Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement
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Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement
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Overview
In this theoretically innovative study, Moon-Kie Jung explains how Filipinos, Japanese, Portuguese, and others overcame entrenched racial divisions and successfully mobilized a mass working-class movement. He overturns the unquestioned assumption that this interracial effort traded racial politics for class politics. Instead, he shows how the movement "reworked race" by developing an ideology of class that incorporated and rearticulated racial meanings and practices.
Examining a wide range of sources, Jung delves into the chronically misunderstood prewar racisms and their imperial context, the "Big Five" corporations' concerted attempts to thwart unionization, the emergence of the ILWU, the role of the state, and the impact of World War II. Through its historical analysis, Reworking Race calls for a radical rethinking of interracial politics in theory and practice.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780231135344 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Columbia University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2006 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Reworking Race
The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor MovementBy Moon-Kie Jung
Columbia University Press
Copyright © 2006 Columbia University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-231-13534-3
Chapter One
Introduction
People's Republic of Hawai'i
Across the top of a two-page spread in its June 16, 1997 issue, Forbes magazine declared, "The People's Republic of Hawaii." This conservative journal of the economic elite bemoaned what it deemed to be an environment inhospitable to business: "At a time when even former socialist countries are going the free enterprise route, this small part of the U.S. remains mired in a half-baked form of socialism" (Lubove 1997:70). The sins of this "semisocialist welfare state" were many. Most of them stemmed from too much government and taxes: "The state's annual budget comes to around $5,270 per Hawaiian [sic]. That compares with $2,980 in California. It amounts to almost 19? of the islands' gross economic output.... Under a law passed in 1974 employers must pay virtually all of workers' [health] insurance premiums.... Add to this a workers' compensation system that presumes all injuries were caused on the job" (Lubove 1997:67-68). The article took Hawai'i to task for being far left of the mainstream in other areas as well. The journal feared that the state's judiciary would be amenableto demands of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. At the time, Hawai'i also seemed to be on the verge of becoming the first state to permit same-sex marriages, stirring reactionary furor across the United States and prompting the passage of preemptive legislations in Congress and twenty-nine states.
Forbes could have run off a much longer list to paint the islands red. Hawai'i instituted the first negative income tax program for the poor (Thompson 1966:29). It was the first state to legalize abortion and to ratify the ultimately failed Equal Rights Amendment. It led in abolishing the death penalty. Hawai'i was the first state to mandate prepaid health care for workers, and its workers' compensation program has had the highest payout rates. As of 1970, Hawai'i was the only state with an unemployment compensation program covering agricultural workers and 1 of only 5 states providing temporary disability insurance for illnesses or accidents unrelated to the job. Citizens of Hawai'i have continually voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, and Hawaii's Democrats have been among the most left ward leaning. For example, in the 2004 Democratic primaries, Dennis Kucinich, the presidential candidate on the left fringe of the party, garnered 31 percent of the votes in Hawai'i, nearly doubling the figures for Maine, Minnesota, and Oregon, the only other so-called "blue" states in which he scored double digits. While not without serious limitations-like the eventual rejection of same-sex marriage, resistance to Hawaiian sovereignty, and the Democrats' entrenched ties to wealth and power-Hawaii's politics have been arguably the most progressive in the country.
What may be even more striking about Hawaii's relatively progressive politics is its sharp break in the 1940s and 1950s with a long, resolutely conservative past: few other states or regions, if any, have traversed the political spectrum so far and so quickly. For example, increasingly dominated by a small group of haole sugar capitalists of mostly U.S., English, and German origins, the Kingdom of Hawai'i (until 1893) and, following the illegal overthrow of the monarchy, the Republic of Hawai'i (1894-1898) sanctioned and enforced a system of indentured labor for a half century, until the U.S. territorialization of the islands in 1900. The dearth of democracy, however, lasted for almost another half century, as the small group of haole sugar capitalists continued to wield virtually unfettered control over the territory's economy and politics, the latter unwaveringly through the Republican Party.
Given its long conservative past, how did Hawai'i remake itself into one of the most democratic-and Democratic-social formations in the United States? Hawaii's working class provides a necessary and essential part of the answer. Beginning in the late 1930s but not gaining much momentum until the end of World War II, the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) organized the islands' sugar, pineapple, and stevedoring industries, representing the vast majority of Hawaii's organized labor and becoming the generally recognized voice for the working class as a whole. Leftist in its ideology and leadership, active both at the point of production and in politics, and unprecedentedly interracial, the ILWU embodied Hawaii's working class for itself. Reviewing the union's role in the swift left ward shift in Hawaii's politics, its regional director recounted in a 1968 speech: "As workers became conscious of their economic power they began to recognize that they also had political power and exercised it successfully in cooperation with other liberal sections of the community to enact in Hawaii probably the best package of social and labor legislation of any state in the union. Twenty-five years ago we were one of the most backward communities in our nation." Even the harshest critics of the ILWU concede grudgingly the union's vital role in the rapid democratization of Hawai'i, objecting to the degree to which it has succeeded, not failed, in achieving its loft y goals.
