Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 <silence>
Speaker 1 00:00:05 Hi, friends, again. This is talking strategy making history, Dick, flax, aka. We're together again, and today we have an extreme privilege, which is to have the, as a guest, bill Fletcher, bill Fletcher Jr. Bill Fletcher, may be known to, some of you, should be known to all of you as a very wise commentator on the political scene. For many years, he was an important figure in the labor movement, but also as a writer about. And, uh, we are going to have the opportunity to talk to him about the, the wider political scene, especially about the labor movement and its current permutations and developments. But Bill Fletcher really excited me because I get an email from him and he said, I'd like to be on your radio show, because I have a new book out, and it's a, it's a novel, and I'd like to be interviewed about that novel. Well, my radio show would've been a nice place, but this is a better place for Bill because we want to talk about not only the novel, but uh, as I said, a lot of other topics relevant very much to our ongoing podcast. So this novel is called The Man Who Changed Colors, is that right?
Speaker 2 00:01:29 That's correct.
Speaker 1 00:01:30 And, uh, it's kind of surprising. I I, I, I imagine everyone says this to you. What are you doing writing a, uh, mystery novel,
Speaker 2 00:01:42 <laugh>? So, first of all, thanks to both of you for having me on the program. So, the Man Who Changed Colors is a sequel to my first novel, the Man Who Fell From the Sky. And, and I decided back in about 2008, after I had completed my first book, uh, the Solidarity Divided About the Crisis in the Labor Movement, I decided I wanted to try to write a work of fiction. And I wrote a manuscript that I was pleased with, but I sent it to an agent who ridiculed it, and I dropped the project only a few years later developing a new idea, which my wife and daughter gave me the go ahead on. And, uh, that became the man Who Fell from the sky. And I decided that I wanted to write something, first of all, because I always have come up with stories since I was a kid in my head. But I, I wanted to communicate political with a small p messages through the venue of fiction, and didn't wanna be hitting people over the head with it. And so that's what led me to, to enter into this. And Murder Mysteries is a long history of the left, engaged in murder mysteries.
Speaker 1 00:03:09 That's correct. You've got Dashell Hammett, who was
Speaker 2 00:03:13 Exactly
Speaker 1 00:03:14 Full fledged communist and, and, and paid a price personally for that. We have a local famous mystery writer, Ross McDonald, who wrote a whole series of books with Santa Barbara as its venue, or fictional Santa Barbara. And he wrote an essay that impressed me claiming that what he was doing was fussing Marx and Freud in the detective novel. So when I knew that you were doing this, I was not surprised from that point of view. But, um, and I assume you're a, you, you're a reader of such literature that I, uh, of the kind that I just cited, right?
Speaker 2 00:03:53 Absolutely. And someone who was also a fan of the film noir and very inspired by Walter Mosley and, uh, others, Gary Phillips. So there's, there's a whole range of people. But one of the things that I found in writing, because some people said to me, bill, have you given up on writing nonfiction? I said, of course not. I said, I've continued to, I've continued to get things published, not books, but articles, essays. But what I found in writing is that writing is a two-lane highway. You can be in the fiction lane or the nonfiction lane, if you change lanes, you often get a ticket, there's a penalty. And this is true, whether you're moving out of the lane of fiction or moving out of the lane of nonfiction, there is frequently a level of intolerance by the ru uh, the reading public, and certainly by publishers of people who make those changes. And that has been one of the challenges that I've been up against.
Speaker 1 00:04:57 Right. So, but we, we should talk about the book because you want people to be interested in reading it. So let's, let's walk folks about on this and then maybe get back to a little, the political pance of doing this kind of work. I read it without thinking, is this a great political act on your part? I just wanted to know whether it was a good book. And I have to say that it was, it's extremely engrossing because of the plot and characters. And, you know, if I were to be a critic, I'd say, I'd love you to keep working on your just writing style. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And you probably know that it's the hardest part of it, <laugh>. But there's something strange about the book right off the bat, which is it's locale and the sort of cultural underpinnings of it, which I am dying to have you explain. So, first of all, the, the basic, uh, venue of the story is largely in Cape Cod and surrounding areas in Massachusetts. The main character is a African-American reporter for a Cape Cod newspaper. And, uh, the characters are, or the mystery re revolves around, uh, characters who are largely Cape Verdean and relating to Portugal as well. And the whole timeframe is what, what's the exact time? The mid seventies, right?
Speaker 2 00:06:29 1978 to 79.
Speaker 1 00:06:32 Okay. So all of that's kind of not what you would expect. So I need you to give us an account of why those particular, uh, places and and cultures are the main story. Is this your own experience, uh, directly? What, what's going on here? Well,
Speaker 2 00:06:49 It's interesting. It overlaps with my experiences. I, um, when, uh, from when I was a kid, my family would have summer vacations on Cape Cod. And, and so when I got there as a kid, and I grew up in New York, in very multicultural, as we would call it, uh, uh, communities, I encountered these black people with strange names. And, you know, growing up in, uh, at, in the Bronx and later in Mount Vernon, I was used to, you know, African Americans, Caribbean Americans, Puerto Ricans, et cetera. But I get to Cape Cod and these black folks with strange names, and it, the names sounded almost Spanish, but weren't, they were clearly what we would call black, but frequently, and this is in the sixties, would not identify as black, uh, might identify as Portuguese. And I was very curious about them. And, and over time I came to understand this was, these were Cape Verdeans, the first post 1492 African population to come to North America voluntarily.
