Black Labor Research Articles

“The Problem Alike of Statesman, Race Leader, and Philanthropist”: Economic Thinking and the Division of Negro Economics

In 1917, the US Department of Labor launched a new section: the Division of Negro Economics (DNE). Established to study black labor in the context of the Great Migration and staffed completely by black social scientists and social workers, the division offers a window onto the origins and meaning of black economics in the United States. During an age of pervasive scientific racism, the division’s leaders leveraged the language and tools of academic economics to assert black Americans' fundamental humanity, particularly by rendering black migrants as economic agents. The history of the division reveals how black economic thinkers made the economic study of the Great Migration into an egalitarian intellectual project, even if they could not escape institutional bias and prejudice. It stands as a lesson on the potential of economics, both as a tool of oppression and as one of political claims-making.

The Economic History & Urban Geography of Race Relations in Detroit: Movement of Capital, White Resistance and Immobility of Black Labor

Detroit's intertwined history of deindustrialization and racial segregation is often explored separately. In The Origins of the Urban Crises (1996), Thomas Sugrue examines post-WWII job losses and housing discrimination without elucidating why and how the city came to experience the abrupt flight of capital in that period. Conversely, Murray and Schwartz's Wrecked (2019) details the catalysts for Detroit's deindustrialization but neglects its impact on the African-American community. This paper aims to bridge these perspectives by utilizing various secondary sources and archival evidence to analyze how concurrent discrimination and economic decline have maintained the persistent segregation between Detroit and its suburbs.

Love and Theft in Dance Economies

The emergence of blockchain dance tokens is reshaping the dynamics of race in short-form dance videos within digital economies. While blockchain technologies primarily have been associated with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, they are changing the arts sector, particularly dance and choreography. This transformation has significant implications for understanding the valorization of Black labor and aesthetics. By examining two distinct choreographic initiatives, we can grasp the profound impact of blockchain cultural production and distribution ecosystems. One example is the work of JaQuel Knight, renowned for choreographing iconic music videos, including Beyoncé’s. Knight's efforts to copyright his dances and empower Black choreographers reflect a shift towards artist ownership of dance steps. Another case study involves the Renegade dance, initially popularized on TikTok. Despite its viral success, choreographer Jalaiah Harmon struggled for recognition. Now, with the advent of dance Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), artists can monetize their work and bridge the gap between labor and circulation. These innovative legal and financial pathways mark the emergence of crypto-choreographies, enabling Black artists to reimagine and carry out a post-extractive dance world. This transcends conventional debates of dance appreciation versus appropriation, signaling a transformative shift in aesthetic economies and the limits of choreographic copyright law.

Joe William Trotter Jr. Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America.

Joe William Trotter Jr. <i>Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America</i>.

‘A Chronicle of the Rebellion in Jamaica’: Pseudobiblical Style and Jamaican Proto-nationalism

Abstract Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, now widely recognized as a watershed in the history of the Atlantic world, fundamentally shaped discussions about Jamaica’s political and legal status within the British empire. Here, I analyze a little-known narrative of the rebellion written by Jewish newspaper editor Sidney Levien in pseudobiblical style, with almost every sentence of the account echoing the language of the King James Version of the Bible. I locate Levien’s narrative within a literary tradition that used pseudobiblical style to describe contemporary political life, especially in America. The literary tradition, identified by historian Eran Shalev, transposed contemporary politics into events of biblical proportion. By using pseudobiblical style, Levien advanced a sense of Jamaica’s importance in nineteenth-century political imagination. While many accounts conceptualized the rebellion as a struggle between White landowners and Black laborers, Levien refused to present Jamaica as a White fatherland or a Black republic.

The Ruse of Recognition: Black Labor in the Afterlife of Slavery

Given the abolitionism professed by successive labor leaders in the years following the U.S. Civil War, why did the cause of interracial solidarity fail to gain traction in postbellum organized labor? Drawing on archival and secondary data on the encounter of Black and White labor from Reconstruction to the turn of the twentieth century, we trace the failure of interracial solidarity to the labor movement’s refusal to reckon institutionally with what Hartman calls the “nonevent of emancipation” and the “afterlife of slavery” for Black populations. Enslaved artisans dominated the skilled trades before the war, and White unions emerged correspondingly to exclude Black labor. When, after the Civil War, the formerly enslaved began to argue that they were being excluded from unions, White labor used emancipation as an anti-Black discursive technology to deny those claims. White labor also employed violence to exclude Black people from the labor movement. By addressing the research puzzle in this way, we offer a novel synthesis of Black studies and the sparse but important body of work on the sociology of slavery to reframe the mainstream approach to interracial solidarity in the sociology of labor and labor movements.

