New Article: Aziz Rana, Our Segregation Problem, Dissent Mag., (Fall 2022). Excerpt below:
Throughout the United States, racial separation remains a common feature of collective life. The consequences are significant for left political organizing aimed at building a multiracial working-class majority.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Tom Watson, a white congressman from Georgia, worked diligently to organize white and Black farmers into the Populist Party. He sought to appeal to the farmers’ material interests, arguing that together, as a united class, they could overcome Southern structures of debt bondage and economic oppression. But Watson’s case was also based on the communal experience he had observed in farmers’ homes. White and Black tenants lived in “adjoining” residences, and “their houses are almost equally destitute of comforts,” Watson wrote in 1892. “Their living is confined to bare necessities. . . . They pay the same high rent for gulled and impoverished land.”
Poverty Law 