After ICE Raid Mississippi Workers Labor to Overcome Racial Divisions

Ironically, Jena was the site last year of massive protests over racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, after a group of young African American men faced felony charges in a confrontation with a group of young white men, who were not charged.

Racial tension in the South has spilled over into relations between African American and white workers, and immigrants from Mexico and Central America, who have arrived in Mississippi over the last few years. In the Howard Industries raid, media accounts have painted a picture of a plant in which African American and white union members were hostile to immigrants, based mostly on an incident in which some workers "applauded" as their coworkers were taken away by ICE agents.

Mississippi activists, however, say that this simplistic picture obscures the real conditions in the plant, and the role the company itself played in fomenting divisions among workers. According to Clarence Larkin, African American president of IBEW Local 1317, the union at the plant, "this employer pits workers against each other by design, and breeds division among them that affects everyone," he says. "By favoring one worker over another, workers sometimes can't see who their real enemy is. And that's what helps keep wages low."

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