking that Covid19 would, for some reason, leave the global South only slightly touched, turned out to be in error. The planet, as a whole, has been under siege and, again, the global north has been willing to allow millions to suffer . . . and die. The US Black workers’ future, then, operates in this context of global crisis and can only be solved through organization, strategy, and the fight for power.”
For his part, Turner analyzes the theoretical underpinnings of the Black industrial worker and socialist journalist Charles Denby's autobiography, Indignant Heart: A Black Worker's Journal (1989). Through a close and incisive read of Denby's autobiography, Turner aims to “unpack” what he describes as the “revolutionary theory” embedded in the Black radical's self-portrait of himself and his ideas. A Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning as well as a scholar of Marxist and Hegelian philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Turner carefully compares Denby's prescriptions for African American labor and political struggles to those advanced by his close Marxist-Humanist collaborator, Raya Dunyevskaya, the principal founder of a new “independent socialist tendency of the American left.” Turner persuasively argues that the theory of Marxist-Humanism (influenced most profoundly by the ideas of Marx and V. I. Lenin) provided Denby a template for treating Black workers as “the vanguard” of the revolutionary socialist movement in America—a movement that skillfully combined the African American fight for labor rights with the wider struggle for human and civil rights.
As such, according to Turner, Denby mirrored Marx and Lenin's insistence on “the inseparability of workers’ shopfloor struggles from the struggle for social democracy” as socialism was referred to at the time within the Russian context. Furthermore, Turner concludes that the Russian experience also informed Denby's critique and strategic approach to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s—particularly his analytical distinction between the interests of the so-called Black “petty-bourgeois leaders and elites versus the grassroots organizational forms of community-based democracy, on the one hand, and rank-and-file democratic caucuses at the point of production and in local unions on the other.”
In addition to creatively connecting past and present perspectives on race, work, politics, labor movements, and health in a time of pandemics, this issue also offers a useful microhistory of the coronavirus impact on African Americans from its initial onset in the spring of 2020 through December 2020 with the gradual evolution of the vaccine. In their essay, “At Work in a Pandemic: Black Workers’ Experiences of Safety on the Job,” labor studies scholars at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Clare Hammonds and Jasmine Kerrissey analyze survey data on the pandemic—gathered from “paid targeted Facebook advertisements to recruit respondents”—for some 8,000 participants in six different states, including Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, and Washington State.
Based on these data, “At Work in a Pandemic” demonstrates the unequal impact of the coronavirus on virtually every facet of African American life at work and at home. Employing the notion of “precarity,” defined as “uncertain, unpredictable, and risky” conditions on and off the job, Hammonds and Kerrissey convincingly argue that Black workers were disproportionately subjected to unsafe work conditions, compounded by ongoing historic patterns of racial discrimination that made them more vulnerable than their White counterparts. In their words, “Black workers faced the compounding effects of being more likely to be employed in low wage, precarious (and essential) jobs and to be subject to other forms of systemic racism outside of their workplaces. In addition to the barriers that Black workers have historically faced in their workplaces, Black workers also face discrimination in other ways, from redlining, underserved health needs, police brutality, and the strain that generational blockages to wealth accumulation place on families. These pressures generated a highly stressed, unsafe, and unstable position for many Black essential workers as the pandemic unfolded.”
Finally, in her study, “Violence and Disposability at the Intersection of Twin Pandemics,” Ashley Howard, an Assistant Professor of African American history at the University of Iowa, shows how forms of racialized violence linked African American life and labor across time, space, and different categories of experience. Drawing upon her book in progress on violence in the late twentieth-century urban Midwest, Howard documents what she describes as the intersection of “twin pandemics”—the escalation of executions of young African Americans in police custody alongside the rise of sickness and death at the onset of the coronavirus. Accordingly, Howard calls for a more expansive definition of violence—one that moves beyond the narrow treatment of violence as “physical harm done by one individual against another or their property” to an understanding of the many ways that “multiple” acts of violence are daily visited upon people of color at the bottom rungs of the social hierarchy. As such, Howard convincingly concludes that, “Covid-19 and anti-Black violence are not separate, isolated phenomenon, but twin, interlocking pandemics,” with a long history stretching back to the original slave-holding “scaffolding on which this nation was built.”
Students, scholars, workers, labor leaders, social justice activists, educators, policy makers, and broader publics will learn much from this extraordinary collection of essays. Most of all, this issue will encourage many readers to intensify their commitment to the ongoing fight to create a more just and equitable labor movement, society, and world during the twenty-first century. But that is not all. As scholars turn the pages of this special volume, they will see many opportunities to conceptualize, research, and bring to fruition another dynamic series of studies and further deepen our understanding of the wide-ranging and profound impact of COVID-19 on workers in the United States and around the globe.