Suppose that two million black persons were freed from prison or from the shackles of the post-prison criminal justice system. Most of them would be poor and in need of decent housing. Let’s say that the government builds housing complexes, with decently constructed units in which these two million persons can live. It places these complexes in places where at present mainly poor white people live. But now the poor white people can move into these complexes as well. A strong blow has been struck for equality. Now what? For this to work, wouldn’t we have to imagine that there was a multiracial movement fighting for this in the first place? I mean isn’t it conceivable that whites might not mean interracial equality even if they said that they were all for equality. So, wouldn’t any such movement have to be race-conscious to begin with? Greater equality will always benefit those at the bottom the most and therefore benefit blacks more than whites. But what, in practice, does the struggle for greater equality mean? The great thing about the left-led unions in the old CIO is that they engaged the racial issue inside the unions, where black and white unity was essential to defeat the bosses. There white workers might be able to see that the material conditions of their lives had much more in common with those of black workers than not. Circumstances are much different today, but can we learn any lessons from these struggles? Once in a UAW sponsored class I was teaching, a white man made a racially charged comment. A black woman challenged him. She called him "brother" and he called her "sister." We had a discussion and the man saw that what he had said wasn't right. The union setting provide a way to deal with this. In a bar, if I had challenged some yahoo who spewed out some nasty shit about welfare, I might have gotten my head cracked. What I think is that we won't be able to sweep the race issue under the rug of the fight for equality. At least that's what more than fifty years of experience with the racial divide tells me.
Here is another question. In practice, today, in the United States, if all else is roughly equal, shouldn’t a black person be given the new job, the housing unit, the promotion, early release from prison, etc. over the white person? Doesn’t this generate greater equality too? You might say that for the new job, the poor white person might need the job as badly as the black person. But don't a number of studies show that the white person is more likely to get a job at some point than the black person?