The mid-century coalescence of Hawaii's working class through the ILWU was not achieved easily. Before World War II, nobody had any realistic expectations that the workers would form a coherent, progressive social force in the foreseeable future. While employers may have feared it and the most ardent labor organizers may have aspired to it, neither anticipated the working class's actual formation in the 1940s. The employers' unremitting dominance and suppression of labor were important factors in the dismal state and prospects of prewar workers. But, as scholars agree, the most crucial factor bridling working-class formation before World War II was racial divisions.
From the middle of the nineteenth century, Native Hawaiians and migrant laborers recruited mainly from China, Portugal, Japan, and the Philippines, in overlapping succession, worked on Hawaii's sugar plantations. Following their initial contractual stints in the sugar industry, many of them moved on to work in Hawaii's other industries, including pineapple and longshoring. From U.S. annexation to World War II, there were several large-scale movements through which workers contested their poor pay and conditions and the employers' unmitigated, unilateral control. But the workers were divided racially. Then, toward the end of the war, they built, seemingly overnight, a lasting interracial movement. The protracted period of entrenched racial divisions, displaced by a protracted period of durable interracialism that continues to this day, points to the overarching research problem of this book: how to account for the historic formation of Hawaii's interracial labor movement.
Reconceptualizing Interracialism
Sociology is quiet, nearly silent, on the concept of interracialism, which I define as the ideology and practice of forming a political community across extant racial boundaries. Instead, sociology speaks almost exclusively to racial divisions and conflicts. Despite the near silence, however, interracialism has long been present and indispensable. Since the decline of biologistic theories, a commonly shared but largely unspoken assumption has underpinned most sociological explanations of racial divisions and conflicts: the normative desirability of interracialism. A pervasive shadow presence, it functions as the analytically absent but "epistemologically structuring desire" (Kennedy and Galtz 1996:437). That is, sociology maintains its explicit focus on racial divisions and conflicts, while bracketing interracialism as something implicitly desired but rarely analyzed. A consequence of this somewhat peculiar situation is that interracialism is understood negatively, as necessitating deracialization. In a world divided by race, interracialism happens only when race lessens in salience. Even the few studies that appear to redress this negativity through explicit analysis reproduce it.
William Julius Wilson (1999), for example, admirably aims to deal squarely with interracialism, analyzing and advocating the formation of interracial political communities mobilized against the ever growing economic inequality in the United States. Because racial ideology distorts "the real sources of our problems," building interracial coalitions requires "an adequate understanding of the social, economic, and political conditions that cause racial ideology either to flourish or subside." Emphasizing and acting upon the "race-neutral" sources of inequality are the proposed keys to interracialism (Wilson 1999:39, 7, ch. 3 passim). In other words, interracialism entails deracialization.
Wilson (1999) is hardly alone, though notably more explicit than most. Ever since the eclipse of biologistic theories of race by assimilationist ones, the same two notions concerning interracialism evident in Wilson have steadfastly held sway: that it is desirable and that it requires a retraction of race-in significance, if not in toto. From the early decades of the last century, assimilationist theorists constructed teleological explanations in which racial and ethnic conflicts and differences gave way inexorably to assimilation. As Robert E. Park ([1926] 1950:150) wrote memorably, "The race relations cycle which takes the form, to state it abstractly, of contacts, competition, accommodation and eventual assimilation, is apparently progressive and irreversible." Based "almost always [on] an implicit, if not always precisely stated, hypothesis that trends will show a moderation of differences between ethnic populations," many have proceeded productively within a broadly assimilationist approach to the present (Hirschman 1983:412; see also Niemonen 1997; Waters and Jiménez 2005).
A common assumption of assimilationism is the normative desirability of assimilation, which is, in almost all cases, the formation of a unified nation unstratified and undivided by race and ethnicity-in other words, the "imagining" of a single, interracial political community coextensive with the nation-state. The path toward its realization is an evolutionary, though at times conflictual, process of deracialization by which all within a nation would eventually become raceless in their outlook and actions, save for politically amorphous celebrations of multiculturalism and diversity.
Although they developed in contradistinction to the assimilationist framework, more conflict-based approaches to race share similar assumptions concerning interracialism. A leading conflict-based alternative to assimilationism has been Marxist accounts of race. Like their assimilationist counterparts, they share a largely unspoken desire for interracialism; a major difference is that the interracial political community to which Marxists aspire is not a unified nation but a unified working class in struggle against capital. Also like the assimilationists, Marxists imply that interracialism is brought about by deracialization, as workers get beyond race and organize around their common class interests.
