Review of Teri McMurtry-Chubb, Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy (Lexington Books, 2021)

Abstract

In academic studies of the southern plantation, the overseer is often portrayed in simple terms as a lower-class white male who did not himself own land or enslaved persons. Departing from these one-dimensional descriptions, McMurtry-Chubb illustrates the plantation overseer in a much more granular way. In this lucid and engaging monograph, she shows how public and private law helped construct the overseer’s masculine identity in a way that both elevated the social status of elite planter males, and lowered the status of the enslaved people the overseer managed. The overseer’s performance of masculinity was assigned a value (lower than the planter, higher than the enslaved) “based on the imperatives of capitalist and white supremacist structures” (xiii)—another iteration of Du Bois’s critical concept of the “wage of whiteness” and its tendency to undermine classconsciousness.

Keywords: Teri McMurtry-Chubb; overseer contracts; white masculinities; plantation economy