Labor and the Idea of Race in the American South (Essay‪)‬

A GENERATION AGO, A CALL FOR AN ESSAY ON THE HISTORY OF SOUTHERN labor with a focus on "racial" factors would have prompted a predictable response: a chronicle of white people's exploitation of blacks who lived and labored in the region defined by the boundaries of the Confederate States of America. In all likelihood the essay would have provided a seemingly straightforward account of enslaved black people and black sharecroppers, peons, and wageworkers. Within the last few years, historians have challenged the basic formulation of this deceptively simple problem--the key, if largely implicit, assumptions behind it--and reconfigured the problem altogether. Scholars have abandoned use of the word race to signify a fixed, transhistorical category of historical analysis; instead, they have explored the fluidity of racial ideologies across time and space. Ever-shifting ideas of racial difference shaped the labor patterns not only of people of African descent but also of all other groups as well, including whites; and further, it is clear that social categories such as black, white, and Indian are insufficient to understand fully the complex dynamics of labor deployment throughout the South. In a related vein, Europeans were not the only persons to have exploited men, women, and children while using "racial" differences as a pretext for doing so. Indeed, the history of southern work patterns reveals a broader social division of labor that encompasses a variety of legal and illicit systems, including forms of bound and dependent labor in addition to slavery, as well as unwaged and reproductive work. The role of the state, variously defined, has been critical in shaping "racialized" work patterns; masters of servants, owners of slaves, and employers of wage earners, for example, relied on the protection provided and the force wielded by public officials. Moreover, many historians of the South now embrace a broad international perspective that includes the Caribbean and Southwest Borderlands and, more generally, the global context of any particular time period. And finally, scholars today argue that the exploitation of labor constitutes only part of the story; the other part highlights efforts of subordinate groups to control their own productive energies and either to resist or to accommodate themselves to the work demands imposed on them. Instead of focusing narrowly on blacks in the southern colonies or states, then, historians today take a capacious view that includes a wider geographical area and the many different groups of workers defined by various racial ideologies--all within various layers of authority, including specific work sites, localities, regions, colonial empires, and ultimately the federal government.