Bitter Truths: Why Are Working Class White People So Angry?
Posted By The Editors | April 14th, 2009 | Category: Economic Justice | 8 comments
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By Deborah Rudacille
At the colossal Sparrows Point steelworks on the outer shores of Baltimore harbor, founded in 1887, black men long fed the sweltering ovens and furnaces while white men ran the finishing mills that produced gleaming coils of steel, tin, nails, wire and pipe. Three generations of my father’s family labored on Sparrows Point and I grew up in a nearby white working class community that owed much of its post-war prosperity to Bethlehem Steel.
Over the past four years, as I’ve researched a social history of the works, I’ve wrestled with issues of race-and with my own ambivalence about my white working class roots.
The people that I was raised among were extraordinarily generous, unpretentious and hard-working, and I greatly admire those qualities. But many were also, no getting around it, racist. Not lynching racist, not burning crosses on the lawn racist, not even, in many cases, personally racist.
As World War II veteran and retired African-American steelworker Lee Douglas, Jr. told me when we chatted in November 2006, “whites and blacks got along good in the mills. The only thing was that whites didn’t want anybody promoting to their jobs.”
White privilege was upheld by the unit seniority system. Hired for a few traditionally black units-labor, rigging, the blast furnaces and coke ovens-black steelworkers were prevented from transferring to more lucrative jobs in the finishing mills. When a Justice Department consent decree issued in 1975 forced a switch from unit seniority to plant seniority in American steel mills, many whites did not surrender their status easily.
“When that first influx came in, the white guys didn’t want to teach the black guys,” former union officer Ed Gorman said. “The first thing they’d ask is ‘how much seniority you got?’ Then they were like ‘I’m not gonna teach him anything. Why should I teach him something when he’s gonna take my job.’”
Eddie Bartee, Sr., first African-American vice-president (and longtime president) of United Steelworkers of America local 2609, testified to the traumatic effects of the transition. “I had good white buddies who when the consent decree came down stopped speaking to me,” he said.
Black transferees advanced quickly in the mills, leap-frogging over white employees who had more seniority in their units but not in the plant as a whole. “I transferred from the labor department to a production unit and just kept going from lowest job to top job,” tin mill roller Cliff Lockman said.
Roosevelt Caldwell, hired as a laborer on the ore docks in 1955, testified that by the time he and his friends retired in the 1990s, “we had made it, more or less, to the top.”
The consent decrees were implemented just as the American steel industry began its slow painful decline in the late seventies. Job losses fueled by advances in technology and competition from foreign steel in the eighties further ratcheted up the pressure as workers competed for a rapidly shrinking number of slots. The lingering anger and frustration of displaced workers was compounded by the 2001 Bethlehem Steel bankruptcy that stripped retirees of health care coverage and reduced many pensions.
“We’re very bitter,” said tin mill retiree LeRoy McClelland, Sr. when I spoke to him last fall in the run-up to the presidential election.
McLelland was voting for Barack Obama-as a die-hard Democrat and union man, he couldn’t do otherwise, he said. But he admitted that many of his friends and neighbors were planning to sit out the election. “They don’t like Obama. To be honest, because he’s black.”
And that’s the problem that still confounds me when I talk with some otherwise admirable people-folks I genuinely love-who share my roots. They have not been able to move beyond the old suspicions, the old hostilities, the old grudges. They remain, in the word we used in my childhood, “prejudiced” against African-American people in large part, I believe, due to long-standing economic rivalry.
In the eyes of many, civil rights is an issue long since resolved-in those difficult days when the old rules were changed, to their detriment. Some (not all) are willing to admit that the changes were necessary. “If you were really to reach into your heart and look back, you would say to yourself it really is a case where they denied blacks the right to be on productive jobs other than the jobs that no one else wanted,” said McLelland.
But as the union manufacturing jobs that brought prosperity in the post-war period have withered away, and with their own families and community struggling to survive, they do not understand why we are still talking about civil rights when, as McLelland pointed out, “those who were discriminated against are dead and gone.”
Ironically, in the end, blacks and whites on Sparrows Point wound up in about the same place, as predicted by World War II veteran Lee Douglas, Jr. The former Marine began speaking out at union meetings about civil rights on the Point in the Fifties, when it was, says Eddie Bartee, “a very undesirable thing to do.”
As a young man, Bartee watched white steelworkers jeer Douglas in union meetings when he tried to get them to confront the injustice that had been allowed to fester for so long-and to point out that they were next in line. “He’d say to the whites that just as sure as they are going to screw us today, they will screw you tomorrow,” Mr. Bartee recalled. “And that,” Mr. Douglas told me when we spoke in 2006, “is just what happened.”
Deborah Rudacille is a freelance writer living in Baltimore. Her book Roots of Steel will be published by Pantheon Books in 2010.
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As much as I would like to relate this to one thing or the other – life really isn’t like that…
The best example I can make is globalization that is never going to work -.- it isn’t race -.- it is a feeling of importance of working harder than the next guy -.- and a degree of stupid pride……BUT of being -.- my world is better than your world -.- my country is better than your country…..
