The Cost of Freedom: The Violent Exploitation of Black Labor as Essential to Nation Building in Jamaica and the United States of America
Abstract
Levy and Sojoyner talks about the violent exploitation of Black labor as sssential to nation building in Jamaica and the US. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a pernicious myth of the nation as a procurer of safety and well-being for its citizenry. With the veil removed, a perverse logic of massive extraction from the public coffers during a time of extreme crisis has been laid bare. With a specific focus on labor, our goal is to demonstrate the inherent violence located within nation-building projects that have performed the slippage of equating freedom with the freedom of people to choose their labor (i.e., wage labor). As we have argued throughout this article, the construction of "essential labor" is intimately tied to the disposability of Black life in keeping with the racial logics forged in the plantation regimes of the Western hemisphere. The failure of both the United States and Jamaica to prevent the spread of COVID-19 within their borders, despite a clear desire to do so, is in form and function a direct result of racial capitalism.
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- Authors
- Levy, J. O., & Sojoyner, D. M.
- Venue
- Kalfou
- Publisher
- Temple University Press
- Published
- 2021-12-06
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 1-2
- ISSN
- 2151-4712 (ISSN-L)
- 2372-0751
- OpenAlex
- W4210779752
- Cited by
- 0
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Kalfou A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Race, History, and American Society
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Colonialism, slavery, and trade
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Economy and Marxism
- Keywords
- Black labor, nation-building, freedom, wage labor, Blackness, plantations, carceral state, Reconstruction, capital formation, statecraft, Jamaica, United States, African diaspora
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