This implication is made explicit in the important work of Terry Boswell, Cliff Brown, and John Brueggemann. Like Wilson (1999), they laudably recognize the dearth of scholarship on interracialism. But, also like Wilson, their willingness to address interracialism head-on steers them back to maintaining a racially negative conceptualization of it. Interracial working-class solidarity "requires that both cheap and higher priced labor give primacy to long-term, class-based interests" (Brueggemann and Boswell 1998:438), presumably abandoning or holding in abeyance their short-term, race-based interests. Not surprisingly, given the studies' ties to split labor market and political process theories, both of which have been criticized for objectivist biases (Omi and Winant 1994; Goodwin and Jasper 1999), their account of the ideological dimension of interracialism remains underdeveloped: racial ideologies matter when economic competition among workers corresponds to racial boundaries but do not figure centrally in structuring interracialism.
Though boasting a more substantial empirical literature on working-class interracialism than sociology, labor history also offers little theoretical help in rethinking interracialism. The study of interracialism, and race more generally, was long premised on a dichotomous understanding of race and class that privileged the latter. More recently, labor historians have sought to move beyond that understanding, although the merits of this effort remain hotly debated in the field (Arnesen 1998; Hill 1996). Regardless, even a sympathetic reviewer notes that the recent scholarship on interracial unionism, particularly with regard to the CIO unions, has been focused too narrowly on "variants of the 'how racist/ racially egalitarian were [the unions]?' question" (Arnesen 1998:156), largely overlooking the related, less metrical "how" problem of explaining the ideological formation of interracialism and the role of race in it.
Perhaps we should not view the racially negative conceptualization of interracialism as a problem. After all, that forming a political community across extant racial boundaries would require deracialization seems intuitive. The scholarship on Hawaii's working class certainly provides little reason to gainsay this: there has long been a consensus that the interracial working-class movement of the 1940s and 1950s presupposed deracialization. Seeing the historically unprecedented interracialism among the workers not as a phenomenon needing explicit analytical attention but as part of a general postwar trend toward racial democracy in Hawai'i, the more liberal, assimilationist studies presume, but do not give a clear account of, the deracialization of the working class. The more Marxist-oriented studies tend to focus on the ILWU, casting it-most pivotally its leftist leadership-in the proverbial role of the vanguard of the proletariat.
There are two major weaknesses, one empirical and one theoretical, to the consensus concerning the deracialized conception of interracialism prevailing in the study of Hawaii's workers and sociology. Comparing the scholarship against the historical evidence reveals that a critical question has gone unasked: Did race in fact recede in significance for Hawaii's workers as they forged an interracial class solidarity? Current scholarship assumes that race receded in inverse relationship to the speedy ascendance of the working-class movement, but the assumption turns out to be empirically flimsy. If Hawaii's working-class interracialism had been predicated on deracialization, race should have faded from the workers' discursive and other practices. But this study's examination of primary sources demonstrates that race did not fade but instead took on altered meanings and practices.
Theoretical developments on ideology and social change over the past few decades also cast doubt on deracialization as the apposite conceptual imagery for interracialism. Deracialization, whether gradual or sudden, implies a process toward an absence or insignificance of race. In the case of Hawaii's working-class interracialism, the supposed deracialization of the class struggle entailed a seemingly straightforward retreat of racial ideology, replaced and partly actuated by a likewise straightforward diffusion of a color-blind-and hence more apt or "true"-class ideology advanced by the radical ILWU leadership. Accordingly, the workers' new class identity and politics bore ostensibly little or no relation to their old racial ones. But, more mindful of continuities, as well as discontinuities, in social change-even rapid and large-scale-social theorists argue variously against such clear-cut conceptual breaks in history, "because the concepts by which experience is organized and communicated proceed from the received cultural scheme" (Sahlins 1985:151).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
List of AbbreviationsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Origins of Capital's Contentious Response to Labor
Race and Labor in Prewar Hawai'i
Shifting Terrains of the New Deal and World War II
The Making of Working-Class Interracialism
ConclusionNotes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
Well-written and meticulously researched, Reworking Race is the first to examine the historic formation of Hawaii's interracial working-class movement in the 1940s. A fascinating account of the mutual constitution of race and class, it will be pivotal in future debates in the fields of labor history, sociology of race, and ethnic studies.
— Yen Le Espiritu, professor and chair of ethnic studies, University of California, San Diego
Interracialism, Reworking Race refreshingly contends, involves a rearticulation of race and class as mutually (re)constituting. The case of Hawaìi before and after World War II is exemplary because of the concentration of capital and power, the alienation of labor, and the hierarchy of color. The making of a working-class interracialism is intellectually and politically expansive and liberating.
— Gary Y. Okihiro, professor of international and public affairs, Columbia University, author of The Columbia Guide to Asian American History
This astonishing study has the rare distinction of succeeding equally as both theoretically informed social science and rigorously documented labor history. It shows concretely the human actions that created interracial class unity and the structural factors that enabled it to be created. Jung brings the specificities of a multiracial, white-minority Hawaii to the fore in a way that amply and arrestingly demonstrates how its story can change the whole story of race in colonial and U.S. history.
— David Roediger, Babcock Professor of History at the University of Illinois and author of Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs