`Race-ing class, historicizing categories'.

ALABAMA; UNITED States

In an inspired metaphor, Daniel Letwin scorns "models that counterpose class and race consciousness, as if they made up two ends of a seesaw". Many historians writing today would agree: either/or ways of thinking impede rather than advance understanding of these questions. Letwin has achieved a great deal in "The Challenge of Interracial Unionism." Not least of his contributions is his recovery of long-silenced and intensely compelling black working-class radical voices, such as Willis J. Thomas, the Greenback Labor Party orator with whose story Letwin introduces the book. And, yet, the specter of old arguments hangs over this work. It leads Letwin to an unnecessarily restrictive explanatory framework, particularly in its understanding of class. This is evident early on when he outlines the book's core arguments. Being so workplace-focused, the book gives little sense of the texture of everyday life and social relations in mining communities. The constricted view of class has influenced not only the questions asked and the answers considered, but also the very sources consulted-such that other interpretive possibilities were closed off at the outset.