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From organizing workers on the San Francisco waterfront in the 1970s to conducting oral history interviews with black and white steel workers, professor of history Bruce Nelson has immersed himself in American working-class history.
Nelson shared the most recent fruit of his labors, his newly published piece, "Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality," with a diverse group of students and faculty over lunch in the Hayward lounge at the Hanover Inn, yesterday.
Race is central to any discussion of American class struggle, he said.
Nelson delineated the central focus of his novel, the making and remaking of the American working class.
According to Nelson, as wave after wave of European immigrants reached the United States shore, they came to unite in a common claim to "whiteness," excluding African-Americans from their ranks.
For this new immigrant working-class, social class became intertwined with race so seamless that class itself was racialized.
This historical reality has created a tragic history for African-Americans and whites alike, undermining the possibility of any true interracial working class solidarity, he said.
And while employers and politicians worked to intensify such racial divisions, white workers themselves played a central role in shutting out black workers, a fact hard for many working-class activists to deal with, Nelson said.
Our society must thus confront a much deeper-rooted problem, "a problem of our humanity," and of invalidating others' claims to full person-hood, he added.
Still today -- decades after the Civil Rights movement -- America has not achieved a race-less society, and while there has been significant advancements, Nelson said the country must confront this longer-term reality of our history.
As groups of students and faculty discussed the implications of Nelson's ideas, conversations drifted to the effect the new Bush administration will have on race relations in the United States.
Several professors commented that while Bush has assembled a racially diverse Cabinet, more than symbolic measures are needed to win the support of the African American community.
Nelson's presentation and the student-faculty discussions were part of the College's efforts to increase student-faculty intellectual dialogue through the FAST (Faculty and Students Together) Food Program.
