History of the Working Class Article Review by Top Papers

The paper is an analytical article review examining David Goutor's, "Drawing Different Lines of Color: The Mainstream English Canadian Labour Movement's Approach to Blacks and the Chinese, 1880-1914." The paper relates that originally appearing in "Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas" in 2005, Goutor's article is a detailed examination of how Canadian labour unionists in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries retreated from racist constructions of Black Canadians while "vilifying" Chinese workers. Specifically, the article stresses how labour unionists of this period saw Black workers as being people who had unshackled themselves from an earlier tyranny not altogether different from the tyranny they (mainstream white unionists) faced as wage-earners in a capitalist society. The paper explains that at the same time, unionists tended to portray Chinese workers as being the embodiment of what would happen to workers if industrial capitalism continued to run amuck (Goutor, 75-76). With that in mind, this paper looks at how Goutor emphasizes anti-Chinese venom during the period in question by drawing from publications that might only represent a fragment of the total union population's sentiments - and by selectively citing some of the more ugly and vile primary materials available to him. At the same time, the strength of Goutor's article in other ways - his fairly solid treatment (in parts) of the very real economic fears of whites - is explored with the focus falling on his use of resources and his efforts to offer a measure of balance in detailing the unionist sentiments when jobs were not in peril.