interviews
A Bifurcated Approach
by Paul Frymer
February 24, 2021
This interview with Paul Frymer, Professor of Politics at Princeton University and author, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Paul | The Wagner Act was built on the idea of making the workplace accountable to the workers, of getting better wages, and improving working conditions. It is a relic of a time when the government was involved in regulatory action. We just don't do that much anymore at least in the realm of labor politics.
One thing I write about in my book, Black and Blue, is that at the time of the New Deal, civil rights were really not a priority for most U.S. politicians. Though the vast majority of African-Americans had no voting rights and no protection against economic discrimination, these big pieces of legislation like the Wagner Act did not try to change that structure.
The New Deal was built around the idea of a white working class, and the Wagner Act is part of that.
What would it have looked like if it included civil rights?
Most straightforwardly, the NAACP wanted a provision in the Wagner Act that said that employers can’t discriminate on a basis of race. That was not in there.
The Democratic Party, which was reliant on Southern Democrats at the time, did not want that and it was not put in the bill. As such, the legislation allowed companies and unions to discriminate on the basis of race. There is a case in the 1950s that I mention in my book where an employer was accused of firing workers because they were union members. You can't do that according to the Wagner Act. So, he said he didn't fire them because they were union members, he fired them because they were black. That was fine under the law.
Workers in Hole, photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth56863/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Hardin-Simmons University Library.
You write about how labor movements and civil rights movements often act independently of each other, rather than in conjunction. Why is there bifurcation?
It is a great and complicated question. W. E. B. Du Bois, the great civil rights intellectual and activist in the early 20th century, famously wrote about just how easy it is for employers to divide workers on the basis of racism.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, employers used to bring in African-Americans from the South or Chinese workers to break strikes and to create racial conflict. Though we are a long way from those kinds of extreme examples, today, we can still see the ways in which race and class have difficulty coalescing. We have lots of great examples of when they do when multi-racial or multi-ethnic coalitions form around class lines, but it’s very hard to do.
Specifically, in terms of the Wagner Act, the 1930s was the time of the labor movement and the labor movement, itself, was largely white. Later, in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement gets underway. The white labor movement publicly supports civil rights, but not always privately. Just as we have seen in the Trump era, there were conflicts among white workers who did not want greater diversity. Unions have continued to struggle with this.
Democrats have stepped back from workers. Trump towards them. Do you think his labor support is essentially just about race?
No, it was not just race. He gave them a sympathetic story to buy into. He said that he was going to give them their jobs back. He said that the United States and the Democratic and Republican Party had forgotten about the working class and that they don't care about the working class. They shipped your jobs out to other countries, he said. The sympathetic story is not that far off from the same one Bernie Sanders told. Jesse Jackson ran on that message in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a very powerful message that resonates.
The problem is, a lot of people out there, media and politicians, look for a scapegoat, and race is an easy scapegoat. Economic messages resonate a lot more when there are people who “don't look like us” that are perceived as threatening the white working class. So we point to things like building a wall.
[Workers on Platform], photograph, [1965-05-13..1965-05-24]; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1011027/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.
There's long been a debate within the Democratic Party about class and race, and how to emphasize both. One part of the party says it’s all about class and that race is an artificial construction that employers used to keep themselves in power, so we should emphasize economic distribution and racial inequality will be reduced in the process. That goes so far, but it doesn't go all the way. Race may be an artificial construct, in that we no longer attribute race with individual differences, but it still has taken an incredibly powerful meaning in our society as a result of longstanding prejudice and discrimination. Our solutions can’t just be about universal policies. We need to recognize that there is racism, discrimination, and prejudice in America and that it needs to be addressed on its own. It too cannot be dealt with in isolation from issues of class, but it needs its own stress and dedication. It's really complicated to have those conversations, obviously with Trump voters, but with progressives, suburbanites, and just about everyone else as well.
Backing up a little bit — in the 1930s, there were very few black members in unions. Over time it really moves up, but union participation more broadly declines. Why is that?
You are right. During the time in which African-Americans and Latinos have joined the labor movement, labor movement numbers declined dramatically.
