WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Today’s show is a repeat of “Roll Jim Crow” (April 30, 2019) about the very intentional practice of white supremacy by the corporate managers of the American Tobacco Company and how, via corporate imperialism, that same racial project found expression in countries all over the world, most notably China.
Some of the topics covered are:
- James Duke and debunking the myth of the brilliant innovator disrupting industrial practices and what that myth actually hides – the manipulations of corporate law.
- The intentional structure of the Jim Crow corporation
- How Black employees still found ways to be proud of their labor and identify with the corporation which is a community identity too.
- Bright Leaf tobacco in China and how the British American Tobacco company created a kind of Jim Crow culture of debt and sharecropping.
GUEST
Nan Enstad is the Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the current Director of the UW Food Studies Network. Enstad is the author of Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism, published by the University of Chicago Press, and Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Popular Culture and Labor Politics at the turn of the Twentieth Century, which appeared from Columbia University Press in 1999.
I interviewed Nan Enstad in Madison, Wisconsin at the studios of community radio station WORT. Many thanks for their hospitality.
RELATED
Debunking the Capitalist Cowboy by Nan Enstad (Boston Review)
How Jim Crow Went to China in the Making of Big Tobacco (Interview with Nan Enstad in Truthout)
Spreading Global Freedom, or the Divine Right to Traffic Drugs, Guns, and People
Slavery’s Imperial Skein: Knitting Together the Capitalist Empire
United Slaughterhouse of America: Josh Specht on the Cattle-Beef Complex
MUSIC
“Lucky Day” performed by Judy Garland
“Nicotine Stain” by Siouxsie and the Banshees
“Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)” by Tex Williams
“Last Cigarette” by Dramarama
“Cigarette” by The Smithereens
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