Racial Excess: Black Labor and Media Technology in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

Racial Excess: Black Labor and Media Technology in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

Reformulating Black Cinematic Labor

AbstractConsidering the 2022 film Nope, this essay pushes beyond indexical and ontological readings of blackness in film in order to consider how invisible forms of blackness—in particular, the labor of black film workers—are inscribed in the film text. It argues that the inscription of black labor and a reading of film as an effect of labor supply a reformulation of a deracinated film formalism. Mining Nope's self-reflexive gestures, the essay explores the film's reformulation of American film history and its navigation of the invisible and the spectacular as the limited forms of manifesting blackness in cinema.

Plant Infrastructure

This essay analyzes Miami as a place where plants are a major component of urban infrastructure. The centrality of tropical plants to the growth of Miami connects that city to the history of empire, where control of plant matter was the violent model for the standardization and distribution practices of modern infrastructure. In Miami, the US Department of Agriculture established a Plant Introduction Garden in 1898, with “Agricultural Explorer” David Fairchild activating networks connecting India, Kew Gardens, and Washington to bring mostly Asian tropical fruits, shrubs, and flowers to South Florida. A close reading of archives of botanical gardens, plant nurseries, and community organizations shows that Miami plant infrastructure was created jointly by these elite political/scientific networks and by vernacular, informal networks of Black labor migration and horticultural know-how. The essay focuses on the cultivation of Miami’s best-known plant product, the Haden mango, and the vital role in its propagation played by Black Bahamian gardener Nathan Sands, whose letters to his employer David Fairchild are preserved in the latter’s papers. Recovering the stories of people like Nathan Sands is vital to understanding the development of a global metropolis whose plant infrastructure erased the Black horticultural work on which it depended.

Profitability, Respectability and Challenge: (Re)Gaining Control and Restructuring the Labour Process while Maintaining Racial Order at South African Gold Mines, 1913–1922

The history of black labour at the South African gold mines has conventionally been punctuated by three great African strikes, in 1920 (often obscured by the great white mine-worker strike of 1922), 1946 and 1987. The strikes of 1920, 1946 and 1987 (as well as the great white strikes of 1913 and 1922) have all attracted considerable scholarly attention. Yet a more limited black strike in 1913 has seldom, if ever, been recalled, despite its crucial importance for formulating racial policy at the gold mines, buried as it was in the violent defeat of white miners and their cohorts. This paper takes up the challenge of understanding management and state responses to collective (black and white) mine-worker struggles during the decade from 1913 to the early 1920s and assessing outcomes for worker participants, white and black alike.

What Purpose Education? Anna Julia Cooper’s and Booker T. Washington’s Differing Views on Education

ABSTRACT: This article discusses Dr. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper’s and Booker T. Washington’s advocacy for African American education during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cooper and Washington had very different opinions about the purpose and kind of education African Americans should receive. Each saw education as central to African Americans’ success and inclusion in the American nation. Cooper perceived education as an opportunity for self-actualization and a way to resist political oppression and racial discrimination. Washington had a more pragmatic approach to education, seeing it as a utilitarian tool to help create a Black labor class to reconstruct a New South. Cooper’s A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892) and “Educational Programs” (ca. 1930s) and Washington’s Atlanta Exposition speech (1895) and Up from Slavery (1901) provide readers insight into their ideas about the purpose of education. Cooper and Washington were two of the leading voices debating the question, What purpose education? Was education meant to be emancipatory and liberating, as the enslaved and their descendants believed and hoped it would be? Or was it meant to be pragmatic and utilitarian, as those seeking economic solutions to their problems thought it should be? The answers to these questions would have long-lasting effects on the lives of African Americans.

