In the December edition of the Metro Justice Newsletter Danielle Ponder and I wrote about the systemic ways in which our society maintains the privilege of white citizens over citizens of color. Institutional and public policies have been woven together to form a system of racial injustice producing disparities in health, wealth, and opportunity along racial lines. White supremacy is “baked” into the system.

White progressives don’t get to ignore this reality because conservatives have always used racially-coded issues to divide and conquer our electorate. As Paul Krugman points out in “The Conscience of a Liberal”, during President Truman’s attempt to establish national health insurance, southern conservatives torpedoed attempts at creating a universal health care system because it would have integrated hospitals.

Time after time conservatives have used race to grab power to preserve corporate dominance. Nixon took a page from George Wallace and said he would “get tough on crime.” Bush Sr. pushed his Willie Horton ads. Steve Minarik kept his Republican majority in the Monroe County legislature after mailing out flyers graphically displaying the “threat” posed by Arab immigrants. And the current crop of Republican presidential candidates somehow have come to the conclusion that a crumbling healthcare system, global warming and economic insecurity (a subprime housing hurricane gathering strength offshore) all pale in comparison to the threat of brown skinned immigrants coming across our southern border. Race, race, and more race. And the conservatives ride these racially-coded messages to victory.

Yet conservatives want us to view our society through their race-neutral frame. They want us to think that America has moved beyond race; that if you are having problems, it’s your own fault because “You’re On Your Own.”

If progressives are going to be successful in reforming our society around the concept that “We Are All in This Together” then we are obligated to strategically challenge structural and institutional racism. It’s not just the right thing to do. It’s how we bring together a winning majority.

The same is true with organized labor. We won’t stop the ice caps from melting without putting corporate domination in check. And, we can’t do that without organized labor. Ralph Nader sums up the challenge thusly:

“What do all these movements have in common? The anti-slavery movement, the women’s right to vote movement, the worker trade union movement, the farmer, populist, progressive movement, the civil rights, environmental, women rights movements of recent decades, other civil rights movements, disability rights– they had one common theme: They took power away from people and institutions who had too much power and made that power be shared by the many.

That is what made it possible. It wasn’t just the documentation of injustice. It wasn’t just the feeling by people that they had to have a better life. It was the strategy of power. It was the strategy of deconcentrating power. It was the strategy that confronted the dominant business powers of our history which uniquely were always in the forefront of saying no to social justice movements.

Who opposed the anti-slavery movement? Who opposed the women’s right to vote movement? It wasn’t just some men. It was the railroads, it was the liquor industry, it was industrial interests that didn’t want women to speak out with voting power against child labor and the injustices of the Industrial Revolution.

And who opposed the workers in the steel, coal, textile and other areas trying to unionize? It was the corporations. And who opposed the farmers, dirt-poor farmers coming out of Texas? It was the big banks and the insurance companies.”

The corollary to Nader’s indictment of corporate power is that a critical part of the resistance to corporate power has come from unions.

When George Bush decided to stop in Rochester during his 64-city Social Security Destruction Tour, Metro Justice called a rally. Over 1,000 people turned out. But it was the unions and their organized infrastructure that turned out over half of the crowd. When the Alliance for Quality Education needed an analysis of Joe Bruno’s education funding proposals, they turned to the labor-funded Fiscal Policy Institute. And our campaign to end industrial development agency boondoggles is dependent on the power of unions to move key legislators in the Senate.

As Peter Dreier and Kelly Candaele note in a TomPaine.com article, “When labor unions educate and mobilize their members, they are very effective… Union members are more likely to vote, more likely to vote for Democrats, and more likely to volunteer for campaigns than people with similar demographic and job characteristics who are not unionized. In the November 2004 presidential election, union members represented 12 percent of all workers, but union households represented 24 percent of all voters.”

Union members are less likely to fall for conservative wedge issue gambits. In the 2004 presidential election, gun owners favored Bush by almost two to one. But a majority of union members with guns voted against Bush. Bush also attracted the votes of white males by similar margins, while white male union members overwhelmingly rejected Bush.

Dreier and Candaele also point out that the decline of union membership in recent decades has contributed to the falloff in voter turnout, because unions have traditionally been the most effective vehicle for mobilizing low income and worker class voters. If the United States had just 15% of its workforce unionized, we might never have had to suffer through eight years of George Bush. We wouldn’t be inIraq right now.

So let’s come together. Let’s build a majority that can stop the social Darwinism let loose by corporate forces. How we build our new future will determine what that future looks like. We have to build it together.