Book Review

In this broad survey of the experience of work across the span of American life from the arrival of Euro- and African American immigrants in the seventeenth century to the present, Jacqueline Jones orders her material to argue forcefully that racism and unfree, or forced, labor, in diverse forms, has been central to this history. Racism, she correctly insists in her introduction, "was not a primal prejudice but rather a fluid set of rationalizations" that responded to social and economic change. Racial ideologies also reflect the different circumstances of the believer: economically powerful whites might claim their racial superiority over blacks as a given, while for poorer whites, themselves perhaps examples of forced labor whose work conditions may parallel the black experience, this racialized thinking worked to separate them from African Americans. (It is in this latter category, Jones suggests, that the creation of "whiteness" is so important.) Finally, she notes that racial ideology has also influenced "members of oppressed groups." Here the emphasis has been difference rather than inequality, and she points to understandings of "blackness" that seek to "function as a force for political cohesion" among African Americans.

1

Jones's purpose in delineating these distinctions is clear. She will focus on forced labor, as opposed to the more traditional emphasis on the concept of free labor, as the narrative theme in her story. This emphasis allows her to transcend race, even as she retains a perspective on the African American experience, and to underscore a particular aspect of the American experience of work as it changed over time.

. . .