{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,16]],"date-time":"2026-10-16T01:01:53Z","timestamp":1792112513760,"version":"4.4.0"},"reference-count":26,"publisher":"American Public Health Association","issue":"10","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Am J Public Health"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2019,10]]},"abstract":"<jats:p> This study explores the history of the denial of the vulnerability of non-White workers to risks of heat illness. Defenders of chattel slavery argued for the capacity of workers of African descent to tolerate extreme environmental temperatures. In Hawai\u2018i, advocates of racial segregation emphasized the perils to Whites of strenuous work in tropical climates and the advantages of using Chinese immigrants. Growing reliance on Mexican immigrants in agriculture and other outdoor employment in the early 20th century brought forth claims of their natural suitability for unhealthful working conditions. These efforts to naturalize racial hierarchy fell apart after 1930. The Great Depression subverted the notion that people of European descent could not endure hot work. More rigorous investigation refuted contentions of racial difference in heat tolerance. <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.2105\/ajph.2019.305246","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,8,15]],"date-time":"2019-08-15T20:00:41Z","timestamp":1565899241000},"page":"1329-1335","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":9,"title":["\u201cA Widespread Superstition\u201d: The Purported Invulnerability of Workers of Color to Occupational Heat Stress"],"prefix":"10.2105","volume":"109","author":[{"given":"Alan","family":"Derickson","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Alan Derickson is with the School of Labor and Employment Relations, Pennsylvania State University, University Park."}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"844","reference":[{"key":"#cr-split#-bib3.1","unstructured":"Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 260-264"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib3.2","unstructured":"Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 39-41"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib3.3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia H. King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 5, 59.","DOI":"10.1017\/CBO9780511665035"},{"key":"bib4","author":"Tidyman P.","journal-title":"Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib7.1","unstructured":"William H. Holcombe, \"Characteristics and Capabilities of the Negro Race,\"Southern Literary Messenger, December 1861, 401 (quotation), 403 (quotation), 401-404"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib7.2","unstructured":"J.\u2005H. Van Evrie, Negroes and Negro \"Slavery\": The First an Inferior Race, the Latter Its Normal Condition (New York, NY: Van Evrie, Horton, 1861), 256 (quotation), 251 (quotation), 64, 247-248, 250, 258, 263-269."},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib13.1","unstructured":"US Immigration Commission, Reports of the Immigration Commission, 41 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911), vol. 23: 67 (quotation), 67-68, vol. 24: 235-236, 600"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib13.2","unstructured":"Victor S. Clark, \"Mexican Labor in the United States,\"Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor, September 1908, 466 (quotation), 466-467, 482, 487-488, 493-495"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib13.3","unstructured":"Mario T. Garcia,Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-1920(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 77-78, 92."},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib14.1","unstructured":"Zaragosa Vargas, Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917-1933 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 43-47, 100, 102, 121"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib14.2","unstructured":"John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 240 (quotation)"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib14.3","unstructured":"Paul S. Taylor,Mexican Labor in the United States, 3 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1931), vol. 2: 14 (quotation), 5."},{"key":"bib18","unstructured":"Raymond Wolters, Negroes and the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1970), esp. 113\u2013124; Charles H. Martin, \u201cWhite Supremacy and Black Workers: Georgia\u2019s \u2018Black Shirts\u2019 Combat the Great Depression,\u201dLabor History18, no. 3 (1977): 366\u2013381; Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez,Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, rev. ed. (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2006); Devra Weber,Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 137\u2013163; James N. Gregory,American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), 56\u201362."},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib19.1","unstructured":"Andrew J. Dunar and Dennis McBride, Building Hoover Dam: A Oral History of the Great Depression (New York, NY: Twayne Publishers, 1993), 44 (Woodbury quotation), andpassimthroughout, esp. 36-47, 306, 317"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib19.2","unstructured":"Roosevelt Fitzgerald, \"Blacks and the Boulder Dam Project,\"Nevada Historical Society Quarterly24, no. 3 (1981), 255-260"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib19.3","unstructured":"Michelle F. Turk, A History of Occupational Health and Safety: From 1915 to the Present (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2018), 69."},{"key":"bib20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Turk, Historyof Occupational Health, 86\u201388; Steven M. Horvath and Elizabeth C. Horvath, The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory: Its History and Contributions (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 63\u201364; John H. Talbott, H.\u2005T. Edwards, D.\u2005B. Dill, and L. Drastich, \u201cPhysiological Responses to High Environmental Temperature,\u201d American Journal of Tropical Medicine 13, no. 4 (1933): 383 (quotation), 381\u2013397.","DOI":"10.4269\/ajtmh.1933.s1-13.381"},{"key":"bib22","author":"John H","journal-title":"Journal of Clinical Investigation"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib23.1","unstructured":"Clarence A. Mills, Climate Makes the Man (New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1942), 169-170, 250-257"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib23.2","unstructured":"US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health,Occupational Exposure to Hot Environments, Revised Criteria, 1986: Criteria for a Recommended Standard(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1986)"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib23.3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Joel M. Hanna and Daniel E. Brown, \"Human Heat Tolerance: An Anthropological Perspective,\"Annual Review of Anthropology12 (1983): 273 (quotation), 259-284, esp. 278-280","DOI":"10.1146\/annurev.an.12.100183.001355"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib23.4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"cf. Paul T. Baker, \"Racial Differences in Heat Tolerance,\"American Journal of Physical Anthropology16, no. 3 (September 1958): 287-305","DOI":"10.1002\/ajpa.1330160303"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib23.5","unstructured":"Kentaro Ono, Chi T. Viet, Yi Ye, et al. \"Cutaneous Pigmentation Modulates Skin Sensitivity via Tyrosinase-Dependent Dopapinergic Signalling,\"Scientific Reports7 (August 23, 1917): 9181"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib23.6","unstructured":"Carol K. Redmond, Jack J. Emes, Sati Mazumdar, Paul C. Mageem, and Eliezer Kamon,Mortality of Steelworkers Employed in Hot Jobs(Cincinnati, OH: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 1977), 16-19, 47-68"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib23.7","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Carina J. Gronlund, \"Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in Heat-Related Health Effects and Their Mechanisms: A Review,\"Current Epidemiology Reports1, no. 3 (2014): 166-167","DOI":"10.1007\/s40471-014-0014-4"},{"key":"#cr-split#-bib23.8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Kelly M. Hoffman, Sophie Trawalter, Jordan R. Axt, and M. Norman Oliver, \"Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs About Biological Differences Between Blacks and Whites,\" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 16 (2016): 4296-4301. On earlier medical notions of African American insensitivity to pain, see Martin S. Pernick,A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century America(New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985), 154-166.","DOI":"10.1073\/pnas.1516047113"}],"container-title":["American Journal of Public Health"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/ajph.aphapublications.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.2105\/AJPH.2019.305246","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2022,5,10]],"date-time":"2022-05-10T00:16:42Z","timestamp":1652141802000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/ajph.aphapublications.org\/doi\/full\/10.2105\/AJPH.2019.305246"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2019,10]]},"references-count":26,"journal-issue":{"issue":"10","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2019,10]]}},"alternative-id":["10.2105\/AJPH.2019.305246"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.2105\/ajph.2019.305246","relation":{},"ISSN":["0090-0036","1541-0048"],"issn-type":[{"value":"0090-0036","type":"print"},{"value":"1541-0048","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2019,10]]}}}