Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2023

Abstract

Some labor dynamics transcend place and time: workers provide the labor; management oversees the work; owners capitalize on the fruits of that labor. This hierarchy repeats across nations, industries, and eras. The actors in these stories have set roles and a particular stage to act upon. We are familiar with a narrative wherein the worker is forced to toil under extreme conditions, the manager motivates the worker to produce faster and more, and the owner reaps the rewards. And we usually know where our sympathies lie.

Professor McMurtry-Chubb's latest book, Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy (hereinafter, Race Unequals), drops her readers onto a particular stage that at first feels familiar: the American plantation of the South during the era of enslavement. We know that the workers are the enslaved laborers who represent the worst commodification of forced labor. We know that the overseers are the managers who wield power and use violence to force those enslaved to cruelly and inhumanely submit. And we know that plantation owners blithely accepted the privilege of exploiting that labor as their due. The genius of Race Unequals is this: asking readers to put aside what we know and witness a completely new narrative. What if the overseer was not just the punisher but also the worker acted upon? What if plantation owners were protecting not just their monetary benefits but also their own White, masculine social identities? What if another vulnerable and precarious worker in this particular worksite was the one tasked to enforce the worksite rules? A place where those rules happen to be the most atrocious worksite rules of all time?

It bears explicitly stating, here and in any discussion of the enslavement of Africans in this country, that the horrors of slavery know no bounds. As property and a commodity, the Black body was thoroughly dehumanized by the manifestation of white supremacy as law. While recognizing these truths, we can also study the enormous pressures- economically and socially-in place to keep all workers in their respective subservient class. This essay attempts to explore one of the many themes present in Race Unequals: worksite rules and norms that have the power to control lives, dictate futures, and shape societies.

Publication Citation

56 Creighton L. Rev. 191 (2023).

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