On Unequal Freedom

This book must have been so difficult to write. In it, Evelyn Nakano Glenn synthesizes a large body of scholarship on identity in the United States and argues that race and gender shaped both the definition of American citizenship and the forms of labor in the United States.

To me, the most skillful innovation is that Glenn moves beyond formal definitions of citizenship—those produced by the Constitution and legal statutes—and instead argues that citizenship is a category that is constituted locally. This seems antithetical to traditional definitions of citizenship in the United States, which argue that citizenship endows a level of equality among all citizens. However, the enforcement of citizenship fundamentally occurs on the local level and is influenced by conceptions of race and gender in individual regions or localities. To highlight these, Glenn examines the position of African Americans in the South, Mexican Americans in the Southwest, and Japanese Americans in Hawaii, ultimately showing that—although citizens—they were (and are) not treated as equal citizens by the dominant group in the United States (white, male, and Anglophone).

Glenn’s coverage of labor is a bit more subtle here and a bit more difficult to make sense of. It seems that she argues that the United States has developed a dichotomy (or perhaps a spectrum) between “free” (wage) labor and “unfree” (slave) labor. By the mid-nineteenth century, free labor had been coded as inherently white with other groups falling into the category of “unfree” labor (especially black slaves). While unfree labor required that workers were dependent on some other group, free labor was liberating—offering a degree of independence. After 1865, formal slavery was abolished, except in prisons, and “freedom of contract” for labor became the law of the land. However, free labor continued to be coded as “white” (and male), and non-white people often were forced into contracts (like tenant farming by African Americans in the Reconstruction South) or were heavily subject to vagrancy laws. These differing conceptions of labor reified the inequalities already faced by those who were not white and/or male.

Glenn’s ability to bring all of these different threads into one cohesive whole shows us that she is an incredibly skilled historian who is worthy of praise for this book. However, at times, the many threads makes it easy to get lost in the details and, as a theoretical work about labor and citizenship, it can be difficult to make sense of her main points. Nevertheless, this is a critical work that takes already-familiar stories and transforms them into a useful way of thinking about inequality and citizenship throughout the entirety of the United States.