Working-Class Agency and Racial Inequality

To have one's work in progress dissected at length by two historians whose scholarship one admires is gratifying; it offers a refreshing opportunity to learn through critical dialogue. I am especially grateful to Thomas Sugrue for his reading of my article on "Class, Race and Democracy in the CIO". I agree with his assertion that "working-class racism was structured by forces over which workers had varying degrees of control". His focus on the "power of capital in shaping patterns of discrimination" is important and necessary, as is his attention to the role of larger, often unseen, social forces in constraining the choices that workers made. Sugrue's work on the intractability of discriminatory labor markets, corporate policy and capital flight, and the volatile convergence of black migration and the politics of housing in post-World War II Detroit is exemplary in many ways. Labor historians, especially those like myself who have focused on the "shop floor" and the internal dynamics of unions, have much to learn from his approach. However, to some degree Sugrue has misconstrued the purpose of my article. I never meant to imply that a focus on the agency of white workers can provide a full explanation of racial discrimination in employment, nor would I be willing to dismiss "economic explanations of labor market segmentation", as he suggests. Any in-depth study of racially-based inequalities must pay attention to exactly the themes that Sugrue so eloquently articulates. But my purpose in "Class, Race and Democracy in the CIO" was more limited. I focused on working-class agency because it has been a major preoccupation of labor historians since the early 1960s, and I wanted to engage the "new" labor history on its own terrain. Above all, I wanted to challenge certain assumptions that I believe have been at the heart of much of the new labor history, and that have until recently been at the heart of my own work. All of this required a focus on agency, without suggesting that the consciousness and activity of working people is either fully autonomous or sufficient as an explanation of racial inequality. Take the post-war context in which the CIO sought to organize the South and expand labor's political role in shaping the direction of social