Speaker 2 00:08:04 And they began coming in the 19th century as Portuguese colonial subjects. They found themselves immediately confronted with a very different reality. They were mainly Roman Catholic. They spoke, spoke Creo or Portuguese. They had not been slaves coming voluntarily. And they encountered, uh, an African population that was primarily Protestant, had overwhelmingly been enslaved and, and spoke English. And these two groupings had a very complicated relationship with one another because they had very different experiences with white supremacy. The Portuguese former white supremacy was different from the British. And I found that fascinating, Richard, fascinating. And part of what I wanted to do was to write something that talked about the complexity of race in a way that was not a black, white, traditional bipolarity. And so I situated it there, but I also did it. I was inspired by a friend of mine, Cape Verdean, American journalist, and I found myself thinking about his experiences, so that that's sort of how it came together.
Speaker 1 00:09:35 So that, that's a good, that's a thank you very much. 'cause that clears up. I, that's sort of what I might've suspected. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I was wondering whether you had Cape Verdean somehow in your, in your background, but it's more that this was a strange and intriguing cultural world that you encountered, and you, you learned something about, I guess, uh, I wonder whether you did even more digging and research in order to write this book about, about that world. I assume so, yes. Oh,
Speaker 2 00:10:02 Yes. But it was really over time. It, it was, it was, um, you know, I mean, going back to my experiences in the seventies when I worked at the Quincy Shipyard and I worked with Cape Verdean immigrants, who had Okay. Brought over and were living in southeastern Massachusetts and getting to know them, getting to know Cape Verdean community in New Bedford. So there's an accumulation of research over time, not just for this book, right. But over time, that translated into both of those, uh, pieces.
Speaker 1 00:10:38 So one of the things that's so engrossing, one of the ways this book is so engrossing is the multiple political, overlapping political, uh, scenes that fuse or fuse. Here you've got the story of this, uh, newspaper, which is a struggling newspaper mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, which is a story in itself that's very, you know, it's not unique to, to your particular location. It's something that we're experiencing all over the country, uh, what is happening to journalism mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and you, that's part of what is fascinating about the book, is just tracing that there's the kind of sexual re the, the, the sexual relationships and politics of the main characters. I mean, the sexual politics or, or dynamics. And then of course, there is the shipyard, uh, that you had direct experience in and where, uh, where the, the, uh, crime, so to speak, occurs. And so we get a, a, a deep glimpse of that life. And then the interplay between the Cape Verdean community and this fascistic Portugal set of characters who are important to the story is, is that also in your direct experience, the, those Portuguese, they, they were escaping when the, when the military dictatorship of Portugal was overthrown, they came to the same areas as the Cape Verdeans, which I didn't realize had happened mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but that's, that's the key to the story, right?
Speaker 2 00:12:12 Yeah. The, so Portuguese and Cape Verdeans were coming over and settling in similar areas, Southeastern Massachusetts, and then Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area, and the fascists that are mentioned in the book, or become a major part of the book, uh, that was an actually inspired by a group that existed in the 1970s called The Front for the Liberation of the Azores, which was a right wing secessionist group that had been set up basically in response to the Portuguese Revolution of 1974. And so, but then I started to dream and I started to think about the Algerian revolution and the o a s, the Secret Army organization that these fascists, French and other p noir fascists in Algeria had set up in order to try to prevent the independence of Algeria. So I basically worked with that without giving away the story. I worked with that as one element, but there was, there were other things that I was trying to do in there.
Speaker 2 00:13:23 Like, there's a character who is an Irish immigrant, right. And who is inspired by someone I knew in the shipyard, but in, in the book, uh, the Man of Change Colors, this Irish immigrant had been a soldier in the Irish National Liberation Army, which was the military wing of the Irish Republican Socialist Party. And the, uh, the guy that I knew, I, he might've been something, it, it's one of these things you just didn't ask. But he actually inspired the character. And I wanted to have a character who was an anti-racist white, and the this guy as an Irish immigrant, which a lot of people don't appreciate the, um, the differences in approach to race when you're in Ireland versus when you're dealing with Irish Americans. And so this character was part of that, and one of the incidents in the book where he's actually confronting some Irish Americans tries to make the point.
Speaker 1 00:14:36 By the way, it was interesting for me to read this because I had just read it, the new book by Dennis Leham, which takes place in Boston at just about the same time period that your novel is set mm-hmm. <affirmative> and, and it's among the Irish Boston racists. That's the world he's depicting there. That's right. So it's a, um, it was quite an experience for me to share, you know, try to put these two stories together. So what's the title refer to?
Speaker 2 00:15:06 Can't Give That Away.
Speaker 1 00:15:08 Oh, okay.
