Description
Book SynopsisAn important history of the way class formed in the US, "The Rule of Racialization" offers a rich new look at the invention of whiteness and how the inextricable links between race and class were formed in the seventeenth century and consolidated by custom, social relations, and eventually naturalized by the structures that organize our lives and our work. Arguing that, unlike in Europe, where class formed around the nation-state, race deeply informed how class is defined in this country and, conversely, our unique relationship to class in this country helped in some ways to invent race as a distinction in social relations. Martinot begins tracing this development in the slave plantations in 1600s colonial life. He examines how the social structures encoded there lead to a concrete development of racialization. He then takes us up to the present day, where forms of those structures still inhabit our public and economic institutions.Throughout, he engages historical and contemporary thinkers on the nature of race in the US, creating a book that at once synthesizes significant critiques of race while at the same time offers a completely original conception of how race and class have operated in American life throughout the centuries. A uniquely compelling book, "The Rule of Racialization" offers a rich contribution to the study of class, labor, and American social relations. Author note: Steve Martinot is Instructor at the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs at San Francisco State University. He has edited two previous books, and translated "Racism" by Albert Memmi.
Trade Review"In fine accounts of the 17th-century Virginia colony, post-Revolutionary class and racial formation, Civil-Rights-era affirmative action debates, and the languages of whiteness, Steve Martinot offers a clear and ultimately clarifying work of scholarly synthesis. The Rule of Racialization tracks the structures of feeling and thinking--illogical, unconscious, baffling, and vestigial though they may be--that remain the driving forces of racialization and racism today." --Eric Lott, University of Virginia, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class "This book deserves to be consulted not just by students of race and ethnicity, but also by those interested in the failures of American socialism and ore concrete issues of affirmative action." --Ethnic and Racial Studies "[This book] makes an indispensable contribution to understanding the origins of racism in the United States, and [it] offers a useful framework to clarify the interconnection between economic and racial domination." --Contemporary Sociology
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. The History And Construction Of Slavery And Race 2. Racialization And Class Structure 3. The Contemporary Control Stratum 4. The Meanings Of White Racialized Identity Notes Index
