Title: 'No Separate Peace:' Interest, Identity, and Interracial Solidarity
How is it possible to forge interracial solidarity in polities fractured by racial oppression? This article contends that, in formulating a conception of solidarity up to the task, we must interrogate the assumption that solidarity is built necessarily upon pre-existing forms of unity. Organizing solidarity across difference is a matter of shaping, rather than simply activating, interests and identities. I develop this claim through an original history and interpretation of the United Construction Workers Association, a Seattle-based labor organization that fought racial exclusion in the city’s building trades through the 1970s. Drawing on archival documents including interviews, correspondence, UCWA internal reports, and organizing notes, I argue that the UCWA and its founder Tyree Scott charted a course to forge interracial solidarity in Seattle’s construction industry by directly confronting conflicts between the short-term interests of Black and white workers. The UCWA’s interventions altered white workers’ choice architecture, making it more costly for them to exclude and exploit, rather than act in concert with, Black workers. The UCWA’s fundamental ambition was to elaborate this contestatory organizing strategy into a process of re-identification in which Seattle’s building trade workers came to reimagine their good and with whom they shared it in common. The UCWA articulated a conception of solidarity on which the grounds of mutual identification are in our power to forge rather than find.