Speaker 2 00:15:09 The title of both books, uh, has a mixed meaning, but particularly the second one, it has a double meaning. So for the Listener, the book begins in 2004 with a discovery of some bones in a suburb of New Bedford, and then mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it flips back to 1978. Summer 78 in the Quincy Shipyard. And it takes place, even though it's a fictional Quincy shipyard, it takes place a week after I fell 20 feet. And so I actually did fall 20 feet.
Speaker 1 00:15:51 Oh, okay. And, um,
Speaker 2 00:15:53 And a week before me, another person had fallen, they fell nine feet and they died. So I don't,
Speaker 3 00:16:00 I can't believe I've been sleeping on these books.
Speaker 2 00:16:02 Oh, man.
Speaker 3 00:16:03 I'm just sitting here like, what
Speaker 2 00:16:04 You got? You gotta
Speaker 3 00:16:06 It, man. I'm your target audience.
Speaker 2 00:16:08 Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:16:09 Alright, I'm there. Don't worry. This
Speaker 2 00:16:11 Is another interesting story about, you know, trying to get the word out about the books, which is why this kind of program is very important. So in the Manner Change Colors, this Cape Verdean immigrant, as opposed to Cape Verian, American Falls to his death. And the immediate assumption is that it's an industrial accident. So the main character, David Goms, is asked to write a story about why shipyards were the second most dangerous industry in the country. And in the process, he then comes to conclude that this wasn't an accident. And then that leads into a whole series of things, which then it's through that you get the answer to why the book was entitled, what it was,
Speaker 3 00:16:57 You Gotta Sell This to Portuguese, Netflix,
Speaker 1 00:17:00 <laugh>,
Speaker 2 00:17:00 You know, I sold the rights to the first book
Speaker 3 00:17:04 Okay. To
Speaker 2 00:17:05 Kilimanjaro Productions. And they are in the process of trying to find a screenwriter to write a screenplay, and also they're talking with studios. Excellent. So, excellent. I look, I got my fingers crossed, man, because it's so what, you know, my publisher's a great publisher, hardball Press, and, but they, they're small. And the difficulty when you have a small publisher is getting reviews. It is really hard to get reviews and to get the kind of distribution you need. And so that's part of the challenge of it. Now, if the, if either of the books is translated into a movie or a limited series, all Betts are off. Right. And because it would be, be, it could be the equivalent of when John Grisham wrote his first novel, A Time To Kill, which was not an instantaneous success after the firm came out and then ultimately became a film, all of a sudden everyone was running to read that book. So,
Speaker 3 00:18:07 Dick, is it okay if I ask a follow up on that? Go ahead. I'm curious, as a writer, if you thought that way as you were sort of crafting the story or pacing it, like, were you thinking of this in a cinematic way since I feel like the genre of detective fiction is already very cinematic, but were you thinking even practically about translating it that way?
Speaker 2 00:18:29 Absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, I have a vision with regard to the Man who fell from the sky of, if it was translated into a film, I can just imagine the first scene and the music, and it would be song for my father by Hara Silver, who was at Cape Verde.
Speaker 1 00:18:48 Wow.
Speaker 2 00:18:48 And yeah, so I, that's actually, that's in, in, in some ways the rocket. That's sort of how I write. I film the story in my head, and then I write.
Speaker 1 00:18:59 And I think that's a great strength of, of, uh, of the book is, is that it is visually, um, you, you feel it in that way, or you can see it Thank you, as a, as a film noir kind of a film. And, um, I I'm just wondering whether this character, David, go Gomez. Gomes Gomes, sorry. So I didn't know how to pronounce it. Goms. All right. So this is gonna be, you've got a series in mind, I bet.
Speaker 2 00:19:25 Well, you know, it's interesting, Richard. I'm thinking about a third novel, and I have basically filmed it in my head. Um, and I was gonna start writing it while I was on vacation, but I realized I was so exhausted. I, I wasn't really ready to do it. I just wanted to read and relax and eat seafood. And so I'm probably gonna start it, but I wanna see whether anything happens on the film front that will be really inspiring. But I definitely have a third David Goms story, and it would take place in the early 1980s in Boston.
Speaker 1 00:20:05 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, which is where he, as I remember it in the book, he, he moves there.
Speaker 2 00:20:10 That's precisely it. He relocates to Boston.
Speaker 1 00:20:13 Right. I sort of vowed that we would talk for 20 minutes about the book. So that's where we are at. And, uh, sure. Uh, we're gonna shift, uh, gears and have aka take the lead in the conversation at this point. This is the podcast called Talking Strategy Making history, Dick and aka Influence Influencing, not Influencing, being influenced by Bill Fletcher Jr. Go ahead, Rocco.
