CLASS WAR IN AMERICA

Jeter, a former Washington Postforeign correspondent, examines the fraught history of race and class in America.

“What is to be done now,” asks the author, “as the country disintegrates into political chaos and those of us who are fully awake wait anxiously for the rest of the nation to join us in reclaiming this land from the bloodsucking capitalists who have robbed us blind?” In these pages, Jeter presents readers with a far-ranging survey of American history to trace tangled and interconnected stories of race and class relations going back to before the U.S. Civil War. The author refers to his project as “a journey through time” undertaken to “assess what has been wrought by this ferocious, 150-year class war between the Americans who built the country and those who own it.” Focusing on racial issues, Jeter looks at incidents such as the 1898 racial massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, in which “white supremacists overthrew the progressive, interracial government on the pretext of Black male predation despite a lack of any evidence.” On the labor relations side, he walks readers through events like President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1935 signing of the Wagner Act, recognizing the right of employees to bargain collectively with their employers, which, among other things, was a signpost moment in the long “antagonistic relationship” between the American Federation of Labor and Black American workers.

Jeter’s narrative skill is remarkable; he writes with both passion and clarity about the ways “the white settler elite has historically deployed…false accusations to stir up murderous passions, creating a smokescreen for dispossession.” The picture he paints of America’s ruling capitalist oligarchy constantly pitting workers against each other along racial lines is vigorously convincing, even when he lapses into over-generalizations: “White workers typically respond to financial uncertainly by abandoning the class struggle to instead punch down on African Americans, who they invariably see as a threat to their racial identity and the privileges afforded to it.” His narrative’s main weakness is its sprawl, which blunts its focus. The book bounces all over the last 150 years, from the death of Ethel Rosenberg to the murder of Emmett Till to the Korean War to the Montgomery bus boycott to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling to President Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to Charleston mass shooter Dylann Roof—Jeter even makes a detour to discuss a dispute he had with an acquaintance over a personal loan he was late in repaying. The author manages to draw connecting threads between most of these subjects, but the sheer number of data points may leave some readers yearning for more focus. Still, the power of Jeter’s insights is consistently stunning, and his rhetoric is often thrillingly sharp, as when he describes “Black respectability politics increasingly promoted by an African American bourgeoisie that, however well-meaning, operated from a misguided understanding of Black laborers as a defeated people whose best chance was to obey white folks and hope for the best.” All of these insights are enlisted in the cause of exposing the “the gaping spiritual wound left by a battery of invectives, bullying, and profiling.”

A bracing and thought-provoking study of race and class clashes in American history.