The Racial Dimensions of “You're Fired!”

From the 1970s into the 21^st century, the United States underwent a transformation as significant as the nation’s industrialization in the 19^th century: the decline of domestic manufacturing and with it, the loss on a major scale of well-paying working-class jobs as well as the deterioration of the cities and towns that had flourished with mass production. Journalists, social scientists, and many others wrote about this trauma as it was unfolding. Their victims were White, male workers shut out of steel mills, auto plants, and other factories, with a focus on their fate as a homogeneous group who often responded politically by becoming Reagan Democrats and ultimately Trump Populists.

From today’s perspective, a half-century later, however, we can discern much more complexity in which working people were affected by deindustrialization and how they managed their lives and communities thereafter. In particular, racial and ethnic identities mattered much more than was commonly acknowledged at the time; after all, by the 1970s and 1980s, American workforces were more racially diverse than the stereotype, based in an earlier era, would have it. Consequently, workers’ opportunities for new employment and the support provided by local institutions as well multiple levels of government varied widely. For example, following American manufacturing as it moved from the Midwest to the South was more attractive to White than Black workers. In addition, families experienced stress that had lasting impacts on gender dynamics and the next generation’s life options that also varied with race and ethnicity. This investigation of the racial dimensions of deindustrialization for American workers and their families will be based in the heart of the Rust Belt between Pittsburgh and Youngstown, with those cities and surrounding industrial towns providing the setting.