Speaker 3 00:20:43 They stick. Got a little bit of fuzz on your line there or something. Well, yeah, I mean, thanks again, bill, for being here, and thanks for letting us know about, uh, your fiction works. I'm really excited about picking them up or downloading them and reading them. It's as I said right at my alley in a bunch of ways. And, you know, one of the things that's interesting is just how complicated and nuanced, I hate, that's probably an overused word, but Yeah. Complex and real and historical. Your approach to talking about race in the novel is, and that's true in your nonfiction. And I, I haven't slept on that. Um, I have read a Solidarity Divided, and that is, I think, and for listeners, you know, really should pick it up, just the best book that's been written in the last 50 years that's grounded in actual working class reality and the realities of the labor movement that talks about racism and the role that structural racism, attitudinal racism, and so forth, plays, doesn't play how unions can, can deal with it, and how important it is for the labor movement to reckon with. And, you know, you've just always been a really inspiring and interesting, um, you know, articulator of those issues. So, you know, what,
Speaker 3 00:22:02 On that, what are some things that you see going on in the labor movement, either worldwide or the United States right now that are good responses to the challenges of organizing across racial differences or, or have been bad ones? Um, you know, what are our, uh, pitfalls that we're continuing to see from your perspective?
Speaker 2 00:22:25 So, there's a lot of good things happening in the labor movement as a whole at this moment, just speaking generally. And a a lot of excitement, a lot of, uh, favorability within the broader public. And one element of excitement is the, uh, organizing of lower sector workers, you know, the, uh, the poor, uh, the often marginalized, um, as well as efforts as we saw recently with the Teamsters and, uh, the u a w under its new leadership, engaging, uh, you know, at the contract level. So there's all that going on. Organized labor, though, continues to be ambivalent about how to deal with race, how to deal with sex, gender, and how to deal with the far right. Um, and, and what remains a overall paradigm is a restriction of trade unionism to wages, hours, and working conditions. And the notion that other things, other issues are distractions.
Speaker 2 00:23:52 Now, I'm not saying that all unions fit into that either now or in the past. I mean, there were great examples like the international long show, warehouse Union in the 1930s on the West Coast and forties, that took up a real fight around racism and discrimination on the docks. You had the packing house workers that did a remarkable job in taking up the struggle against racism. You have in the more recent pass, some unions like the service employees, international union that have been good on these questions. But what is often missing is any kind of comprehensive internal education with the rank and file to help the members really understand the nature of race particularly, but the nature also of other oppressions in the United States, and what the implications are. And, uh, that's something that I've been fighting around for years. I mean, when, when I was at the A F L C I O and we developed this thing called the Common Sense Economics Program, it was about talking with workers about capitalism.
Speaker 2 00:25:06 And we, we were really proud of the outcome of it. Um, and we try to introduce issues around race and sex in the program. You know, the, the response of many unions was union, again, ambivalent about how much they wanna use it. Part of that reflected an anti-intellectual, uh, streak within organized labor and anti-education. But part of it was a fear that if you really touch on these issues, that white men in particular are gonna run out screaming never to return. And we, we continue to get this. Thus, much of the leadership after, uh, Trump was elected in 2016, elected president was really baffled about how to respond because they haven't wanted to talk about race, uh, particularly. And, and so that remains the rock, uh, a major challenge. Um, but I, given,
Speaker 3 00:26:04 So you, you're framing this about the United States, and I think, you know, for obvious reasons, it's a, it's just like a glaring core political issue in the us but it seems to me that it's a part of a global phenomenon. It's, and, and a global reality. It's, it's increasingly important or, and glaring in my work in Europe and in Scandinavia, and where you see the labor movement and the, the left traditional parties of the left in general, unable, you know, even if they want to, uh, sometimes or just unwilling and definitely ambivalent to, you know, discuss these issues, let alone educate about them, which just sort of concedes talking about identity to the, the increasingly fascistic. Right. And, you know, you're, you're a very much an international thinker and tend to think about, you know, local things in the context of, of what's going on globally, or, or do you have reflections on this? And what, especially from the standpoint of working people of color throughout the world, you know, what needs to be changed in order to, you know, include their existence and their, their desires and their interests in mainstream politics.
Speaker 2 00:27:21 So there is a specter haunting the world, and that specter is global right-wing authoritarianism, which is one of the things that drives me crazy about debates around the Russian invasion of Ukraine when I hear a leftist defending the Russian invasion, or in effect being silent about the nature of the Putin regime. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it's really amazing, given that the Putin regime has been at the heart of organizing globally around right-wing authoritarianism, word the issue, uh, the danger that we face is both a legacy of colonialism and a legacy of neo uh, neoliberalism. So for, for Europe, like looking at the circumstances you were describing as a whole, was able to benefit on the basis of colonialism, uh, as the late sum means said the welfare state was possible because of cheap oil. Yeah. And, and Right. As a general rule, cheap natural resources made certain things rubber
Speaker 3 00:28:26 Happen.
Speaker 2 00:28:27 Sugar,
Speaker 3 00:28:28 Yeah, absolutely. Ruling
Speaker 2 00:28:29 Classes were willing to make certain concessions to working classes around that. The labor movements in Europe were a real mixed bag when it came to the question of colonialism and whether to address it and to, and the issue of national chauvinism and racism. So you've got that as a legacy. Then you had, you have the experience of neoliberalism, the environmental crises and massive migrations from the global south that have raised a whole series of demographic challenges, uh, not just in Europe, obviously, in the United States and Canada, and the construct, just focusing on the United States for a second, the construct of the United States was that of a white republic, and then to this white republic, were added different populations mm-hmm. <affirmative>. But the notion of this being a multiracial democratic republic is not what the country was founded on, and is not what large segments of the right seek to build.
