What's left of solidarity? Reflections on law, race, and labor history

Institutions and institutional rules-not customs, ideas, attitudes, culture, or private behavior-have primarily shaped race relations in America. ¹ Until recent decades at least, the history of the white working class, in its majority, was one of self-definition in opposition to an often-demonized racial Other and intense resistance to the request of African Americans for full citizenship. In this sense white workers hardly constituted a class apart. Rather, many of them shared in the white supremacist cultural reflexes of the larger society and eagerly laid claim to the "public and psychological wage" that they hoped membership in the "ruling nation" would afford. ².