White Man’s Work

Approx. 224 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 10 halftones, 3 tables

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-7349-3
Published: December 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7348-6
Published: December 2023

Paperback Available December 2023, but pre-order your copy today!

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In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the same time, demographers have predicted the "browning" of the nation's middle class—once considered a de facto "white" category—over the next twenty years as the country becomes increasingly racially diverse. In this book, Joseph O. Jewell takes us back to the turn of the twentieth century to show how evidence of middle-class mobility among Black, Mexican American, and Chinese men generated both new anxieties and varieties of backlash among white populations.

Blending cultural history and historical sociology, Jewell chronicles the continually evolving narratives that linked whiteness with middle-class mobility and middle-class manhood. In doing so, Jewell addresses a key issue in the historical sociology of race: how racialized groups demarcate, defend, and alter social positions in overlapping hierarchies of race, class, and gender. New racist narratives about non-white men occupying middle-class occupations emerged in cities across the nation at the turn of the century. These stories helped to shore up white supremacy in the face of far-reaching changes to the nation's racialized economic order.

About the Author

Joseph O. Jewell is professor of Black studies at the University of Illinois–Chicago.
For more information about Joseph O. Jewell, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"People need this book; at a time when as a nation there is more blending and blurring, people are holding on to white supremacy for many reasons. Jewell engagingly demonstrates how white middle-class people made efforts to sharpen racial lines, especially targeting men of color and mixed-race men during the late nineteenth century."—Elizabeth Higginbotham, University of Delaware