Speaker 2 00:29:42 Right. In Europe, I, I don't wanna call 'em homogenous 'cause the countries weren't homogenous, but you, you did not have, with perhaps the exception of France up until recently, major populations from the global south that were migrating there. But then you start to see that, and as neoliberalism has whacked the living standard of masses, of people in Europe income, these, uh, refugee and migrant migrating populations, and the right wing is seized upon that as an easy way of explaining why people's lives are going to hell. And the labor movements in Europe, by and large, and certainly in the United States, and much of the left, have had real difficulty and courage speaking up against this. But also it relates to another problem, which is what is the solution that the left and these labor movements wishes to propose to the living standard decline that working people have been facing. And this sort of fear of being too radical, of being outside of the mainstream consensus, that type of thing, paralyzes these movements and opens the door so that the right can walk right in.
Speaker 1 00:31:15 Dick, did you have a follow up or
Speaker 2 00:31:16 Something
Speaker 1 00:31:17 You wanna say? Well, I mean, the, the, uh, labor movement opposition to immigration, you know, is longstanding, you know, that, and, you know, one might take some satisfaction, the fact that the F L C I O officially is now in favor of pro-immigration, uh, or, you know, pro-immigrant rights. Correct. Uh, kinds of measures in a way that the historically, it wasn't. That's one thought. The other thing that popped into my head as you were talking, that there's a new program at the University of California called Labor Summer. The state legislature's appropriated millions of dollars. So each campus now has a regular labor center, uh, operating. This is quite innovative. But what's so interesting, relevant to what, what we're talking about here is that labor Summer was an, in a program in which a number of student undergraduates were recruited to spend the summer beginning to work with different unions.
Speaker 1 00:32:20 And overwhelmingly, these are Latino, Latino latina, they, they're, they're LA women students, but it's a very multi-colored group of students. And so, I don't know, I, I always wanna look for the straws that might give some hope. And one of them seems to be this great surge of student interest in the labor movement here. And, and that interest is coming from the, you know, two thirds of the students now at the University of California are non-white, which is a remarkable fact. About 35 to 40% are Latino. And, uh, so we have this burgeoning and more working class student body that is, I think a lot of them are extremely motivated toward for, for a lot of good objective as well as cultural reasons for the, toward the labor movement. So, is that, I don't know if that's part of your experience or any comment you would have on that thought.
Speaker 2 00:33:21 Yeah. Well, it's interesting when the leadership of the A F L C I O changed in 19 95, 1 of the first programs that they, uh, introduced was something called Union Summer mm-hmm. <affirmative>, which was aimed at getting student activists involved in organizing, giving them some experience. And so it's good to hear about what they're doing, what's being done in California. One of the things about immigration that's important is to recognize that in the United States, when people talk about the immigration crisis, that's not really talking about the immigration crisis. They're talking about the crisis that they believe that's been created by immigrants from the global south, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, because no one is really up in arms about Russians, Ukrainians, or Irish coming here. I lived in Boston for years. I don't remember any raids by what was then called I n Ss, uh, against, uh, Irish.
Speaker 2 00:34:23 No, a whole lot of raids against Dominicans and Haitians. You know, I, I worked for a union that represented ICE employees, and I remember listening to some talk about driving places and seeing, uh, people that they knew were illegal immigrants. That's what they call 'em, <laugh>. And I, I was a staff person, so I couldn't say what was on my mind, which was <laugh>. If you, I've been in so many restaurants where I was being served with people with very heavy Russian accents and other East European accents, how many of them were stopped about their citizenship? So I think it's really important for us to be clear, what, what is going on when the current discussion is about immigration. Um, and that's changed over time. You know, it's like immigrants from Europe were met with hostility for the fir when they first arrived, and then became absorbed into white America until 1924 when there was this immigration act, a very heinous immigration act that put serious restrictions on Jews and on Southern, um, uh, Europeans from migrating here. But in the more recent past, we're talking about when, when you hear people talking about immigration, they're really talking about people from the global south. And that's also true in Europe. Although what's interesting in the whole, uh, debate about, uh, so-called Brexit, the, the British exit from the eu, was that part of the issue that was being raised to justify Brexit was the influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Yeah. Particularly pole.
Speaker 3 00:36:15 Yeah. It's definitely more multifaceted in Europe. You have ethnicity and religion also playing a really big role in how people get constructed as other in a way that, you know, as you were saying, we tend to oversimplify things in the United States around that, that, you know, that's right. Black, white race line, even though actual humans <laugh> make it far more complicated and, you know, stress the system of, of categorization to the brink. Uh,
Speaker 2 00:36:43 Exactly.
Speaker 3 00:36:43 You know, I loved what you were saying about the difference between the Portuguese and kind of Anglo-American version of, of race pseudoscience and race theory. It's so important.
