Working Class Does Not Equal White

That the words working class are synonymous in the minds of many Americans with white working class is the result of a political myth. As the award-winning historian Blair LM Kelley explains in her new book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class, Black people are more likely to be working-class than white people are.

Kelley’s Black Folk opens our minds up to Black workers, narrating their complex lives over 200 years of American history. Kelley looks at the history of her own working-class ancestors, as well as the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who made up the world of Black labor. Their joys. Their skills. Their challenges. She also offers historical context for the racist ideas about Black workers that endure in our time, while highlighting the ways that Black labor organizing has always helped to fight back against bigotry.

Myths about race and class continue to dominate our political discourse. For a start, it is a myth that Americans without college degrees are, by definition, “working class.” Accumulated or inherited wealth is a more accurate indicator of class status than education (or salary), particularly amid an enormous racial wealth gap in the United States. Wealth levels of Black households whose members have a college degree are similar to those of white households whose members don’t have a high-school diploma. And those white high-school dropouts have higher homeownership rates than Black college graduates. Even if we were measuring working-class status by college-degree attainment, white Americans (50.2 percent) are far and away more likely than Black Americans (34.2 percent), Latino Americans (27.8 percent), and Native Americans (25.4 percent) to have a college degree, and therefore not be working class by this inadequate measure.

It is also a myth that “the white working class is synonymous with supporters of Donald Trump,” as Kelley points out in Black Folk. In fact, Trump’s base remains much more affluent than is popularly portrayed. “It’s not necessarily a question of [Trump voters] needing to be educated,” Kelley told me when we spoke recently. “It’s a set of choices that people are making about their place in the world, and what makes them feel verified and validated.”

All of these myths comprise our “national mythos,” which “leaves little room for Black workers,” writes Kelley, the incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We discussed what lessons we can glean from their history, from their everyday lives, from their political organizing. Our conversation began with the Black folk we know best: our families.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Ibram X. Kendi: Black Folk opens by chronicling the life story of your maternal grandfather, who was facing and fighting racism in the town of Canon, in northeast Georgia. What was striking for me was that my maternal grandfather, Alvin, is from Guyton, which is also in eastern Georgia, though closer to Savannah. He dealt with racism there as well, fled to New York City. Your maternal grandfather made his way to North Carolina. Such similarities. Why did you decide to start the book there?

Blair LM Kelley: It’s such a formative story for my family. It’s one my mother repeated many, many times. I think my mother really wanted me to understand the degree to which slavery had ended but the circumstances of subjugation had not. She wanted me to get how close that was to my lived experience, that it wasn’t this far-off, distant thing that was long gone.

Tying my family to this larger history, I know that’s a story so many people have of being forced to flee. I really wanted to begin with that because I knew how universal it was.

Kendi: You specifically wanted Black Folk to “capture the character of the lives of Black workers, seeing them not just as laborers, or members of a class, or activists, but as people whose daily experiences mattered.” Why was capturing the character of their full lives so important?

Kelley: I have never really thought of myself as a labor historian. Labor history had such a focus on institutions and unions, and infighting between organizations. Those were interesting, and things you need to know. But they weren’t the ways that I knew my folks. My folks were workers, but their lives, their whole lives, affected the way that they thought about that work. And I hadn’t seen as much labor history that was focused on what the whole being was like. Not just a factory-floor version of history, but rather a church, a house, a mother-daughter relationship. Those kinds of things I wanted to see amplified, because I think they’re just as meaningful for workers’ lives—if not more so—than the atomized workspace.

[Read: Booker T. Washington in the Atlantic on labor unions and civil rights]

Kendi: You start by writing about a blacksmith who was born in slavery—and then move on to other jobs, like washerwomen, train-car porters, domestic maids, and postal workers. Why specifically those occupations? Are there any specific occupations today that Black working folk occupy that we could potentially see as archetypal, or similar to some of these historical jobs?

Kelley: I think that domestic workers are really still an incredible population to think about. Their organizing is really incredible, and something I want to keep thinking about in my future work. I’m very much interested in following postal workers now. I think especially during the COVID pandemic, we could see that there’s a real fight being waged around postal work that I think deserves continued attention. The pandemic, again, made us think about Black people in medical care, particularly certified nursing assistants. The ranks of these nurses are enormously filled by Black women, and they bore the brunt of the pandemic. The gig economy is also really interesting to me. Black people are overrepresented in that space as well.

Kendi: You write that when Black workers are mentioned at all, the very idea of work is dropped entirely. And instead they are described as “the poor,” and often implied to be unworthy and unproductive. This is an echo of the characterization of enslaved Black people as lazy and unmotivated. And you wrote this in the opening pages of the book to really set the stage for a larger argument. What was that larger argument?

Kelley: It’s that I think there is an incredible mislogic around the Black working class, one born in slavery. I put a quote from Thomas Jefferson about him observing Black people and writing in Notes on the State of Virginia that they sleep a lot. And I’m like, Sir, as you sit in your chair, and somebody fans you and brings you your food, who are you calling lazy? And so that stereotype and its afterlife in our contemporary thinking is a confounding one to me. It’s one I really wanted to confront and unpack and pull the thread of throughout the text. Because Black workers’ contributions to this country are enormous. So calling Black folk “lazy” or “the poor” misunderstands what we’ve done and how we think of ourselves.

