Forging a Laboring Race : : The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination / / Paul R.D. Lawrie.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Complete eBook-Package 2016
• VerfasserIn: Lawrie, Paul R.D.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2016]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Culture, Labor, History ; 11
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Mortality as the Life Story of a People: Frederick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction, 1896–1915 -- 2. The Negro Is Plastic: The Department of Negro Economics, Sociology, and the Wartime Black Worker -- 3. Measuring Men for the Work of War: Anthropometry, Race, and the Wartime Draft, 1917–1919 -- 4. Salvaging the Negro: Vocational Rehabilitation and African American Veterans, 1917–1924 -- 5. A New Negro Type: The National Research Council and the Production of Racial Expertise in Postwar America, 1919–1929 -- Epilogue: Invisible Men: The Afterlives of the Negro Problem in American Racial Thought -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author