Abstract
If a white man gets ‘cocky,’ it does seem good to ask how he would like to see a nigger get his job. White factory manager, c.1901
In the late 1980s, when I was living in Boston, I happened to be speaking with a salesman I assumed to be white. In casual conversation I mentioned that I would soon be travelling to Ireland. His response was both interesting and memorable. He stated in a very matter-of-fact manner that he had ‘been brought up Irish’. He continued speaking, but did not focus on the implications of his words.
What struck me about the salesman’s statement was that it was an incomplete sentence. He had been ‘brought up Irish’, he said, but what was he now? The key to understanding his statement can be found in a body of work that includes that of the legendary W. E. B. Dubois, the late Theodore Allen, and which is now further developed by David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch in The Production of Difference.
Race, in the context of the US, was discussed, until the 1980s, largely in terms of black versus white. The phrasing that was common, even in progressive circles, set the tone: ‘blacks and other minorities’, or comments along those lines. In part as a result of the decline of the Black Freedom movement, but also as a result of the rise of freedom movements among other people of colour, the complexity of race in the US came to be better understood as operating on multiple levels and never looking exactly the same. While there were, and are, consistent patterns in racist oppression, the history of the Native American (First Nations) and that of the African American, by way of example, are quite different. Racist oppression played itself out differently and with different objectives in mind, from the standpoint of white supremacist national oppression. While both were victims of racist oppression, the form of that racist oppression differed, sometimes dramatically.
Understanding that race was more than a black/white dichotomy was only part of the problem. The central question was to understand the nature of ‘race’ and the purposes that accompanied its birth. It was this upon which the late and great W. E. B. Dubois set his sights. Whether in his much overlooked The Souls of White Folk or his exhaustive examination of the post-Civil war struggle for black freedom in Black Reconstruction in America, Dubois grappled with the dialectics of race, seeking to understand it as both a system of domestic and global oppression used against peoples of colour in the interest of capitalism, but also as a system that entrapped so-called whites.
Theodore Allen, especially in his two-volume work The Invention of the White Race: racial oppression and social control, picks up from Dubois and theorises two issues. First, he reaffirms that ‘race’ is a sociopolitical construct rather than anything connected with biology and genetics, a point that his exploration of the English colonisation of Ireland makes quite clear. The second is that understanding race solely as a social-political construct is insufficient; it is also a mechanism for social control. With Dubois, Allen noted that race is a form of social control over the oppressed and colonised, but also a method of social control over the working strata of the ‘oppressor nation’ or oppressor state.
Roediger and Esch enter this discussion with an in-depth examination of social control as seen at the level of what they term ‘race management’. Their focus is on the manner in which race and the management of labour are intertwined in the US. In order to analyse this, they focus on the period 1830–1930 and the phenomenal changes that took place during this period, not only in the US, but also in the construction and understanding of ‘race’. In so doing, they examine race as a system that evolves with the expansion of the US empire. They begin with the matter of slavery.
By the 1830s, the slave system was unambiguously a racial system; that is to say, race had become codified as a means of determining who was a slave and who was not. Of particular interest is that the plantation owners used the language of race and managing the African slaves as the prism for the class relations that capitalist slavery represented. It was under the slave system that the racial system began not only to delineate superiority and inferiority, but also to develop a highly complex level of nuance regarding the various characteristics that the slave system identified with a particular ‘race’.
It is during a discussion of this period and of the US’s westward expansion that Roediger and Esch introduce the notion of ‘whiteness-as-management’, a manner of describing the structural establishment by which it was expected that whites, depending on how one defined them, would be in leadership roles in the workplace, and, furthermore, that people of colour were to treat whites as superiors. Roediger and Esch mention, by way of example, the use of the term ‘boss’ by African Americans, beginning in the nineteenth century, to refer to all whites.
What makes this book so important is its detailed exploration of the broader implications of the racial system. Central to social control, the system of white supremacist national oppression created various niches for different ethnic groups/nationalities and, with those niches, also developed rationales for why specific groups were to occupy them, plus the characteristics of those groups, including both ‘positives’ and ‘negatives’ from the standpoint of the elite.
