Road to Victory  |  October 22, 2008

Views from the trail: USW election volunteer shares reflections about racism

BY Jim Frederick
 

“I’m not going to vote for his kind,” a woman said to me very curtly as I knocked on her door this past Saturday.  I was knocking on doors as a volunteer supporting Barack Obama in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. 

Over the past several national election cycles, I have knocked on many doors, made countless phone calls, and passed out scores of flyers to encourage working families to vote.  I am one of the several thousands of volunteers from the United Steelworkers Union (USW). 

While talking to working families, we highlight the candidates’ positions on key union issues.  I hope to gain votes for my candidate with each contact.  In the past two presidential campaigns, our candidate did not win.  However, this year my candidate has a much better chance for success. 

Beaver County is filled with communities that have been drastically impacted by the economic tailspin of the rustbelt over the past quarter century.  The cities, towns and boroughs that dot the landscape of the picturesque county were a mix of quiet rural communities and thriving middle class cities during the boom times of the steel mills.  Many thousand steelworkers lived and worked throughout the county.  Today, most of the mills are shuttered and closed.  The industrial workplaces that remain are primarily small specialty shops employing handfuls of workers. Some are unionized, many are not.

In my mind, there should be no question about who my neighbors support in this election.  Barack Obama is the candidate who stands on the correct side of the issues facing workers, but a significant number of us talk to USW members and retirees who are hesitant to support or are adamantly opposed to Obama.  At the USW Constitutional Convention earlier this year, Rich Trumka of the AFL-CIO stated very aptly, “You see brothers and sisters, there’s not a single good reason for any worker -- especially any union member -- to vote against Barack Obama. There’s only one really bad reason to vote against him: because he’s not white.”  Sadly, Trumka’s quote accurately reflects the sentiments that many volunteers have found across this part of the country.

In some cases, like the woman who answered the door on Saturday, they express racial prejudice.  The prejudice is sometimes veiled with phony excuses like “he is a Muslim” or “he doesn’t hold his hand on his heart during the national anthem.”  Sometimes it is not veiled at all.

In other cases, working families express reasons that they won’t support Obama connected to the political party rather than the color of the Senator’s skin.  These are often based on religion – such as the ‘single issue voter’ concerns about abortion – or – right to life.  Certainly many of us recognize that right to life does not equate to anti-abortion nor does it equate to Republican value versus Democratic value, but that is another topic for another time. 

Other working families express that they are dyed in the wool Republicans regardless of the arguments otherwise. 

Four years ago, the overwhelming sentiment of working families that supported George W. Bush were guns, gays and God.  The spin at the time was that a John Kerry administration would:

• send someone to each persons’ home and strip them of their hunting riffles, shotguns and handguns, 
  
• shift the military from the don’t ask, don’t tell policy governing gays in the service to one of open admission of homosexuality somehow exposing military personnel to harm,
  
• allow and encourage gay couples to be married, and
  
• ignore God’s will by allowing abortions to continue.

The concerns about John Kerry were drastically and irrationally magnified by the extreme forces of the Republican Party, Fox News and talk radio persona.  The same fringe is fueling the fire of racism in this election.  They continue to shovel their fertilizer onto the political lies and half truths, but in this case they are feeding their manure onto the frenzy of racism – veiled or otherwise. 

I hope that Barack Obama wins the election to become the next President of the United States. I hope that we, the working class families of the United States of America, find a way to unify behind President Obama and that we can realize the dreams of equal rights that civil rights activists have been working for, fighting for and dying for in this country for centuries.  We have the opportunity to experience an historic Presidency. 

While we face incredible obstacles in the next few years, we also have an opportunity for the Labor Movement to be a driving force to take on and extinguish the remaining fires of racism in our country. 

If you agree that our country needs the historic change that an Obama administration will bring, there are several things we can do to help:

1. Encourage everyone you know to carefully consider the issues, not the rhetoric, before deciding how to vote. 
2. Make certain that every registered voter that you know votes on November 4th. 
3. Volunteer some time to work on the election for your union or your candidate. 
4. Denounce racism and the half-truths and lies that support the racist veil.

Jim Frederick is the assistant director of the USW's Health, Safety and Environment Department.