Part of the reason for that is globalization. Part of the reason is that employers can reclassify workers so that they cannot be unionized--see the battles over Uber and Lyft and the gig economy more generally. And a big part of the reason is that employers are incredibly aggressive. Employers are very aggressively breaking the law and they can get away with it. What employers will do immediately is fire union organizers. That is against the law, but they know that they will just be slapped on the wrist, if anything. There is a lot of intimidation. Employers have all of these opportunities to make appeals to workers, to talk to them as a ‘captured audience’. The union does not have the right to access these workers, the way employers do.
You can see these aggressive tactics with the current Amazon fight. Amazon is about to have a union election in Alabama.
The union is fighting for the ability to vote by mail in light of COVID, and Amazon, just as the Republican party does, is fighting to make voting more difficult.
They don't want people to vote in the privacy of their homes because they know they will quite likely vote yes to the union.
What do you wish the media would note in their coverage of something union organizing?
The media has often made it seem like the union is the bully and the employer is the individual. They make it seem like people have the right to make as much money as they want, and whether individuals want to work for a certain company or not, is their individual problem. This whole idea of collective action is hard for a lot of Americans to understand.
It is also important to note that in a place like Alabama, where racism is deeply embedded in the history, culture, and still resonates in current politics, the employers use hiring practices to capitalize on this. They will bring in more immigrants to work. This racializes the workforce and the employers know what they are doing. In sweatshops and meatpacking plants, for example, they hire workers that speak all different languages so that they have difficulty communicating with each other.
So union organizing work is very, very hard and incredibly stressful. Especially going against Amazon, a massive corporation that is going to throw everything at you. Any worker who has been part of a union drive knows it is an incredibly stressful and often quite scary period of time. Employers will try to capitalize on this further by saying, vote against the union, and all this stress will go away.
Do you think support from local and national politicians is helpful or maybe even a requirement for successful labor union activism?
Totally. At the local level, we do have politicians to do that, and that is helpful. And Bernie will show up. And AOC will show up.
But what we need is the Democratic Party as a whole to stand by unions.
You see this dynamic right now going on with teachers and the nurse's unions and the question about whether the Biden administration will negotiate with teachers over COVID issues at school. The Democratic Party, generally, supports unions, but they frequently offer very little direct support to union campaigns. I mean the Democratic Party taking on Amazon is a big, big pill. Jeff Bezos gives a ton of money to the Democratic Party. He owns the Washington Post. Look at the conflict a few years ago when he pulled a potential Amazon plant from New York City in response to AOC’s opposition. It is not easy, and it often pits Democrats against Democrats.
Why do you think, politically, workers are sidelined for the swing voter? What do you think this obsession with the swing voter is, rather than the working class?
2020 is a good example of that. The African-American vote was the backbone of the Democratic victory. The African-American was critical to winning Georgia. The vote probably won Michigan, and on and on. President Trump obviously realized that because he was trying to make African American voting in Philadelphia and Detroit and in Atlanta much more difficult, or even throw large numbers of votes out.
But the strategists of the Democratic Party are overwhelmingly white.
Most of them are ambivalent on issues of race themselves. They look at the broader map and they say, "Well, who are voters that we need to win?" And frequently, they draw a big circle around white suburbanites. Election after election, the conventional wisdom is white suburbanites. We see that after what happened 2016. The focus immediately turns to those disgruntled white Trump voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio.
And there is some truth to that. The white suburban vote in Georgia was also critical. Not independently of the African-American vote, but the African-American vote is not a majority vote in this country or in any state. You do need a significant proportion of white voters. But the Democratic Party, I think, has overplayed that idea in the sense that they think that in order to win the white vote, you need to then downplay civil rights, and downplay things like Black Lives Matter. There's evidence that goes in both directions. A lot of political scientists are currently studying how much the Black Lives Matter protests helped or hurt the Democratic Party. This is an incredibly fraught issue.
