> But that's not what "anti-racist" means. There have been moments in U.S.
> history where radical movements explicitly talked about and tried to
> fight the role of race. The much-maligned CPUSA tried to do that, even if
> they didn't have the benefit of studying under Tim Wise.
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The white South African unions refused to admit blacks, the Histadrut
declined to recruit Arab members in British mandatory Palestine, and there
were American craft unions which had a colour bar. But the two major
movements of American workers in the 20th century - the IWW and the IWW and
the CIO - organised all workers without exception and strongly supported the
civil rights of oppressed national minorities and their representative
organizations.
No doubt there were both conscious and unconscious racists within the most militant unions - they were also products of their time and place -but does it really need saying that these unions were not "white supremacist" institutions? It's true that the treatment of minorities was not the "central question" for these predominantly white organizations, but in what political party or trade union was this ever the case? The Bolsheviks, for example, condemned anti-semitism very strongly and punished anti-semitic acts within their own ranks, but never regarded anti-semitism as the "central" question which had to be confronted by the party; with the best of intentions but perhaps an incomplete undertanding, they proceeded on the assumption that the backward prejudices of the masses were a feature of capitalism which would disappear with it, and that the struggle between classes was therefore paramount. The CIO and IWW framed the issue in much the same way.
Women and non-white workers are more heavily represented in the working class and trade unions today than they were then so it's reasonable to expect that issues of race and gender would receive correpondingly more attention in any contemporary revival of the US working class movement.