The Color Line and the Assembly Line Quotes

“In the history of the United States,” the literary scholar Lisa Lowe writes, “capital has maximized its profits not through rendering labor ‘abstract’ but precisely through the social productions of ‘difference,’ . . . marked by race, nation, geographical origins, and gender.”
― Elizabeth Esch, The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire

“Even before African Americans made up the literal majority of foundry workers such work was becoming understood as more “suited” to them, not just at the Rouge but in the array of foundry and metal pressing workplaces in and around Detroit. A Packard spokesperson described this phenomenon to an interviewer: “White and colored get along all right in the foundry because the average white worker doesn’t want a foundry job anyway. White foundry workers are foreigners.” A Ford official said, “Many of the Negroes are employed in the foundry and do work that nobody else would do.”40 As with the myth, specifically subscribed to at times by auto management, that Black workers had higher tolerance for hot and exhausting work, such a statement brings into being the truth it claims to describe—it is a perfect example of how racism becomes race-lore, an a priori assertion claiming to be based in observed and material reality.”
― Elizabeth Esch, The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire

“The Ford Empire is the Hitler Nazi Empire on a small scale. GEORGE SELDES (1943)”
― Elizabeth Esch, The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire

“Ford’s assembly line came to embody the idea of social improvement through efficiency, mass society, and progress. None of these concepts existed outside of belief in racial and national hierarchies.”
― Elizabeth Esch, The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire