| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Steve Martinot. The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance. (Labor in Crisis.) Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 240. Cloth $79.50, paper $22.95.
This writer steps boldly forward with a comprehensive exploration of race and class in American history. Steve Martinot's model is racialization, by which he means the elite's institutionalization of racial hierarchy since the seventeenth century, in contrast to the various models of common prejudice. He continues the theoretical tradition of Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the more recent philosopher of race, Albert Memmi, a Tunisian Jew and Arab nationalist.(Martinot is the able translator and interpreter of Memmi's 1982 essay, Racism.) In four tightly organized chapters, Martinot synthesizes the works of several dozen major writers. The prose is dense but lucid, theoretically rigorous but oriented to the problems of achieving equality. More than a work of historical analysis, it suggests a positive, large plan of action.	1
The reader is first introduced to the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, where race and class were born together. Echoing Eric Williams, the writer attacks the idea that cultural bias caused racism—as argued, for example, by Winthrop Jordan. He shows that, as the Tidewater became a slave society, the planter class racialized whiteness in the law as a system of color allegiance, based on an idealized concept of purity and the fear that nonwhites would rebel. As for cultural influence, it would have been much the same if slaves had been green instead of black.	2
The next chapter outlines the mature stage in the alliance of planters and the common people, which was mediated by "a middleclass sense of belonging" (p. 76) epitomized by the slave patrols. Race was not merely an upper-class tactic to divide workers; planters made race an elixir to avoid class conflict among whites. In the nineteenth century, that racial project inexorably gave birth to the white laboring classes' populist free labor ideology.	. . .

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