“In the union, we aren’t divided by race – I shouldn’t even say ‘race,’ because that’s not real – okay, ethnicities, gender, etc. We are all equal,” Joe Tarulli, a Communications Workers of America (CWA) union member, boomed in front of a room of fifteen other union members.

It was 9 AM on a cold Monday morning in lower Manhattan. Everyone was gathered, with coffee and donuts in hand, for an eight-hour political training called “Runaway Inequality,” on Wall Street, inequality, and institutional racism. The group was a mixed crowd — a handful of white men who lived in Long Island and worked as field technicians for Verizon, along with around ten black men and women who lived in Brooklyn and worked for the city government. They all were members of the same union, CWA, whose members were facilitating the training for them.

Tarulli speaks with a slight Italian-Brooklyn accent; he’s lived in Staten Island for the past ten years but grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He works as field technician for Verizon — he installs Fios service in people’s homes — a job he got twenty-five years ago, equipped with a GED and a driver’s license. Tarulli was part of the original group of CWA members to participate in the very first training a few years ago.

In 2015, the CWA, one of the largest unions in America, wanted to create an intensive training to help its members understand the political context underlying their day-to-day struggles. To create the curriculum, CWA reached out to Les Leopold, director of the Labor Institute, who adapted his book, Runaway Inequality, into an eight-hour program on the systemic causes of inequality, two hours of which are devoted to institutional racism. The first one went so well that Tarulli and his fellow union members asked to be trained to teach the class to others. Since then, all trainings have been member-led. Tarulli, along with fellow CWA Staten Island-trainer Ray Ragucci have facilitated, on their own time, trainings for Sustainable Staten Island, a coalition of organizers and community members in a Trump-voting borough of New York City.

So far more than 1,500 CWA members, out of 700,000 total nationwide, have undergone the program. Word about Runaway Inequality has already spread, and many community organizations, including the NAACP, have signed up to participate. Other unions have invited CWA to train their members, partially galvanized by the results of the 2016 election.

Although union households voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, the margin was only 8 percent, the smallest since Ronald Reagan’s election. When United Auto Workers Region 9A director Julie Kushner invited CWA’s trainers to train UAW workers, she said, “Since the presidential election, I’ve been thinking we need to do a better job helping our members connect the dots between economic justice and political solutions.”

Although CWA’s political training began before the 2016 election, it has only become more significant. After Trump’s victory, some on the Left sprang up to argue that addressing racism is too divisive; uniting workers requires focusing on “bread-and-butter issues” to the exclusion of all else. If there was any group that might be sympathetic to focusing on “bread-and-butter” working-class issues, it would be labor unions. But unions have learned a bitter lesson from their past: ignoring racial division has historically undermined the working class as a whole. That’s why CWA knew that it had to tackle institutional racism if it wanted to address economic inequality in America.

But CWA had a challenge before them: the union’s membership is racially diverse, and in certain pockets, predominantly white. Thus, according to Runaway Inequality’s program director, Margarita Hernandez, CWA knew that it had to frame racism in a way that would help white working-class people realize that they too have a “stake in the fight against racial inequality.”

To understand how CWA was going to pull this off, I observed a Runaway Inequality training, led by Tarulli and a few other facilitators, last year. The atmosphere was relaxed and familial. People introduced themselves by the union local they were in, not the job they held. The phrase “brothers and sisters” was tossed a lot by union members. When someone dropped a marker on the floor and apologized, another picked it up and said, “No worries, we’re all brothers and sisters.”

After spending some time discussing economic inequality and Wall Street, the facilitators turned the room’s attention toward race. “The material might feel uncomfortable, but we’re not here to accuse anyone of being personally racist, but to examine the impact of institutional racism,” Sonji-Ann Roseborough, a CWA shop steward, Verizon field technician, and black woman, said to warm up the room.

The two-hour section on race began with a history lesson of how the ruling class invented the concept of “race” and skin-color hierarchies to justify colonialism and slavery, and to divide those they ruled into unequal silos. The workbook described how eighteenth-century slave owners extended special privileges to poor whites to drive a wedge between them and black slaves; how nineteenth-century employers brought in Chinese laborers as strikebreakers, paying them half of normal wages; how agriculture companies exploited millions of Mexican guest workers to undermine the bargaining power of US agricultural workers in the 1960s.

The section concluded with charts demonstrating glaring racial disparities in criminal justice and wealth, the most gasp-inducing of which was one that showed how white high school dropouts tend to have more household wealth than black college graduates. All in all, the message was clear: Racial inequalities benefit the ruling class, which seeks to divide the working class against itself. We must band together in solidarity against our common enemy.