“All Manner of Cruelty and Slavery”: A Long History of Black Labor and White Violence on Navassa Island, 1857–1898

“All Manner of Cruelty and Slavery”: A Long History of Black Labor and White Violence on Navassa Island, 1857–1898

Dismantling Curricular Statues: Critically Examining Anti-Black Racism in Representations of Ancient Africa in Canadian Textbooks

Although Canada is portrayed as a benevolent multicultural society, the experiences of many of its racialized peoples point to the ongoing realities of racism. Research demonstrates that schools are central to perpetuating racism, in part through a prioritization of white Eurocentric curricula. But how might ancient history curricula specifically contribute to racism? In this article, we interrogate representations of ancient African societies as presented in three secondary school world history textbooks from Quebec and Manitoba and consider the mechanisms of anti-black racism at work. By using Fairclough’s (2003) approach to critical discourse analysis, we offer insights about how ancient history curricula do little to address the persistence of anti-black racism. Our analysis finds a continued valorisation of white Western civilizations at the expense of ancient African histories and Black peoples more generally. Further, we demonstrate how ancient history textbooks perpetuate specific anti-black discourses such as Black primitivity and an overemphasis on Black labour.

Factual basis of Colson Whitehead’s novels

Twice Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead bases the plot of his novels on various facts of American reality found in documents and newspaper publications. By juxtaposing fact and fiction, he transforms them to create a new reality, rooted in the events of real life but acquiring a universal or metaphorical character that could be seen even in his early works. In “John Henry Days” (2001) the writer makes use of the legend of the famous black laborer John Henry, its reflection in the folklore and everyday life of the American South and attempts to up-sell it in today’s USA with the help of social networks. In the novel “The Underground Railroad”, written after Whitehead’s archival research and his study of slave narratives of the mid-19th century, the document is woven into the artistic structure of the text by using authentic announcements about runaway slaves. The novel “The Nickel Boys” was written under the influence of the information about the horrible findings discovered on the grounds of the so-called Arthur Dozier School, established in early 20th century for juvenile delinquents, telling the story of two black boys who got there in the 1960s. The writer incessantly explores the impact of racism on American society and social injustice making use of a historical novel elements, of alternative history, neo-slave narratives and satire in his descriptions of the contemporary US media.

“When there is no money, that is when I vomit blood”: the domino effect and the unfettered lethal exploitation of Black labor on Dominican sugar plantations

BackgroundIn this article, I utilize the concept of the Plantationocene as an analytical framework to generate a holistic and historical understanding of the present-day struggles of a mostly Haitian migrant workforce on sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic.MethodsInspired by Paul Farmer’s methodology, I combine political economy, history, and ethnography approaches to interpret the experiences of sugarcane cutters across historical and contemporary iterations of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial practices over the course of five centuries.ResultsMy findings elucidate the enduring power of capitalism, implicating corporate and state elites, as the structural scaffolding for acts of racialized violence that condition the life-and-death circumstances of Black laborers on Caribbean plantations to this day. Although today’s sugarcane cutters may suffer differently than their enslaved or wage labor ancestors on the plantation, I argue that an unfettered racialized pattern of lethal exploitation is sustained through the structural violence of neoliberalism that links present conditions with the colonial past.ConclusionsUltimately, this paper contributes understandings of the plantationocene’s enduring effects in the global south by demonstrating how imperialist arrangements of capitalism are not a distant memory from the colonial past but instead are present yet hidden and obscured while relocated and reanimated overseas to countries like the Dominican Republic, where American capitalists still exploit Black bodies for profit and power.

Creative Destruction in the Afterlife of Slavery: A Comment on Revaluing Work(ers): Toward a Democratic and Sustainable Future

In this review of Revaluing Work(res), I argue that the labor studies approach must move forward in two directions. First, it must anchor the conversation on the future of work in the concept of “creative destruction” and in doing so advocate a socialist alternative to organizing production. Second, it must highlight the specific legacy of Black labor in the afterlife of slavery in the forms of labor control that characterize new forms of work.

