Book Launch: Paul R.D. Lawrie

Fri. Nov. 4 07:30 PM - Fri. Nov. 4 08:30 PM
Location: McNally Robinson - Travel Alcove

Launch of Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination (New York University Press).

“How does it feel to be a problem?” asked W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). For many thinkers across the color line, the turn of the century “Negro problem” was linked to the concurrent “labor problem,” occasioning debates regarding blacks’ role in the nation’s industrial past, present and future. Efforts to chart the linkages between race, industry and labor led a collection of thinkers across the natural and social sciences to develop a new culture of racial labor management. Evolutionary theory and industrial management combined to identify certain peoples with certain forms of work and reconfigured the story of races into one of development and decline, efficiency and inefficiency, and the thin line between civilization and savagery.