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  • Erratum

As a result of a most regrettable series of production errors in Race/Ethnicity 4:2 (Winter 2011), “From the Editors,” beginning on page v of this issue, did not accurately represent quoted material from Barbara J. Fields and Oliver Cromwell Cox, nor did we include the Works Cited list that should have accompanied this article. We wish to extend our apologies to our guest editor and our readers, and are reproducing the relevant section of the editorial. Please note that the citations appear in the original, but the appropriate text was not produced in block quotation format.

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Our collection, then, begins with a classic piece from Caste, Class, and Race (1948) by the Trinidad-born sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox, who explored some of those interactions among European Americans, Chinese, and Japanese workers in the Pacific West. For Cox, there were many predecessors to this severe regime of labor exploitation: “Sometimes, probably because of its very obviousness, it is not realized that the slave trade was simply a way of recruiting labor for the purpose of exploiting the great natural resources of America” (Cox 1970 [1948], 332). Cox’s enemies on the left criticized him for minimizing the tenacity of white racism, but he was at pains to indicate how regimes of labor exploitation led to different historical patterns of racism. He rejected the tendency to treat racism as an eternal part of the human condition stemming from “The Curse of Ham” in the Old Testament or some similar ancient or primal distaste for Otherness. It is sometimes forgotten that in colonial North America more than half of the white immigrants had been indentured servants who, according to African American historian Barbara J. Fields, “could be bought and sold like livestock, kidnapped, stolen, put up as stakes in card games, and awarded—even before their arrival in America—to the victors in lawsuits” (Fields 1990, 102). Whites had proved themselves quite capable of enslaving other whites in classical Greece and Rome and during the early Middle Ages. For Fields, the great land magnates in colonial North America ultimately decided against the enslavement of whites:

To have degraded the servants into slaves en masse would have driven the continuing struggle up several notches, a dangerous undertaking considering that the servants were well-armed, that they outnumbered their masters, and that the Indians could easily take advantage of the inevitably resulting warfare among the enemy. Moreover, the enslavement of already arrived immigrants, once news of it reached England, would have threatened the sources of future immigration. Even the greediest and most short-sighted profiteer could foresee disaster in any such policy.

(Fields 1990, 103)

Hence, in the late seventeenth century, planters stepped up importation of Africans in recognizing that further attempts to shackle armed Englishmen could prove explosive and destabilizing. [End Page vi] Cox’s own work was an effort to restore some of this labor context, and not simply to rely on platitudes about white European will to dominate and hatred of the Other. He concluded that “Europeans have overthrown more or less completely the social system among every colored people with whom they have come into contact.” But fundamentally he wanted to revitalize an understanding of how Europe’s early transition from feudalism to capitalism, and then to a more expansive industrial imperialism, generated racist regimes of labor exploitation: “It should be made clear that we do not mean to say that the white race is the only one capable of race prejudice” (Cox 1970 [1948], 345). Yet he did not like the centrist-liberal tendency to believe that overcoming racism mainly requires infusing the public with a new attitude, what might be labeled the Patti LaBelle theory of historical progress. Cox held that investigation into racism too often

leads to confusion because it ordinarily resolves itself into a study of the origins and development of an idea rather than the study of social facts and situations. The study of racism is a study of opinions and philosophies. However, since students of racism are seldom, if ever, concerned with the peculiar type of social organization in which racial antagonism develops, they are likely to produce an apparently consistent selection...

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