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A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn

2002; Oxford University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2700804

1945-2314

Sundiata Keita Cha–Jua, Craig Steven Wilder,

Race, History, and American Society

Craig Steven Wilder powerfully demonstrates the persistence and pervasiveness of race or, more accurately, the power of whites continually to recast racial oppression and to envelope blacks in an all-encompassing subordination through different historical periods and social relations in Brooklyn, New York. Wielding a wide assortment of sources, Wilder articulately argues that the historic and current predicaments of blacks in Brooklyn are a consequence of the confluence between whites' economic, political, social, and cultural power and race. A Covenant with Color surveys the African American experience from the arrival of eleven African males in 1626 to 1990. This sweep of nearly four centuries is both the book's strength and one of its major weaknesses. The expansiveness of Wilder'study serves to punctuate his thesis, that race and racism represent a “pact” between elite and working-class whites “in defense of the perverse maldistribution of social power.” Wilder presents compelling if episodic evidence from every era to support this proposition. For instance, in the first three chapters he successfully connects the region's commercial barons and capitalist economy to southern slavery. Although a small contingent of slaves supported the “little masters,” the region's proslavery sentiments resulted primarily from its shipping and manufacturing of slave-produced sugar, tobacco, and cotton. Beginning with chapter 4 Wilder shifts his emphasis to the white working class, which he contends took the initiative in racial formation after that point. In his account, after 1827 the class struggle became a means by which the white working class cemented its racial privilege. His examples range from the 1863 draft riots to the role of the United Federation of Teachers in the 1968 Ocean Hill– Brownsville teacher strike. This line of argument overestimates white workers' ability to structure racial oppression.