Historical Levis and White Supremacist America
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The story of Levi Strauss is well-known–German-Jewish immigrant who comes to San Francisco, manufactures denim for miners, makes a fortune, and begins the most important jeans company in the world. Well, a pair of Levi’s was found in a New Mexico cave. They were dated from the 1880s and recently sold at auction for $87,000 (some people have way too much money). It should not surprise you that part of the selling point for the company back then was the use of white labor to make them.
“The only kind made by white labor” all the way at the bottom in tiny letters pic.twitter.com/5QxzNz4jXc
— 4-1 Chiefs Szn 🏆 (@PatMaGoat) October 14, 2022
This gets at points I’ve made again and again–white workers have traditionally placed their white identity over their class identity. The important thing for Levi Strauss and part of the reason it worked as a company, evidently, is that it wasn’t made by the Chinese workers already laboring in sweatshops. This was a white man’s product for white men all the way. Given the routine anti-Chinese violence that dominated the American West in the 1880s, this kind of material culture artifact of racism should not surprise us in the least.