2016 Postmortem

forcing the union membership to see that they actually needed black labor on their side. Making people see that all workers are allies in common cause helps to erode the mechanisms of racism. It doesn't do all the work or even most of it. But it is an in.

I have no idea why you say that won't work today. The point is not to simply get more people of color into positions that matter where they can continue to be abused by the predominant racism in the land. The point is that we need to tear down all the mechanisms that keep feeding that divide. Starting that effort by changing up our predefined sense of teams is at least a shake-up. It has been a struggle for marginalized communities to successfully even take on that herculean challenge, I understand, but compared to most anything else, I'd say it has been effective. We need to create that solidarity in one germinating area, and prosecute it all the way to the point of wresting some of the money and political tools away from the people who continue to sell racism because it benefits them.

And you don't actually have an alternative anyway. Yours is that nothing will change until white people are finally outnumbered, as if as you have pointed out in other threads, people won't fall pray to the same mechanisms, no matter who becomes the next majority. As if Mexican Americans, Black Americans and Indian Americans are all in solidarity now. Divide and conquer works. Keeping someone under the boot in order to manipulate everyone else will never go out of fashion by itself.

All of that said, I am sure that Chomsky didn't think what he said through, which granted, is certainly a benefit of his white privilege to not immediately feel the disconnect of his words to reality. Racism never did get conquered, even within labor, and to say otherwise, is a whitewash, however unintentional I think it was in this instance.