Sadly I feel our government has banked in the other direction -.- the stupid -er – less educated -.- less deserving -.- led by the nose crowd
In your article you talk about the grudge that the white people had against the blacks at the plant, should that have been the other way around, in their minds they thought that the blacks were inferior to them, and those old timer still do, but you can find them in church every sunday professing to love god and hate a creation of god.
Any Black person who really believes that whites are their friends are not “post racial” in their thinking, just sadly deluded and just plain crazy. I am glad to see that one of them has had enough honesty to admit that a lot of the dissention and bad attitude toward Obama is because he is a Black man in power. A Black man in power has always been and continues to be, perceived as a threat by whites to whites. These same people now have to look at a Black woman being hailed as the country’s “First Lady”, and they cannot stand the thought of it. Whatever happened to Sapphire, Aunt Jemima and “Big Mama”? Michelle Obama is totally NOT everything that racial stereotypes about Black women have purported for 400 years. President Obama was smart enough to marry a Black woman, and, one who is truly befitting of her present status. Together, the Obamas are “Camelot in Color”. Racism is oh so alive and well. There is no “post racial” sentiments nor environment in this country. It is business as usual when it comes to race. Attorney General Eric Holder was right. This is a country of deluded cowards whenever race is brought up and any Black person who thinks different is operating at a dangerous disadvantage.
Are you nuts? People did not vote for Obama because he is black? Give me a break. It has nothing to do with his color. It has to do with his lies and deceipt. I can’t believe everyone on the left still wants to make it a race issue. Totally blows me away that you have to keep this race thing going when that is not at issue here at all.
I only have one thing to say and will show with one thing alone that it is true. I am not a raciest but if I was I would have to stand up and say that for and between all races and genders that the white male is the most held back and discriminated against in the whole united states. It starts like this and it is public knowledge that if a white man and a black man would apply for the same job and the white man had even more experience, that the black man would get the job due to the fact that there has to be so many blacks or persons of ethnic background to be specific, for so many workers of white or Caucasian decent to be exact and to show just how raciest our own government has become toward the white male populous, if you were stationed on an aircraft carrier, doing your enlisted time and you were a white male or female they would tell you there is no such thing as color on board, that everyone is equal, but they have a month of celebration for every nationality other than the white Americans. For instance black history month and Latino month also Asian month and so on. Now tell me why they can’t have a white history or white American month are they ashamed of white history or are they afraid of it causing problems among the masses? Lets face the facts until every person is treated equal from employment to everyday events there is never going to be a change in this country simply because if it does not change someone somewhere, somehow, is going to feel neglected and discriminated against and that feeling or energy is just fueling the raciest fires and will continue to keep them burning. When two people apply for employment and if one is more experienced for the job no matter what there gender or race is the job should go to the person most experienced for the job and in our military if they cannot have a month set aside for the white man or woman and they do have it for other races, well quite simply they need to get rid of them all and not have any special day for any individual race or any color to show no special favor toward any special persons. I will continue to hate our biased government for there way of manipulating all people of color and gender to separating the races and in the other hand say they are against it for if they truly are against it, Why do they have a special month for every race but the white race in our own navy on our own aircraft carriers group? Answer that question. I have seen racism my entire life and heard the black culture say they want reparations for what they went through and I say this, I am American Indian and I want it to. Now lets be real, neither I nor they went through what our auntsisters went through and neither of us are deserving of It, I mean since we have all had the same rights for many, many years and if all of us would forget about what we cannot change which is the past and make our future better by not looking back, but instead look forward to what we can change by being better people and working together to make our futures brighter and better for our children and by teaching our children that there is no such thing as color when it comes to people and do not teach them the bad things that has happened in the past, but instead get them focused to the good things they can accomplish in the future if everyone works together and does not see color between themselves it could happen you know.
I invite those who are interested in understanding ( Racial Comments ) too e-mail me at (leroymcclellandsr@comcast.net ) and I will send you a clear case that was used in defending racial comments . For those who my have heard the issue of (Michael Richards better known as ) (Kramer ) from tv’s Seinfeld show , that was said at one of Richards comedy act.
This article contains overbroad and unkind generalizations about a group with whom LDF needs forge a better relationship. I do not understand the connection between posts like this and the important work LDF does. A better approach would be an article about why civil rights groups and traditionally white labor groups should work together on certain issues, defying structural and cultural racism in the labor movement. Perhaps there are some LDF cases that could provide good examples of places where this might work.
On the question of race in America, I would like to submit my thesis that the “white” race is a convenient myth that was concocted by white-skinned Europeans to merge multiple disparate and competing nationalities that would otherwise be at each other’s throats in the competitive environment that was early America. While “wHITES” kept the “Blacks” in check, the Irish, Italian, Russian, Scottish, German, East European immigrants surreptiously blended their ethnicities in the public space, in so doing they emerged after several generations as a homogenized “white” race. Today, those with some memory, and with some connection to recent fresh waves of immigration from the home country, continue to support and promote their “home” culture. All the while, the Black male had to experience the whithering attack of this “unified” white culture.
So, let’s get over it. Admit that all races are subject to the unified front of the economic power elite of the world. Let us put a face to the unseen hands of the globalists who form our thoughts for us before we can utter them. This would be our true “post-racial” America.