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Book

Transformative Organizing: Race, Gender, and the American Labor Movement

This monograph examines the innovative ways in which mid-20th century organizers in the American labor movement sought to build solidarity across racial and gender inequity in exclusionary workplaces and unions. Political philosophers and theorists have generally thought that solidarity is built on the basis of pre-existing unity: persons recognize a set of interests that they already share, and commit to struggle for one another in pursuit of these shared interests. Yet many political projects, especially those combatting identity-based forms of oppression, seek to build solidarity among persons whose interests are in conflict with one another. The question I take up in this project is: what does it mean to build solidarity in communities and workplaces fractured by oppression, where the idea of a common cause or interests cannot be taken for granted? I contend that the solution to this puzzle requires a reimagining of the core activity through which solidarity is built: organizing. Whereas organizing is often thought of as a process that appeals to and activates the pre-existing shared interests of persons in order to build solidarity between them, I develop a conception of organizing as activity that transforms persons’ interests, generating novel commonality from which solidarity can be built. Through extensive archival research, I trace this conception of organizing in the political thought of mid-20th century American labor organizers who found ways to build solidarity across racial and gender inequity in exclusionary workplaces and unions. These organizers started from hard-nosed recognition that workers in privileged social positions and identities had something to gain from racial and gender inequities; but these organizers refused to accept these dynamics as unalterable obstacles to organizing the working class. Theirs was a struggle to build solidarity by forging common interest anew.

Articles

An essay on Frederick Douglass and Black solidarity - for the Oxford Handbook to Frederick Douglass, eds. Ivy Wilson and Philip Gould.

Crusading or Calculating: Organizing Interracial Solidarity in Operation Dixie - In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) initiated an organizing drive across the U.S. South, tasking its organizers to “organize everything in sight.” This Southern Organizing Drive, popularly known as Operation Dixie, failed in its effort to expand industrial unionism in the South. Operation Dixie is widely recognize to have been an abject failure in its efforts to organize the South. I argue in this paper that Operation Dixie’s failure is partially explained by a philosophical perspective embedded in its organizing ethos that treated workers as agents whose interests were fixed and in need of activation, rather than as agents whose interests are dynamic and open to transformation.Drawing on the archival materials of over a dozen CIO organizers involved in Operation Dixie, including Lucy Randolph Mason, Stetson Kennedy, Paul Christopher, and Don McKee, I show that this organizing ethos is reflected paradigmatically in the campaign’s failure to systematically pursue efforts at forging interracial solidarity among Black and white southern industrial workers.

Contesting the Common Good: School Desegregation and the Boston School Bus Drivers Union - The past decade has seen the proliferation of American public and service sector union contract campaigns organized around a commitment to ‘bargain for the common good.’ Bargaining for the common good is a strategic orientation that envisions union contracts as vehicles for directly and explicitly advancing the interests of the communities in which a particular workplace is embedded. For instance, the Chicago Teachers Union, in its 2012 and 2019 campaigns, cast its contract as a struggle for “the schools Chicago students deserve,” fighting for reduced class sizes and increased nursing staff and social services for students. One crucial assumption built into bargaining for the common good is that unions spearhead struggles for interests that community members by and large already recognize as their own: union-community coalitions are built around constellations of interests that they already share. In this paper, I argue that we find in the history of the labor movement in America an even more militant sibling of bargaining for the common good, which sees unions as political agents with the power to contest and reforge what a community understands as its common good. In particular, I examine to the role of the Boston School Bus Drivers Union in the fight to desegregate the city’s schools in the 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival materials, including hundreds of pages of personal organizing notes by one of the union’s lead organizers, Gene Bruskin, I show how the union leveraged its integral role in the city’s busing policies in an effort to reorganize the city’s working class around a collective commitment to integration and racial justice. Through this struggle, Boston’s school bus drivers developed a theoretical framework that cast the common good not as a precondition for coalitional politics, but as a site of contestation where which new coalitions are built through redefinition of a community’s common good.

'Not seeing, but believing:' Clarity and Humility in Locke’s Essay - In this paper, I consider the role of epistemic humility in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. An epistemically humble agent recognizes the limits of her capacity for comprehension and the role of such recognition in our epistemic practices. It is tempting to ascribe to Locke a negative conception of epistemic humility, on which on which we ought to “sit down in a quiet Ignorance of those Things, which, upon Examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our Capacities” (I.1.4). This is because Locke seems straightforwardly committed to the clarity thesis, that comprehension consists in gaining a clear view of ideas and their relations. I argue, however, that Locke is not straightforwardly committed to the clarity thesis in the Essay. Instead, Locke tempers the epistemic power of clarity in his critique of the enthusiast, who believes that she has an immediate connection to God. Locke’s critique of the enthusiast suggests a role for a positive conception of epistemic humility in Locke's epistemology: that recognition of the limits of our capacity for comprehension is itself sometimes implicated in the expansion of our comprehension.