Joseph O. Jewell - "White Man's Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility Into the Progressive Era"

Joseph O. Jewell will discuss White Man's Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility Into the Progressive Era. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

Presented in partnership with International House.

At the Co-op

RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required.)

About the Book: In the White Man's Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility Into the Progressive Era, 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 and author of White Man's Work: Joseph O. Jewell is professor of Black studies at the University of Illinois–Chicago (UNC Press; December 2023).