Here’s an urgent Labor Day challenge for organized labor: grapple with the simultaneously heroic and sordid history of unions in America, and use the past to inform the fight to revive the labor movement today. The emergence of Black Lives Matter demands that we remember not just those unions who fought for principles of racial equality, but those that capitulated to racism.

Too many of labor’s supporters won’t criticize unions for their lack of internal democracy, seeing it as airing dirty laundry in public and thus weakening an already enfeebled progressive force. The fear is understandable, but labor’s desperately needed revitalization is unlikely to occur without unions and their supporters facing what is essentially an identity crisis.

Labor’s opponents, who see, correctly, that unions have tremendous potential to derail the project of increasing wealth for the few at the expense of the many, are quick to expose labor’s dirty laundry. Our best defense against this is to confront the problems openly.