Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement

by Moon-kie Jung

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Hawai'i changed rapidly from a conservative oligarchy firmly controlled by a Euro-American elite to arguably the most progressive part of the United States. Spearheading the shift, tens of thousands of sugar, pineapple, and longshore workers eagerly joined the left-led International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) and challenged their powerful employers.

In this theoretically innovative study, Moon-Kie Jung explains how Filipinos, Japanese, Portuguese, and others overcame entrenched racial divisions and successfully mobilized a mass working-class movement. He overturns the unquestioned assumption that this interracial effort traded racial politics for class politics. Instead, he shows how the movement "reworked race" by developing an ideology of class that incorporated and rearticulated racial meanings and practices.

Examining a wide range of sources, Jung delves into the chronically misunderstood prewar racisms and their imperial context, the "Big Five" corporations' concerted attempts to thwart unionization, the emergence of the ILWU, the role of the state, and the impact of World War II. Through its historical analysis, Reworking Race calls for a radical rethinking of interracial politics in theory and practice.

Genres: Labor, Race

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Moon-kie Jung is Professor of Sociology at UMassAmherst.

Professor Jung holds a Phd from the University of Michigan.

Reviews

[Michael Pellagatti · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this age of horrific reactionary politics, this book beautifully describes how a divided and marginalized people can come together through shared collective interests (in spite of past historical transgressions enacted upon one another) and unite to stand up to tremendous reactionary opposition in the form of the Big 5. Having been jaded by the past few years from what has come from the radical left and the mainstream left — this book has provided me with HOPE.

This book should be MANDATORY reading for young college-aged activists who I feel are falling into a postmodern-leftist trap of exclusionary radical politics that divides instead of unites!

This book is a godsend, simply a GODSEND.

[Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great narrative on how racial divisions among Hawaiian workers were overcome to create an incredibly successful labor movement. However, the book did not deliver on the promise it makes in the beginning. My main contention with Jung’s argument is his claim that the Hawaiian labor movement’s interracialism was not a process of deracialization, but rather a rearticulation of race. Although this may seem like a minor semantic distinction in an otherwise well told piece of labor history, given the fact that Jung centers his argument around this distinction, his failure to convincingly argue for a rearticulation of race potentially discredits the larger theoretical claims he makes.

The difference between a rearticulation of racial categories and deracialization is that the former constructs new racial particularities that no longer conflict with class solidarity, while the latter does away with racial particularity in order to emphasize the primacy of class interests. If new forms of racial particularity are not created, then the elimination of stereotypes must be defined as a form of deracialization. Although it is quite clear that racist stereotypes such as the scheming disloyal Japanese and the inferior rabid Filipino were done away with, Jung does not provide an example of the new articulations of these racial categories. For the most party, he describes a process in which negative stereotypes of deracialization are done away with, not transformed to become a tool of class solidarity. The one potential exception I can think of is the new perception of nisei Japanese as patriotic due to their sacrifices during World War II, but even this appears more as a negation of their earlier perception as distrustful rather than a new racial category in-and-of-itself.

One possible way to save Jung’s argument is if “deracialization” is understood as a near totalizing process where Portuguese, Japanese, and Filipino workers get rid of their specific cultural practices, completely integrate their communities, make interracial babies together, etc. - which obviously did not happen. But if Jung’s conception of deracialization is a claim as absurdly strong as this one, then he is criticizing a strawman that no one would defend. Given that Jung’s major claim is made in contradistinction to deracialization, such a definition would greatly weaken his own argument because the opposing side would be such a useless foil to his claim.

Therefore, it appears as if Jung’s argument is not one of a rearticulation of race, but rather a partial deracialization. Although the workers were not deracialized to the point that they were “color-blind,” the racial aspects that prevented class solidarity were abolished. Deracialization only occured to categories that presented potential obstacles to worker unity. If Jung’s narrative is one of partial deracialization rather than a rearticulation of race, then this puts his argument quite in line with the Marxists he criticizes. Most Marxists would likely argue that racial divisions that intersect through class solidarity need to be done away with, not that we have to live in a “post-racial” society to achieve class consciousness.

Regardless of all of what I just wrote, this text is undoubtedly a great account that is unfortunately burdened with a rather shaky theoretical claim. I'd still absolutely suggest it to anybody interested in an account of the building of an interracial workers' movement.

[Shan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such a great book. It chronicles the history of labor in Hawaii and the ways in which Hawaiian farm/plantation workers organized with direct engagement around their ethnic and racial identities. They faced up to the problems and strengths of interracial movements, and as a result were able to build consensus not based on "labor first," as might be done through a classic labor model, but one based on labor as multicultural.

[Koa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book about the labour movement in Hawai'i. The struggles with starting it, and how the workings were eventually successful by rearticulating race and coming together to win big gains! (this review is incomplete so will revise later