| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michelle Brattain. The Politics of Whiteness: Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South. (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2001. Pp. x, 301. $35.00.

Textile mill workers have long played a leading role in southern labor history. Now a new cohort of historians is scrutinizing a striking feature of the mill world: its nearly all-white character. With this book, Michelle Brattain joins Bryant Simon, Timothy J. Minchin, and others in seeking to understand how race mattered in southern textiles. A detailed local study of Rome, a manufacturing hub in northwest Georgia, Brattain's book concentrates on the period from 1930 to 1970. The author argues that mill workers lived class through race; until civil rights remade the workplace, to be one of them was to be white. Not "false consciousness" but self-interest explains the undertow of conservatism that earlier scholars found puzzling. In an industry that gave whites exclusive access to machine jobs, their commitment to racial hierarchy was "not irrational" (p. 228). . . .

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