Who was cleared? Chucalissa museum, a land-clearing project

Within Memphis’ T.O. Fuller State Park, formerly the Shelby County Negro State Park, lies the C.H. Nash Chucalissa Museum where skeletal remains of the Tunica people are on display. Because it is a popular tourist attraction and a hub for archeology research, it has been dubbed the “central clearing house for Western Tennessee archeology.” Despite the many journal articles written about Chucalissa, underwhelmingly few critically engage with the Black labor exploited and the sacred burial mounds disturbed in the “clearing” and excavating of this exhibit. In this paper, I exchange the definition of “clearing,” a technical term common among archeologists with one that exposes it as a euphemism that disavows the historic violence of extraction.1,2 Through an interdisciplinary textual analysis of Nash’s “Chucalissa Indian Town,” this paper inquires what does it really mean for Chucalissa to be a “land clearing project” and a “central clearing house”? Who was cleared? How will digging up the history of the Chucalissa Museum shape our interpretations of regional archeology at that time? Finally, how can these findings contribute to the present Black and Native tensions with Chucalissa and to the broader conversations on repatriation?

Hal Baron as Radical Geographer: Institutions, Geopolitics, and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism

Harold Maurice Baron (1930–2017) was a researcher and organizer of the Chicago Freedom Movement (1965–1967) who made important contributions to racial formation theory and the broader theorization of the relationship between racism and capitalism. Baron produced notable contributions to the study of racism throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, such as his essays “The Demand for Black Labor,” “Racial Domination in Advanced Capitalism,” and “Racism Transformed: The Implications of the 1960s.” I argue that Baron can be productively read as a radical geographer, and in turn, that his corpus offers important theoretical reflections for the task of building antiracist geographies. Baron produced a “geopolitical” interpretation of racism in the United States, highlighting how racist practices were used as problem-solving measures by the hegemonic institutions of postwar capitalism, most notably the capitalist state (at multiple scales), capitalist production, and the imperative to manage the unemployed and racialized poor (particularly via civil society institutions). In this article, I outline Baron’s research project as it evolved throughout his life, and offer a geographical interpretation of his work, highlighting his relevance to contemporary theoretical projects within human geography.

Why She PARs: Combating the Deintellectualization of Sport through Participatory Research

Abstract: This empirical research paper is a study of agency and liberatory practices for Black women’s basketball players within a predominantly White institution (PWI) of higher education. Central to this study is the exploration of the dynamics surrounding Black labor in sport, particularly how the regulation and confinement of the body, mind, and spirit of Black women’s basketball players allows for their continued exploitation by the institution of sport in U.S. higher education. This paper uses an Afrocentric feminist epistemology to design and execute a participatory study that flips the proverbial script on student-athlete research by empowering Black student-athletes to critically evaluate their own lived experiences while simultaneously exploring ways of disrupting the tools of regulation currently confining their agency and autonomy. The site of data collection was also leveraged as a space for participants to identify opportunities to secure and exercise agency and bodily autonomy in real time—a process fellow PAR scholars refer to as the design serving as the intervention. In doing so, this paper highlights both how the regulation and control of Black women’s basketball is inextricably linked to power, race and gender, and identifies where they can collectively build towards increased freedoms.

The Racial Economy of Perception: Reading Black Sociality in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract This article investigates a central problem for literary aesthetics in the nineteenth century: why literature won't directly represent Black revolution. It argues that in Blake; or, The Huts of America, Martin Delany thinks through the structural impossibility of conceptualizing a specifically Black sociality by continually refusing to depict Black revolution at the level of the plot. Instead, Blake ties together Black labor with revolution to suggest that within the context of the system of capital in the nineteenth century, Black labor's central role in the world economy renders the social nature of Black revolution similarly imperceptible. Blake reproduces this imperceptibility and unthinkability through its structure. The book, which is famously incomplete, ends just as a violent revolution is about to erupt in Cuba. Whether the final chapters were lost or never written in the first place, this article tracks how this same anticlimactic and nonrepresentational narrative mode is repeated throughout the novel. It suggests that these conspicuous absences serve as formal literary interventions that point toward the impossibility of thinking, sensing, and thereby representing a specifically Black sociality. The article explores how Delany adopts the literary technique of withholding used in the slave narrative to actively play with the formal and generic bounds of the novel and the slave narrative alike. By adopting this familiar technique, Delany asks what role the novel has within the African American literary tradition and what role fiction can play in interrogating the limits of a mode of political thought hemmed in by a racialized political economy.