Speaker 2 00:36:53 It is. And lemme just say something about that, uh, that most of the listeners may not know the Portuguese and the Spanish, in part because they were at a lower stage of capitalist development when they began colonization of the Western Hemisphere did not send over wave after wave of settlers. Right. They sent over conquerors, and they, and these conquerors found themselves to be a minority in the, the areas that they, they took over and they were over, uh, over indigenous populations. And as those indigenous populations started to be wiped out or die out, they brought in Africans, and the Portuguese and the Spanish started intermixing with the indigenous and Africans, and the resulting populations became what the Spanish called Las Costas, the Cas, where they had a description for virtually every intermixture you can imagine, the Portuguese had their own version, right. And in the Cape, so you had, in that, that island chain, you had some islands that were very dark, some that were very light, some of them were more mixed. So that notion of race was what was in the heads of Cape Verdeans when they came to the United States. In the United States, the British had introduced the one drop rule, thereby one drop of African blood, and you are black. So I'm light-skinned in the United States. I'm identifiably black. When I go to Latin America, and I've been to several countries in Latin America, it becomes a running joke when people say, bill, what are you, <laugh>? And I say, I'm black. And they say, well, no, you're not.
Speaker 3 00:38:42 They probably have, they have a specific word for your shade. They absolutely do.
Speaker 2 00:38:46 Yeah, they do. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:38:47 And, and so
Speaker 2 00:38:48 Cape Verdeans, when it came here, they resisted the idea that they were black, because to them to be black met you with the descendant of a slave. Hmm. Right. And so, people's consciousness got completely screwed up. And my first book deals with that and deals with the, the transformation that's happening as the Cape Verdean war against the Portuguese is unfolding. And as the black power movement in the United States is unfolding, the consciousness of Cape Verdeans changes. But there was, there remain struggles within the population. And that's part of what I wanted to get at aka about mm-hmm. <affirmative>. That's why one of the reasons, Richard, that I picked them as a population, because I said, this is different. This is something, I mean, frankly, most people in the United States don't know who Cape Verdeans are, truth be told. And I thought, okay, let's use this to tell a different kind of story about race.
Speaker 3 00:39:47 And if I could say, you know, why, you know, that is more than an academic exercise or a literary one, or, you know, for people that are nerds about, uh, you know, history and colonialism, you know, in a place like California that is so diverse, that's so mixed that there are so many different groups and groups that continue to mix together. Because humans, you know, they make love, they make kids, and they, you know, they mix together. So the, in a place like this, I see activists, commentators, you know, politicians all the time trying to make very simplistic arguments about race and, and representation that don't take into account these subtleties or these differences and so forth, or the comp, the, the, the people can have multiple identities layered on top of one another, and they interact in certain ways. I'm thinking about this tape that got, you know, leaked, um, the conversation, talk about, you know, where, where, uh, really, you know, Chicano, mostly Chicano and Mexican American leadership, you know, Kevin DeLeone is a Guatemalan descent, but they were sitting around and talking about politics in this way that was, you know, obviously egregiously racist, but it was like racist in ways that I think were very confusing to a lot of people.
Speaker 3 00:41:11 And part of it being, try traced to what you're saying that in Mexican American tradition, like the anti-blackness in, in Mexico isn't the same as a one drop Southern racism. Right. Because you have this concept of improving the race through intermarriage. So like, you know, breed, it's good to like, breed the darkness, whether that comes from indigenous or, or African sources. You breed it out by marrying lighter and lighter skinned people and so forth. Like that's, that's there in people's, you know, unconsciousness and culture and, and also consciousness. And you can't understand knitting together a black brown coalition in LA without understanding that.
Speaker 1 00:41:56 That's right. So, um, if I might bring it back to the labor movement, I, I really, uh, wonder, are there specific examples or ideas, bill, that you have for what you would love to see foregrounded in, in the, in the unions and in the organizing efforts that deal with the issues that we're talking about here? The question of race, and
Speaker 2 00:42:20 What I'm obsessed about right now, Richard, is that the labor movement turns attention to defeating the far right. And I don't mean defeating simply in the electoral realm. I mean that we need to mobilize union members to start thinking as pro-democracy warriors. And part of that is fighting to defend and expand upon democratic rights that have been won over the years, including, but not limited to around race. That's what I'm obsessed on. When you have these MAGA forces show up at school committee meetings demanding that books be banned or burned, we need to have double the number of people on our side, including, but not limited to union members that are there. They're saying not so fast, we're not gonna take it. I think that when they show up to, um, to stop abortions, to blockade abortion clinics, we have to be there and we have to outnumber them.
Speaker 2 00:43:33 And we have to say, no, not, not so fast. So I'm obsessed with this, and part of that means that there's a couple of elements. One is internal education, and a second which relates to Europe aka, is that education is not enough. I was reviewing some material from different European labor federations that are taking on fighting the right, and I must say it's very good, very good stuff. But what they weren't identifying was okay, at the grassroots level, what are the struggles that need to be taken on? And I think that those fall into two categories, one I just mentioned. And the second is actually struggles that unite that the working class. And I don't mean that in the sense of the sense that many people that follow Samuel GOPer said of just like ignoring so-called divisive issues. I mean, that we need to be demonstrating to white workers that they have a material interest in opposing racism.
