Race is a social construct, but not one that is consistently defined across time or place. Throughout colonial history, racial identity has been a tool elites imposed to make it more difficult for workers to organize and resist. Assistant Professor Dan McGee of the Department of Economics has developed a new model for examining how the phenomenon of racial definition has been used differently across history and geographies to extract more labour from enslaved, Black-defined workers and offer incentives to some free workers usually defined as white.

“Before I started working on this project more rigorously, I definitely had a casual understanding of race as a social construct,” McGee said, “but I hadn’t really internalized what that meant. I still treated racial categories as if they were innate and immutable.”

The evidence generated by his research inspired McGee to update those beliefs. Appointed to his University of Toronto post in July 2025, McGee conducted the research for the paper, Exploitation Through Racialization, while a graduate student at Princton and post-doctoral fellow at Monash University. [Read more…]