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.
In the paper, McGee uses historical census data from Brazil and the United States and shows how racial boundaries and mixed-race advantages varied depending on local demographics and colonial history. What he found demonstrates how the definition of race is a political strategy, not a biological reality.
McGee’s paper cites Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676–1677 in colonial Virginia as an example. After planters were challenged by multiracial revolt of Black slaves, white indentured servants, and free labourers, the planters used a divide and conquer approach to prevent future unrest. They hardened “racial lines, privileging poor whites over Black people, as exemplified by the 1705 Virginia Slave Codes.” The rebellion serves as one example of a widespread strategy.
“Racial categories became a tool for landowners to promise privileges to some, but not all, workers,” McGee explained. “By defining certain labourers as white and granting them advantages, those individuals were less likely to join revolts against the elite.”
Different definitions of who was considered Black and who was considered white, or coloured, depended on where a person was across the colonial world and when they lived.
“I open the paper with the observation that Homer Plessy would not have been considered Black in Brazil,” McGee said. “Yet in Louisiana, where he lived, he was legally Black, and that classification is what brought his case to the Supreme Court.”
Plessy, whose case upheld ‘separate but equal’ racial segregation laws during Jim Crow, was charged after boarding a whites-only railway carriage in New Orleans in 1892. A Louisiana Creole man, he had both European and African ancestry but Louisiana law after the end of Reconstruction defined him as Black and thus barred from whites-only spaces. Being of mixed race was also a factor in the earlier uprising of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, in 1791.
“In Saint-Domingue, many of the social elite were mixed-race individuals. In fact, in many French Caribbean colonies, there were laws allowing mixed-race people to petition for legal whiteness,” McGee said. “During the revolution, many leaders on both the revolutionary and colonial sides were mixed-race Haitians. It became a clash of elites, many of whom were not socially white, but could petition to be legally white.”
The definition of people of mixed-race people as equal to Black Africans in the United States but elevated above them in Haiti or Brazil, is contrasted again, with the example of Apartheid South Africa.
“In South Africa, race wasn’t legally defined by parentage or ethnic origin,” McGee said. “The elites knew they would never hold onto power if they enshrined that in law because it would exclude too many people understood to be white but who lacked pure European ancestry.”
McGee’s model illustrates that across colonial powers, racial boundaries under different conditions could have been drawn differently, and which groups are seen as socially superior or inferior could have changed. The realities of colonial definitions of race continue to echo today.
“This kind of divide-and-conquer strategy is still prevalent,” McGee said, “not just in politics, but in society and business. It creates incentives for people to act in ways that benefit those designing the system, even if those actions aren’t in the individuals’ own best interest.”
Return to the Department of Economics website.
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