Unions provide countervailing power to corporate power. Racist people are racist. Sometimes these can overlap.
That seems like a very US-lib centric POV where the US is a cartoonish evil-dooer.
In my experience Mexico is pretty much just as bad, even more so in different ways too - classism, racism, anti-indigenous sentiment, Malinchismo, rampant feminicide, etc.
My point is that these countries aren’t cosmic forces. We’re all humans that instantiate the same fundamental prejudices, instincts, biases, etc. wherever you find us.
I'm not sure this makes much sense. "Racism" (I'm guessing you mean things like slavery or de jure discrimination) were practiced concurrently in the US and elsewhere in North America, not to mention many other countries. The US was one of the first countries to have major movements to end slavery (Britain was the first global power to do so, and they preceded the US). I think it would be most accurate to say that the US has historically been both among the most racist and least racist countries, just depending on how you measure.
> Unions provide countervailing power to corporate power. Racist people are racist. Sometimes these can overlap.
Unions, on the other hand... Unions are a monopoly on labor. Monopolies reduce the amount of a good they supply and drive up prices. This means unions depend on certain people leaving the labor market that a union has captured. When a bunch of unions formed in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, which people did the unions choose to exclude? More or less across the board, they excluded women, immigrants and black people. This was extra convenient, as members of those groups would typically work voluntarily for less pay, so the unions had double incentives to get rid of them. Many early Progressives were quite proud of this and other policies like a minimum wage forcing "inferior" groups to have to work harder to catch up to the white man.
The question we should be asking is why unions, minimum wage, hours restrictions, etc. were useful in eliminating "undesirables" from the labor force 100 years ago but help these same groups today.
For the former, I'd recommend chapter three of Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks & White Liberals, about the history of slavery.[1]
For the latter, I'd recommend Illiberal Reformers, about the Progressive Era and its devotees.[2] Later Progressives were responsible for the school-to-prison pipeline and militarized police.[3] The Progressive Era has a wide array of interesting literature, including the writings of many of its early exponents (since they tended to be writers or academics).
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-Liberals-Thomas-Sowell...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Illiberal-Reformers-Eugenics-Economic...