White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History

The author examines the dominating pattern in black-white economic relations and the racial

segmentation of the work force in both South Africa and the United States. Fredrickson explains

the origins of discriminatory employment policies that developed in the United States and

South Africa, and he combines it with a full historical account of how the labor market was split

in the first place—the conditions that allowed one group of workers to become cheaper and

more exploitable than another. The post-Civil War labor market in the South was divided for

the United States, but not in a form that allowed for much direct racial competition.

Fredrickson argues that rather than competition or cooperation between white and black labor,

the fundamental pattern in the South after emancipation was one of economic fragmentation.

Also in South Africa, the pattern of labor market was even more clearly one of segmentation

rather than competition because they brew rational economic calculation and dubious

anthropological theory which impelled the founders of South African industrialization to create

an elaborate system of labor procurement and control designed to fix the wages of Africans at

an ultra-low level and ensure that enough of them would be working for sufficiently long

periods to constitute a reliable labor force.