Speaker 2 00:44:42 And we need to do that through concrete battles in workplaces, in industries, et cetera, to demonstrate how social control operates and why something different needs to happen. There was an experience that I had in the shipyard that I always cite, where there had been a practice going back to the prior owner of the shipyard, Bethlehem Steel, that on third shift from 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM that workers could go to sleep after they had completed their jobs. They just couldn't do it out in the open. It's not like you could go to sleep on deck, just go hide somewhere. That was an accepted practice for years. One night foreman came in and they fired, I think, seven workers. They were African-American and Puerto Rican, and they, it was a brilliant move by management because they expected that the racist leadership of the union was not going to do very much because it was African-Americans and Puerto Ricans.
Speaker 2 00:45:46 And that was in fact, what happened. The union leadership did nothing. There were rank and file activists, however, the Beil that took on a campaign that included, uh, some litigation that won these jobs back. But part of what the message of the rank and file activists was, this was not just aimed at African-Americans and Puerto Ricans. What management was intending to do was to change a past practice. And what they knew was that if the union didn't really fight this, because they looked at this as just a bunch of African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, that really what was gonna happen was they would be able to introduce a new practice that would have an impact on everybody. This is something that happens time and again in workplace after workplace, where there are conditions that exist that are racist. I'm not denying that, but where the objective is not simply about the traditional notion of suppressing one particular population, but of controlling the workforce.
Speaker 2 00:46:52 And that is what the union movement needs to really get. They've gotta understand the nature of social control and the way that race plays itself out in terms of sustaining, uh, uh, capitalism. That's what I want from the union movement. So my obsession on fighting the far right means that we have to do the educational work, but we have to do campaigns. We need to do campaigns against economic injustice, but we can't just limit the to so-called non divisive campaigns. It can't just be about let's all unite around Medicare for all, or let's just, let's all unite around housing for all, or let's, let's all unite around a better, a cleaner, excuse me, a cleaner environment. No, there are certain populations that have suffered disproportionately, and something needs to be done about that. So
Speaker 3 00:47:46 You wanna find the things in which there's a stake for everyone, but it also has a particular stake for people that are excluded for more reasons than class or, or precise or oppressed for more reasons than class, as a way for everyone to get that, those lessons of the connectedness. Is that a good summary? Exactly.
Speaker 2 00:48:09 Very true. So you look at healthcare and, and we want healthcare for all, but if we're going to rectify the problem, see, this is, this is, this is where I think that the notion of truth and reconciliation was myth missing an R, right? It should have been truth, rectification and reconciliation.
Speaker 3 00:48:29 I think, say retribution housing,
Speaker 2 00:48:30 The truth is not enough. But you've gotta have rectification, what are the steps that are actually going to be taken to rectify the years, the decades, the centuries of a particular problem? So if we're looking at healthcare, it's not simply resolved by saying, you know, healthcare for all. We've gotta talk about what are the particular things that have had a devastating impact on communities of color. It's not enough to talk about a cleaner environment unless you're gonna talk about the way that in toxic environmental, uh, the toxic environment has had a particular impact on communities of color. Right? And, and so, but that's part of the work that needs to be done by our movements and taking that up. And there are many people that wanna avoid that by just simply saying, let us rally under the flag of you. Were gonna unite around those things that we have in common. Well, then what happens when somebody raises their hand and says, okay, but what about us? Or as what happened in the steel industry when the Steel Workers Organizing Committee was organizing and in the 1930s and did not want to talk about race. Right? They were successful in organizing, and they raised a living standard for everybody that was organized except for one little problem. There remained a differential between the conditions and salaries of the white workers and the conditions and salaries of the African-Americans and Chicanos, and that.
Speaker 1 00:50:11 So with a good example, right now, be the struggle to overcome tiered wages, uh, and, and the differentials in, in the part-time and full-time labor in the, in the United Parcel contract efforts of the Teamsters. Now, is that a good example of Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:50:30 Absolutely. And it's, it's certainly not an issue that only impacts workers of color, but it disproportionately does. I think that's an excellent example. That's
Speaker 3 00:50:38 Right. As well as younger workers, I mean, there's like all of these opportunities to talk about these cross class or non-class. It, you know, uh, dividers.
Speaker 2 00:50:49 We've gotta understand and win people to understand that favoritism, to put it in its CRAs sense, that favoritism is never in the interest of the working class, that differentials in treatment are not in the interest of the working class. They're always in interest of someone else, and they ult they ultimately come back and bite us in the rear. That's what people gotta get. And you need a leadership of the union movement that's courageous enough to simply say that mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but also to fight for it. When Bridges in 1934 went to black communities in the Bay Area and said, we're gonna fight for a hiring hall that's gonna be a democratic way of hiring workers to work on the docks and get away from the, uh, the preferential system. Black folks rallied to him. He fought, they won, and he stood by that and it became a message for the entire country. I grew up on East Coast. My father would, would always talk to me about the two forms of unionism. One is that he said was the corrupt mobbed up unionism. He saw the building trades. And then he said, then there's the unionism of Harry Bridges. That's the real unionism. This is a guy from New York mm-hmm. <affirmative> image and the, the history of what the I l W had done Right. Resonated. We need more of that.
