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White Dominion As Control: On Scientific Management And Racial Capitalism, Jonathan Masin-Peters

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

This essay deepens the analysis of whiteness-as-dominion recently advanced by political theorist Ella Myers. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois, Myers focuses on the role that ideas of ownership and possession play in white racial identity. While I am persuaded that ownership and whiteness are cojoined, ownership does not necessarily imply control, although the former may be a prerequisite for the latter. I therefore argue that the idea of white dominion can be enhanced by paying greater attention to practices of racial control. More specifically, I focus on racialized modes of labor control via scientific management, or what recent scholars describe …