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When Race Burns Class: “Settlers” Revisited — An Interview With J. Sakai

EC: In the early eighties you wrote Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat, a book which had a major impact on many North American anti-imperialists. How did this book come about, and what was so new about its way of looking at things?

JS: Settlers completely came about by accident, not design. And what was so “new” about it was that it wasn’t “inspiring” propaganda, but lok up the experience of colonial workers to question how class eally worked. It wasn’t about race, but about class. Although people till have a hard time getting used to that — it isn’t race or sex tat’s the taboo subject in this culture, but class.

Like many radicals who struggle as organizers, I had wondered why our ery logical “class unity” theories always seemed to get smashed up round the exit ramp of race? At the time i’d quit my fairly isolated ob on the night shift as a mechanic on the railroad, and was running a cut-off lathe in an auto parts plant. The young white guys in our department were pretty good. In fact, rebellious counter-culture dope smoking Nam vets. After months of hanging & talking, one night one of them came up to me and said that all the guys were driving down to the Kentucky Derby together, to spend the weekend getting drunk and partying. They were inviting me, an Asian, as a way of my joining the crew. Only, he said, “You got to stop talking to those Blacks. You got to choose. White or Black.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2001 at 1:58 pm and is filed under American Empire, White Supremacy, Racism, Oppression, Race and Class, U.S. History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.