Speaker 3 00:52:20 And one thing that occurs to me is that the current sort of norm is, you know, to, to go to minority groups, to go to, to, uh, people that are, that are experiencing multiple layers of oppression and have sort of private conversations with them about why this, you know, why the unions program or unionization or voting for these candidates or voting for this party is in their interest and in everybody's interest, but a fear about then going to white voters or white union members and talking about, you know, how the racist or sexist or, you know, homophobic appeals coming from the other side are bad. That's right. And we're standing with these other people, like talking about it to the whole audience. Seems like the thing people are the most terrified of doing.
Speaker 2 00:53:15 No, that's exactly right. It's always easier to come to the oppressed and tell the oppressed that they're oppressed. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:53:21 Right.
Speaker 2 00:53:22 Than to go to other populations and say, you need to be in solidarity with the oppressed or the especially oppressed, or whatever you want to call it. No, absolutely. That's the case.
Speaker 3 00:53:32 Well, any closing closing
Speaker 1 00:53:33 Thought? I gonna say one thing that gives me hope along these lines is the increasing slogan within unions of bargaining for the common good. And I wonder whether that's something you've, you, you have any observations about?
Speaker 2 00:53:48 Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you, very important. It is a new name for a practice that has existed for a while. And, but many people haven't recognized that. But there is a history in the union movement of people doing just that, including, as I mentioned before, packing house workers, Teamsters in St. Louis back in the, in the forties and fifties and sixties. So they, they're good examples. I think that this is very important. The Chicago Teachers Union, you know, when the new leadership took over years ago, did a remarkable thing in their first strike. I mean, it became a strike for the kids. They had been able to build a relationship with communities, with the parents, so that what they undertook was a effort in the interest of the kids, and they had the support of the communities. That is precisely what we need.
Speaker 2 00:54:42 And you're right to hold that up. That's exactly the model. And I would argue mm-hmm. <affirmative> that most unions can do that in one way or another. They can raise that issue. You know, I just, um, was involved, had the honor and opportunity of being involved in organizing minor league baseball players and Oh yeah. And we were successful in, in, uh, first through a, uh, a nonprofit and then convincing the Major League Baseball Players Association to jump in and organized 5,000 minor league baseball players became unionized. And earlier this year, track first contract. And these were people that I was told in the beginning would never be unionized. It would not work. And me and some other people, uh, mainly, uh, former minor leaders said, no, that's not gonna stop us. And one of the things about organizing minor leaders was that the conditions that they live under are horrendous. They're almost like agricultural workers in terms of their situation. And large numbers of immigrant workers, uh, from Latin America who were treated horrendously. They become a poster child for the, for what has happened with the polarization of wealth in this country.
Speaker 3 00:56:07 Some of them famously trafficking victims. That's right. Right. I mean, it's That's right. Crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:56:12 It, it really is. And so we were able to bring this to the public stage. So the organizing of workers that have been previously ignored, uh, previously described as un organizable in many cases, and disproportionately workers of color, that's maybe coming to an end because there's more of an interest that we're seeing across the board. Now, a little caveat here, and it relates to what you were raising before, aka, about issue of race. In the 1990s, increasing numbers of unions discovered Latino and Latino workers, immigrants, specifically immigrants. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, and there was a problem that emerged. And the problem was that African Americans and Puerto Ricans, and to some extent Chicanos, started to feel like, what are we chopped liver? And there was this thirst for organizing immigrants and a downplaying of organizing non-immigrant workers of color. And this became a very divisive issue within the union work. And most leaders really didn't take this issue on and understand that there's a long history for non-immigrant workers of color being ignored in the name of organizing someone else. And there's a particular history of African American workers being ignored. Um, because I mean, one of the things, and I mean, I think just being candid, is that there's still a lot of fear when a part of whites of African Americans, no matter how loyal we may be, to whatever social movement we are mm-hmm. <affirmative>, we remain a source of fear.
Speaker 2 00:58:31 Um, that are we gonna pull a mau? Are we gonna become a maroon? Right? Mm-hmm. Are we going something wild, which is not the case with immigrant populations. And this is something that I wanna see union leaders talk about. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> there, African-Americans have been a consistently pro-union force in the United States. The most unionized demographic, the most pro-union demographic, and a frequently ignored, we gotta turn that around. And part of that would be the reality of a major organizing effort in the South.
Speaker 5 00:59:26 We
Speaker 0 00:59:27 Need to talk about it. I say Black Lives Matter, 'cause history says we don't. Your, you are either a Christian or a racist. You can't be both slavery. We need to talk about it. We need to talk about it. What does it say about America? What does it say about Africa? What does it say saved about all of us? All.
