IT'S WHY BEING OUTCOMPETED IN THE WORKPLACE...:

Yet, [W.E.B. Du Bois] lamented, "the labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States." The principal reason was "the race philosophy" which "came as a new and terrible thing to make labor unity or labor class-consciousness impossible. So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made impossible."

Thirty years later, Theodore Allen was reading Du Bois's work and contemplating the same question: why had there never been a proper working-class movement or labor party in America as there had been in European nations? Allen was a veteran union activist, Marxist and independent scholar whose two-volume The Invention of the White Race, first published in the mid-1990s, was a groundbreaking exploration of the emergence of racial ideas in America and foundational for the development of "whiteness studies."

He came to the same conclusion as Du Bois -- that white workers had been bought off by being invested with a sense of racial superiority over black workers. For cross-racial solidarity to be established, Allen observed in a 1967 pamphlet, white workers had to believe that "an injury to one is an injury to all." Many of Allen's fellow radicals, he acknowledged, despaired of them ever believing that because "the injury dealt out to the black worker has its counterpart in the privilege of the white worker. To expect the white worker to help wipe out the injury to the Negro is to ask him to oppose his own interests." That interest lay in defending "white-skin privilege." Allen did not necessarily agree. "The race-privilege policy is," he wrote, "contrary to the interests, short-range as well as long-range interests, of not only the black workers but of the white workers as well." Nevertheless, he remained ambivalent about the possibilities of cross-racial solidarity because he was unsure whether white workers could ever be weaned off racism, ever disabused of the illusion of "white-skin privilege."

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