[Two Construction Workers], photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc499160/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
And when you talk about Black Lives Matter you do risk opposition from the white suburbs and other white workers. And that requires the Democratic Party, and our government more broadly, to have bigger conversations. They don't want to have those conversations, obviously. They don't want to explain to people why Black Lives Matter is singularly important for historical and systemic reasons, and how in certain ways, it is also for all of us. Those are hard conversations, and the Democratic party doesn't want to have them.
And you know, you see why any time anyone, whether it’s Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or AOC or Bernie Sanders, says anything of nuance or subtlety, it gets shredded, and frequently, they back away.
This is cynical, but the country is becoming less and less white, at some point the white suburbanite won’t be the majority.
If you look at California in the 1990s, the Republican Party made, in a way, the same big bet on white voters that Trump did. And over time, they have gotten crushed. California is a liberal Democratic state because of demographics and so forth. So, there is hope among progressives that California is a sign of the future of the United States and that the Republicans are going to be crushed in the coming years.
Some Republicans think that too because they are focusing on trying to stop people from voting. They're trying to stop immigrants from entering the United States they fear will become Democrats. They're trying to stop Washington DC from becoming a state.
The one footnote to this is that I find the demographic argument a little bit problematic in that populations are not static. Populations are changing over time. Some populations ‘become white’ over time. We've seen hints of this within the numbers of some Latino populations.
We've already seen it with Cubans, a large number who have been conservatives and Republicans from the first migrations in the 1960s. Puerto Ricans are largely Democrats but there are some openings there, with a strong Republican presence in Puerto Rico itself. You see movement with the third, fourth, fifth-generation Mexican populations in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico as well.
The other thing that you touched on is young people.
What happens with young people as they age? Is the take away from what is currently being said, "I believe black lives matter and I think we need a new era." Or is the takeaway, "I believe black lives matter until it comes to my town and my school and my police department and impacts my housing prices."
This is the moment for the progressive white middle-class to decide how much it embraces racial progress and actively promotes it going forward.
Yeah. How serious are you, I guess.
Oh, I don’t doubt people’s seriousness and sincerity of beliefs. But it is once these beliefs are confronted with different dynamics that you have to really struggle with and be willing to face and accept.
You see this in gentrifying neighborhoods, from Brooklyn to the Mission of San Francisco to Silverlake in LA. These are pockets of progressive white populations. How much are they willing to embrace diversity over the long term, and recognize what it actually means?
The gentrifiers are probably the most progressive politically. Housing in LA is expensive, but…
That is why I think the government is so important. Because you hear these stories you can sympathize or you can find a way to understand it. And I don’t think it's just rationalizing. Every individual story is importantly different. But, that's where the government, I think, needs to step in and say, “We are going to set these rules and everybody has to follow these rules.”
That takes the pressure off of the individuals, and puts the onus on the government to create these spaces that are diverse. That is what we should do as opposed to putting all the energy on the single worker who has to go on strike for a year.
We should put the onus on broader government structures and law so that we actually make it easier for everybody to have it.
interviews
An Interview with Celeste Fremon of Witness LA
by Celeste Fremon
June 12, 2018
Above Photograph: November 11, 1986. More than 110 residents of the Aliso Village Housing Projects call for more police protection against drug traffickers. Father Gregory Boyle, pastor of Mission Dolores, said yesterday's demonstration grew out of Bible study groups he organized at the Aliso and nearby Pico Gardens projects.
This interview with Celeste Fremon, an award-winning freelance journalist specializing in gangs, law enforcement, criminal justice and education policy, the founding editor of WitnessLA.com, and author of "G-Dog and the Homeboys", was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Can you introduce yourself a bit?
The fall of 1990 was the first time I took the drive that would change my life, which is to go to meet this priest I had heard about that was working with gangs in Boyle Heights, he was the pastor of Dolores Mission, which was the largest parish in Southern California. He was having a lot of luck working with street gangs, and it was at the height of the gang crisis in Los Angeles.
This little mile-square area that was then the Pico-Aliso housing projects had, according to the LAPD, the highest level of gang activity in Los Angeles County, and since Los Angeles was at that time the gang capital of the world, that mile-square area was probably the most intense area for gang activity on the planet. It seemed like a really interesting laboratory to see what this gang thing was about. I talked an editor of mine at the Los Angeles Times Magazine into letting me do a story on an alternative school that this priest, Father Greg Boyle, had started.
