Street roots., May 11, 2018, Page 4, Image 4

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Page 4
Street Roots • May 11-17, 2018
Guns 9
capitalism
and race
A conversation with radical
thinker, writer and labor
leader, B ill Fletcher Jr.
BY EMILY GREEN
of TransAfrica,
a foreign-policy
advocacy group in
un enthusiasm is rooted more in
Washington, D.C.
racial suppression than in the
He’s written several
Second Amendment, Bill Fletcher Jr.
told an audience at the SeaTac Hilton in books about labor,
including “They’re
April. From their banquet-room chairs,
Bankrupting Us! And 20
more than 100 union organizers and labor
Other Myths About
scholars leaned in, eager to catch every
Unions,” and is a syndicated
word of Fletcher’s highly-anticipated diction.
They had gathered for the Pacific
Northwest Labor History Association’s
50th Anniversary Conference, where
social justice issues collide with labor
S E N IO R S T A F F R E P O R T E R
G
h isto ry d u rin g a th ree-d ay s e rie s of
presentations and documentary film
screenings.
A panel that afternoon was the third time
in six months that Fletcher, who lives in
Maryland, shared a Seattle-area stage with
Kent Wong, director at the University of
California Los Angeles Labor Center.
That’s because figures at the forefront of
a burgeoning labor movement, one that calls
for broad workforce unity in order to
achieve better conditions for all working
people, have found excitement in Seattle’s
recent working-class victories.
It’s where labor activists banded together
for the first successful Fight for $15
campaign, it was one of the first
jurisdictions to require that employers offer
paid sick time to workers and, more
recently, Seattle has joined a growing
number of cities that require fair scheduling
practices.
Fletcher is considered one of the nation’s
leading labor intellectuals. His thought-
provoking and at times controversial
lectures prove authentic as he seeks to
bring historical context to ongoing labor
struggles in a tumultuous political climate.
Since he was a young man, Fletcher has
been deeply engaged in America’s labor and
class politics. His parents instilled a respect
of unions in him at a young age. Later in
life, he came under the influence of the
Black Panther Party and its focus on the
working class and poor, as well as the late
Dr. Ewart Guinier, who was chairman of
Afro-American studies when Fletcher
studied at Harvard.
Fletcher has held leadership positions at
labor organizations such as the AFL-CIO
and SEIU, and most recently was president
columnist and media commentator, as
well as consultant at RoadMap.
Street Roots sat down with Fletcher while
he was in SeaTac to learn about his views
on today’s labor struggles and the
relationship between race and
capitalism in America.
Emily Green:
You said something
interesting during
your speech: You said
guns are important because of racial
suppression, not because of the Second
Amendment. I was hoping you could elaborate
on that.
B.F.J.: Absolutely. One of the
problems is that the right wing has
- and some people are not right
wing but just really into guns -
has advanced a notion that
the issue of gun ownership
and why people feel so
strongly about it has to
do with protecting
Second Amendment rights. What we have to
understand is that the importance of gun
rights really goes back to the 1600s, with
the colonization of the United States and
the introduction of racial slavery - and that
gun ownership became synonymous with
whiteness and with not being a slave.
A slave could not own guns, Indians
weren’t supposed to have guns, except
under certain circumstances. So the idea of
gun ownership was proof-positive that I’m a
free white man. The Second Amendment,
all that does is it essentially codifies it.
See FLETCHER, page 5
G E T T Y IM A G E S /IS T O C K P H O T O