Students of US history are well aware that these racial niches included Africans, Native Americans, Asians, particularly Chinese in the mid-1800s (and, later, other Asian populations), and Mexicans (following the annexation of northern Mexico by the US), but what is not so much discussed is the racialisation of European immigrants. Here, it is important that one offers a qualification. The Chinese, denied citizenship and the regular targets of racist pogroms, were not in the same situation as European immigrants who, no matter how badly treated, were able to achieve citizenship, even though it might have been on less than favourable terms. That said, as European immigration moved to include central and southern Europeans, ‘non-immigrant’ whites in the US were uncertain whether and how to incorporate them into the US social formation. But the myriad European ethnic groups proved to be very useful in the matter of social control; that is, capitalists were able to use them against one another, and to use many of them together against people of colour. Again, in the racialisation that unfolded, the white ‘native’ elite positioned itself to render analyses of the various characteristics of the central and southern European immigrant groups, holding them inferior to northern Europeans, but generally – though not always – superior to people of colour. Even when any of these groups were praised for specific characteristics, such praise always represented racial condescension, referring, for example, to their abilities to perform hard, dangerous work. By the end of the nineteenth century, such racial management of the workforce fitted in very well with what came to be known by the oxymoronic term ‘scientific racism’. Ironically, it also fitted in well with the elaboration of what Frederick Taylor termed ‘scientific management’ in the early twentieth century.
The racialisation of European immigrant groups essentially came to an end following the first world war, with the combination of labour insurgencies (many of which included European immigrants) and the ultimate immigration restrictions of 1924. It is at that point that Roediger and Esch believe that the capitalist elite concluded that it could no longer succeed by playing off European immigrants against one another and instead moved in the direction of playing up the divisions between the European immigrants and non-immigrant whites, on the one hand, and African Americans and Mexicans, on the other. Roediger and Esch never suggest that the racial division along skin colour lines evaporates. Rather, their insight is that the elite and, on a day-to-day basis, the foremen in the workplaces and fields constructed European immigrants in what was, in effect, a racialised manner.
While I had been aware of ethnic conflict among Europeans who migrated to the US, I must confess that I had never quite thought of this in racialised terms, as described by Roediger and Esch. Nevertheless, it fits the larger pattern. The conflict that existed between the so-called native whites and the European immigrants was not simply about competition in the abstract, but was quite consciously engendered by the white elite as part of its overall objective for domination. Particularly at points prior to the massive introduction of African Americans and Mexicans into the manufacturing workforce, social control had to be manipulated utilising the ethnic tensions that existed among first-generation European immigrants. The application of what was, in effect, scientific racist thinking into the characterising of the immigrants clarified that, as far as the elite was concerned, these populations had not yet become white.
The Production of Difference is a ‘must read’. Although it starts off slowly, the description of the evolution of the slave system and racial management draws the reader in and helps one appreciate the complexity of the white supremacist racial system. That said, there are two issues which are worth flagging up for future discussion.
The evolution of race management in the 1920s is attributed by Roediger and Esch to the inability of the elite to continue using it successfully to stifle labour insurgency among the immigrants. Continued European immigration would no longer bring with it the necessary divisions sought by the elite. While I would accept this conclusion, what seems to be missing here is the notion of the constantly evolving ‘white bloc’. In other words, the question of who is ‘white’ is never settled in the US. An examination of any moment in US history from 1783 onwards would show that, at various points, those who were fully accepted as ‘white’ changed, a point that Roediger and Esch certainly acknowledge (and which Roediger has written about). In that sense, the rearticulation of race in the 1920s can also be seen as a moment for reclarification, for lack of a better term, or the solidifying of a new version of the ‘white bloc’, the majority force in what was originally conceptualised as a white republic. To return to the story that this essay began with, the salesman was brought up Irish, but became white. The European immigrant populations conducted various forms of class struggle once in the US; were often played against one another; but, more than anything else, fought for inclusion within the ‘white bloc’, as demonstrated by their (general) failure to unite with groups that were clearly excluded, such as Asians, African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos. While those class struggles – or perhaps partial class struggles – were often heroic, they largely took place within the plane of the settler colonial state.
The second issue is one that the authors do not discuss at all. Racist oppression against African Americans and Mexicans/Chicanos goes beyond skin colour. Both groups developed, in the context of the US, national identities and, in the case of Mexicans, were the victims of an aggressive annexation. The social control that was the key component of racist oppression was not simply to divide the workforce, essential as that was, but also to ensure that the African Americans, Mexicans/Chicanos, Asians and Native Americans were suppressed. To put it another way, the objective of the racist settler state was the elimination of certain populations and the colonisation and exploitation of others. For that to succeed, those who were deemed to be of colour had to be demonised and a common white front created against them to forestall or undermine, among other things, the eternally feared uprising of the ‘coloured masses’.
Thus, social control has be understood as more than ensuring the economic hegemony of the capitalist elite vis-à-vis the working class, but also about ensuring the staying power of the capitalist settler state.
Despite these qualifications, The Production of Difference is of great importance to a readership that goes beyond the academic. The issues it addresses are of strategic importance to mounting any struggle for progressive change, not to mention a movement for social transformation that challenges white supremacist national oppression and the capitalist system of the US, of which it is part.