I realized very quickly that the story was about the kids he was working with and that the guy and the school was just a tiny part of it. I wrote the story for the Times, but I was so fascinated with the depth of the stories I was seeing with the moms and the dads and the sisters and the homeboys and homegirls and the family interaction and the community interaction and the complexity of it that I sort of never left. I developed an unlikely expertise of LA street gangs.
We were madly passing, in the state of California, legislation that was getting tougher and tougher with sentencing enhancements. What I was seeing was hurting kids. That was the beginning of how I started reporting on criminal justice and juvenile justice because, once I pulled on that thread, all kinds of other topics came down, and I think finding out what you want to do is as mysterious as falling in love.
Had you met me 30 years ago, you wouldn't have said, "As a white chick, former USC song girl, what you should probably be reporting on is Hispanic street gangs." But I felt at home and this is what I'm meant to be doing, and one topic led to the other, and I've reported a lot on law enforcement and prison policy and all kinds of juvenile issues having to do with the justice system, and most of it here in LA.
Long answer to a short question.
Who is most impacted when a member of the family disappears via incarceration?
In the incarceration mania that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, what we failed to take into account — and what I saw up close because the more I reported in these communities and became friends with moms and sisters, are all of the collateral effects. I came a journalist, and stayed as a mom and auntie and friend.
Right now, of the 2.3 million people in prison in the United States, 52 percent of the state inmates and 63 percent of federal inmates are the parents of minor children. To put it another way, according to the Bureau of Justice, 2.3 percent of the US population under 18 have a parent or parents in prison. In addition to all of the shame and stigma that occurs with kids, it has such a profound effect when a family member is removed.
A guy who might have been low level, selling drugs — that was only part of who he was. He was also the guy who babysat for his sister who was struggling or was there for his mom or had all kinds of other functions in the community and in the family. You see all these people disappear from the community and it had a crippling effect, not just on families, but on the communities themselves, and watching that close up, anecdotally, you could just see the damage that was being done.
I remember I talked to Father Greg where I'd seen most of the people in the community where I was reporting were suffering from a high degree of what appeared to be PTSD. Now, we talk about it as early childhood trauma. People have been rigorously studying it, but at the time, all of these effects of being in a war zone and also having seen family members vanish into prison, the trauma led... There was a study done at Stanford where they went into some of the most intense Los Angeles neighborhoods and tested a bunch of the middle school kids and found that they had a high degree of PTSD — as severe or greater than service people returning at that time from Iraq and Afghanistan.
I even saw symptoms blossoming in me because I'd been in situations where I got shot at accidentally. They weren't aiming at me, but I was in the line of fire. More importantly, I saw kids I got to know be killed and went to a lot of funerals. For most of the people in these communities, it seems like everybody's been through that, and the trauma is very deep from being around a lot of violence and also having family members removed into the prison system. It's only now that we're starting to address that stuff and see the harm that's being done.
How does this adolescent trauma stay with people as they become adults? Are they being equipped with any tools to deal with it?
We're starting to see a little bit of it, but it's largely absent. A high majority of the kids that wind up in our juvenile system are suffering from a high degree of trauma. That affects their attention span. It affects their health. PTSD or early childhood trauma can mimic ADHD.
If nobody acknowledges that, it can have long-term health effects. If it starts to be acknowledged, there's stuff you can do. There's a lot of good work being done finally. We're acknowledging that these things are going on and that kids having a brush with any one of our governmental systems and our county systems, whether it's foster care or the juvenile justice system, are by definition coming in there with a high degree of trauma. If we don't admit that and address it, we're going to have problems and we're not going to be helping these kids.
Looking at LA county probation, which is the largest juvenile probation system in the country, they're trying to train staff in trauma. This is like a day-long training. That's not enough.
This is an agency where it's being talked about and the supervisors are all on board. The probation commission is all on board, and it's hysterical trying to get this done.
