Foregrounds the working black body as both a category of analysis and
lived experience
"How does it feel to be a problem?" asked W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of
Black Folk. For many thinkers across the color line, the "Negro
problem" was inextricably linked to the concurrent "labor problem,"
occasioning debates regarding blacks' role in the nation's industrial
past, present and future. With blacks freed from the seemingly
protective embrace of slavery, many felt that the ostensibly primitive
Negro was doomed to expire in the face of unbridled industrial progress.
Yet efforts to address the so-called "Negro problem" invariably led to
questions regarding the relationship between race, industry and labor
writ large. In consequence, a collection of thinkers across the natural
and social sciences developed a new culture of racial management,
linking race and labor to color and the body. Evolutionary theory and
industrial management combined to identify certain peoples with certain
forms of work and reconfigured the story of races into one of
development and decline, efficiency and inefficiency, and the thin line
between civilization and savagery.
Forging a Laboring Race charts the history of an idea-race
management-building on recent work in African American, labor, and
disability history to analyze how ideas of race, work, and the "fit" or
"unfit" body informed the political economy of early twentieth-century
industrial America.
