John Trumpbour, guest editor of “Reworking Race and Labor” (Race/Ethnicity 4.2), is research director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. For this special issue, he has assembled essays that address the challenges of race and labor from a global as well as an American perspective and show how race mattered historically and still matters in the world of labor.
The classic piece, one of the distinguishing features of Race/Ethnicity and one that provides some grounding and familiarity for readers, is from Caste, Class and Race (1948) by the Trinidad-born sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox. Included as well are essays that fall into three parts: a focus on race matters in the rural world of work; an interview with Bill Fletcher, a long-time labor leader and former president of TransAfrica; and a historical and sociological analysis of African-American political, labor-market, and cultural interventions.
New Delhi-based economist Jayati Ghosh’s “Fear of Foreigners: Recession and Racism in Europe” is an overview of developments in Italy and the EU, and University of Calabria sociologist Alessandra Corrado’s “Clandestini in the Orange Towns” examines social structure and migration in Calabria’s countryside and Mediterranean Europe. Latin Americanist Aviva Chomsky reports on and provides an analysis of the US-Mexican border in “Today’s Deportees.”
San José State University historian Margo McBane takes up a critical moment in labor and race relations in Southern California in “Whitening a California Citrus Company Town.” Sharit K. Bhowmik, dean of the School of Management and Labor Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Studies in Mumbai, examines the persistence of bonded labor in India in “Ethnicity and Isolation: Marginalization of Tea Plantation Workers.”
In addition, Trumpbour interviews Bill Fletcher, long-time activist and the author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Towards Social Justice.
The last third of the issue tries to make sense of the African-American labor experience. Independent scholar Susan Roth Breitzer explores what is sometimes called Black Nativism: African-American antipathy to immigrants in “Race, Immigration, and Contested Americanness: Black Nativism and the American Labor Movement 1880-1930.”
In “Black Professionals in Racialized and Community-Oriented Occupations,” University of Connecticut sociologist Maya Beasley argues that African-American professionals remain heavily concentrated in racialized service-sector jobs of modest remuneration. Finally, Binghamton University sociology student Matthew Birkhold delivers a cultural materialist exploration of the rise of hip hop in “ ‘If You Don’t Move Your Feet Then I don’t Eat’: Hip Hop and the Demand for Black Labor.”
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