Thinking of you last night, I was talking to my friend about a then-young man I met, during the early-to-mid-'90s when I was reporting in Pico Aliso in Boyle Heights. He's not a young man anymore. He's been in prison for 17 years. He just got out and he called me because he remembered I'd been sort of an auntie way back when and felt I was a person he could trust and could talk to.
Turns out he spent 10 years in solitary confinement absolutely for no reason, under completely torturous circumstances. For so many years, we thought this would never change, and now in the state of California, we're starting to understand that the use of solitary really, no kidding, is torture, and that we do great damage.
At least it's actually changing. For so many years, it was very, very difficult to get public policy to change. But it's changing now.
How has gang culture shifted since the 90s in Los Angeles?
The gang culture is very different. Still a high percentage of homicides in Los Angeles according to Chief Charlie Beck. They are still gang-related, but our homicides are way down and the gang culture is very different. There are so many other ways people are looking to do rehabilitation, and it's not gang-centered. It's re-entry centered. The gang problem is still a problem, but there are a lot more problems.
So many of the communities, and the moms, and the fathers, and the men are feeling that they are the solutions to their community problems, and they're feeling, to use that horrible word, empowered to start organizations and programs to fix their own communities.
There are a lot of remarkable people who are doing work that come out of the communities themselves, rather than people coming in from the outside to be the helping entities.
The Youth Justice Coalition, they've got policymakers scared to death because you don't want to get in their way. They're relentless, thank heaven, and they're kids who have seen that they can help change policy. When I first began reporting, there were groups of mothers that had found their voices, but that's expanded many, many, many times over. That's a big cultural change.
Are you optimistic about what this next generation is facing? Do you think this generation coming up will see less incarceration and less violence?
I think that's the direction everything is turning, and oddly enough, there seemed to be a breakthrough around 2007, 2008.
I don't think that made all the difference, but the rest of the populous went, "Oh. Maybe we need to cut back on some of this nonsense."
But, yes, I'm much more optimistic because there's real reform coming out of the communities, and policymakers are listening and a lot of them are doing their own part to lead the charge. I'm much more optimistic when I watch kids like those at the Youth Justice Coalition. I was at a meeting recently, and one of the people on this board was a young woman from YJC, and she was just formidable. I don't know what her background was, but most of their kids have come out of a very at-risk situation and many of them have been locked up themselves.
They're becoming activists and organizers, and their blooming is really an inspiring thing to watch. There's still a lot of work to be done. I'm still amazed that so many people don't feel an urgency to make changes, particularly when it comes to the county's kids who wind up brushing up against these systems.
I think it's a very interesting generation.
Because I've followed the same people for such a long period of time, often since they were teenagers to people in their 40s, I see some of the people I knew and cared about get killed or get locked up for a very long time, but I've seen so many who, according to the cultural views of that time, people wanted to cross off. They were wonderful kids who were struggling with some really incredible burdens and were up to no good and were very, very at risk and very involved with gangs.
Now they're good moms and good dads and responsible working people. They were able to redirect the arc of their lives toward a very positive future with tremendous burdens affecting them while they did it. They're the best of victory stories. I don't know how I would have done with the kind of childhood and adolescence that they had, that were not of their choosing.
It's been both humbling and joy-bringing to have the privilege of knowing people over time who have really gone through the steps of trauma and have come out the other side to something really good and healthy. They're great miracle stories.
What do you feel most urgent about?
Any of the things affecting kids is really urgent. When I hear from policymakers and people in some of these big agencies that affect kids say,
That's how I feel. We have to feel that urgent. All of these kids are ours. We belong to each other. Are we willing to sacrifice a generation of kids in certain communities? Is that okay with us? If it's not, then we need to move heaven and earth to get to them. It's that urgent. It makes me nuts.
Somebody who worked for one of the supervisors a couple of years ago said, "It sounds like you're really upset about this."
I said, "Yeah." She said, "Well, yeah, but juvenile probation has always been that way. Why are you so upset?" I went, "They're children!" We can't ever be complacent. Most anybody I know, if they met the kids being adversely affected by the policies we have, if they just met personal kids and got to know them, they would be absolutely aghast.