Labor Rights

A Few Red Drops, while discussing racial tension, American politics, migration, and more, demonstrates the level of intersectionality of issues which lie at the core of inequality in the United States. While analyzing the role race has played and continues to play in blue-collar industries such as the meatpacking industry, what Hartfield accomplishes is not simply a description of the kinds of conditions black workers and white workers endured, respectively; rather, she successfully points out that labor rights lie at the heart of many other issues, race relations included.

Hartfield eliminates all notions of inherent animosity between white immigrants and black Americans at the turn of the last century: just like blacks arriving from the South, immigrants like the Irish experienced hardships, finding that “Chicago was a hotbed of prejudice” (57). The hostility between immigrant communities in Packingtown and black communities in the Black Belt did...