Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Kentucky History > Item 188
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Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky
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by Pem Davidson Buck
Sales Rank: 746069
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$18.95
At Amazon
on 8-4-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 288 pages
Published by: Monthly Review Press June 1, 2001
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 1583670475
ISBN 13 Number: 978-1583670477
Book Dimensions:
8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
Weighs: 12.8 ounces
Product Description
Worked to the Bone is a provocative examination of race and class in the United States and the mechanics of inequality. In an elegant and accessible style that combines thoroughly documented sociological insight with her own compelling personal narrative, Pem Buck illustrates the ways in which constructions of race and the promise of white privilege have been used at specific historical moments to divide those in the United Statesspecifically, in two Kentucky countieswho might have otherwise acted on common class interests. From the initial creation of the concept of "whiteness" and early strategies focused on convincing Europeans, regardless of their class position, to identify with the eliteto believe that what was good for the elite was good for themto the moment between 1750 and 1800 when most people who were identified by their European descent finally came to believe that skin color was as integral to their identity as gender, the promise of white privilege underpinned the Kentucky system.
Pem Buck looks at the long term effects of these developments and discusses their impact on the lives of working people in Kentucky. She also analyzes the role of local tobacco-growing and corporate elites in the underdevelopment of the state, highlighting the ways in which relationships between poor white and poor black working people were continuously manipulated to facilitate that process.
Documentary material includes speeches, songs, photographs, charts, cartoons, and ads presented in a large, visually appealing format.
About The Author
Pem Davidson Buck is associate professor of anthropology and sociology at Elizabethtown Community College in Kentucky.
Reader Reviews
In Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, & Privilege in Kentucky, Pem Davidson Buck offers an intimate view of social history "from under the sink," as she puts it. Her concern is with the lives of men and women whose labors typically go unnoticed and uncelebrated in popular history. Indeed, insofar as popular history books and history textbooks tend to assume the naturalness of elite privilege (such is the essence of the "great man" theory of history), Buck's study is very pointedly offered as an antidote to the orthodoxy. Her focus is on the power struggles between the wealthy and the exploited in Kentucky, and on how modern racial and class identities have been forged in the fire of that struggle. By extension, her work offers a keen analysis of the cultural formations that shape the identities of all Americans. Elites weren't born to rule, and there certainly isn't any divine ordinance guaranteeing their continued dominance. Thus, as Buck's account of Kentucky history reveals, they could never afford to take their power for granted. Their strategy historically has been to divide and conquer. From the colonial period to the post-cold war period elites have pitted non-elites against each other--men against women, Europeans against Africans, northern Europeans against southern Europeans, the Irish against the English, "real Americans" against naturalized immigrants, middle class against lower class--in order to maintain their iron grip on power. They also have had to police the arbitrary borders of human identity that they helped to create. Buck's study especially excels at showing how the ideological construction of the "white race" has helped to promote elite privilege over the last three centuries. Worked to the Bone is a fine book that seeks not only to instruct, but also to affect a real change in attitudes about class politics in the United States. Buck is clearly on a mission here, and her readily accessible prose style means that people both in and out of the academy will be able to read her, and clearly understand her message. She compels us to examine what the lives of typical working class people in Kentucky and elsewhere might be like if the elites were dethroned, and if our country's resources were distributed in a more humane and truly democratic fashion.
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Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky
Available from Amazon
Price: $18.95
Updated on 8-4-2008.
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