Kendi: You also point out that there’s a misunderstanding that Black workers are unskilled. Specifically in writing about laundresses, you wrote about the immense skill required. Is the idea of these Black workers as unskilled connected to the idea of them as unmotivated and lazy—an extension of that?

Kelley: Yes. I was fascinated by the skilled-labor/unskilled-labor dynamic that scholars had used for understanding work. It really struck me during the pandemic. The United Farm Workers were showing videos of farmworkers bundling radishes or picking cauliflower, harvesting asparagus and moving with such speed that you could barely see how they did it. And they’re classed as unskilled workers. Still today, that’s how we would describe them. And so, for me, reading the accounts of picking cotton, or washing laundry, or working on a Pullman car—all of those things took knowledge and study and skill. I just wanted to blow up that scholarly assumption about what is skilled and what is unskilled.

Kendi: Many of those Black people who were called unskilled in the past—and even today—worked in service-related occupations. I mention that because there’s the racist idea that Black people are by nature servile, which undercuts the idea that they’re actually highly skilled in doing these jobs. Do you see that too?

Kelley: Yes. I think when you look at people like the Pullman porters, many of whom were highly educated—they were preferred if they had some education. Because being able to have conversations, to anticipate what people need—they really were the first form of a concierge on these train cars—it really necessitated tremendous knowledge and skill for what might look like just a job serving. It’s a reminder of the dexterity of mind that many people bring to things that we think of as service.

And the ways in which they could serve one another, and use their platform to envision better rights for all workers, it’s really incredible. So often we think of unions as selfish. That’s part of the negative narrative that we have of unions. That they’re taking fees from the workers, and they don’t do much and they don’t really help out. But when we look at a union like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, we see that they started the entire nation in expanding our concept of citizenship and civil rights.

Kendi: Indeed, A. Phillip Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was the person behind the March on Washington in 1963, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. These car porters strove to advance themselves. But you write about how when Black workers are able to start making more money, or owning land, or even start businesses, they typically avoided “outward indications of success.” Racists imagined them to be uppity or even forgetting their place. But what about Black elites? What did they think about the Black working class, then and now?

Kelley: If you look back at Black newspapers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you’ll find them admonishing workers, “Don’t go out and spend your money on these particular kinds of things. Be very frugal. Don’t go to the tap rooms and buy all these fancy clothes to wear on Sundays.” So there are parallels with the current Black elite. That’s an old trope Black communities have been bouncing around for a really long time: that somehow you can save your way out of the circumstances that make working-class life much more difficult.

The space for pleasure, and the space for enjoyment and pride in how you look and what you have, and the ways in which working folk have spent money have always been criticized. “I don’t look like what my job is; I look like who I want to look like”—that kind of pride is traditionally a Black working-class thing. Although it looks very different today when wearing a Gucci belt or something.

[Read: Is organized labor making a comeback?]

Kendi: Members of the Black working class have not only carved out spaces for pleasure and enjoyment and pride. They have carved out spaces for politics, for organizing, for unions. You talk about how members of the Black working class are more likely to be union members today than any other racial group. Based on your research, why do you think that’s happening? Which is to ask, why do you think Black people are at the forefront of this boom of union organizing and activism in our time?

Kelley: I think Black workers have a different outlook on the narratives around unionizing, and what value unions might have. Black workers are already in a critical stance to say, “Well, no, let me evaluate this for myself. And no, actually I think a union would help!” Coming together is a way to aid us and lift us. It fits the narrative of the wider lives we have lived in our families and communities. Unions just resonate with how Black communities have fought over time, which is why we see Black folks forming unions from the very first moments of freedom, all the way till right now.

Kendi: You even described enslaved Black folks running away as engaging in nascent labor strikes.

Kelley: Absolutely. They understood what a difference their labor made. So often we forget that people who are subjugated have intellectual lives.

Kendi: Definitely. That brings me to two quotes from your book that I wanted you to reflect on. The first touches on what we were just talking about—how Minnie Savage, a child of exploited and constrained sharecroppers, knew the value of her crop-picking in Accomack County, Virginia. At 16 years old, she fled. You write, “Minne dreamed of living in a place where it didn’t feel like they were slaves anymore. A place where she could be paid fairly for her hard work. A place where she could safely join with others to demand fair treatment. She had to leave Accomack to ‘get freed from freedom.’”

Kelley: I love Minnie as a figure, and finding her interview was such a gift. She happened to be from the place where my grandfather was from. And it was so interesting to follow her as she made her way to Philadelphia. Just remember that, for so many, migration was this big dream of possibility and the vision of something new and something broader and something stronger. And chronicling her disappointment in what happened in the first decades after she migrates, and then also chronicling that she does end up with something much stronger, and something she’s really proud of—she was an amazing figure to write about.

Kendi: And finally: “The Trump-caused obsession with the white working class … has obscured the reality that the most active, most engaged, most informed, and most impassioned working class in America is the Black working class.”

Kelley: I’m a scholar of Black people, and I love Black people. I think we learn so much when we shift our gaze, when we think differently, when we pay attention to other people and glean from their history. Black life has so much to teach all of us about what is possible.