“Race, Work and Disability in Progressive Era America” in The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, 350-371
Throughout U.S. history, the production of difference, whether along racial or disability lines, has been inextricably tied to the imperatives of labor economy. From the plantations of the antebellum era through the assembly lines and trenches of early-twentieth-century America, ideologies of race and disability have delineated which peoples could do which kinds of work. The ideologies and identities of race, work, and the “fit” ’ or “unfit” body informed Progressive Era labor economies. Here the processes of racializing or disabling certain bodies are charted from turn-of-the-century actuarial science, which monetized blacks as a degenerate, dying race, through the standardized physical and mental testing and rehabilitation methods developed by the U.S. army during World War I. Efforts to quantify, poke, prod, or mend black bodies reshaped contemporary understandings of labor, race, the state, and the working body.
Paul Lawrie is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at York University. His research is on urbanism, race and labour.
Other publications from this author include:
- “The Tragic Action and Revolutionary Intent of Black Lives: Historical Genealogies of Cornel West’s Prophetic Pragmatism in Post-Racial America” in Truth in the Public Sphere, 63-77 (2016)
- Forging a Laboring Race: The African Worker in the Progressive Imagination (2016)
- “‘Salvaging the Negro’: Vocational Rehabilitation and African American Veterans 1917-1924” in Disability Histories, 321-344 (2014)
- “Mortality as the Life Story of a People: Fredrick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction, 1896-1915” in Canadian Review of American Studies, 43 (3), 352-387. (2013)