Course Description

Instructor: David Slavin

Starts: Monday, October 4,  6 weeks

Time: 1-2:30PM     Cost: $60

Because race and gender obscure working class reality, activists and scholars wrestle with how to map labor history. Most knotty is the problem of the "white race." Not simply a social construct, it is a ruling class invention to separate the ranks of the exploited and, by imposing unequal status privilege on the "white" worker, maintain order and undermine resistance to exploitation. Industrial-financial elites adapted the slaveocracy's design to serve their own need for social control. Yet today's progressives tend to lump "white worker" with "Trump voter," a self-defeating assumption that reinforces ruling elite efforts to convince "white" workers that their interests lie with a cross-class "white front." Rethinking class by statistically dis-aggregating "whites" and focusing on the lowest three income quintiles helps distinguish white privilege, and reveal its hidden costs, from real benefits conferred on the upper classes. This course will rely on recent works by Heather McGhee, Ian Haney Lopez, Adolph Reed Jr., and a reassessment of New Deal reforms to help clarify the present political moment