Micro-practices of nation-building: race and class in Jennifer Elrick’s Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism

How do race and class intersect in state practices of nation-building? This is one of the key themes in Jennifer Elrick’s book Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Postwar Canada. In this essay, I discuss Elrick’s conceptualization of the relation between race and class, which combines notions of class as a component of race on the one hand, and class as intersecting with race on the other hand. I argue that the intersectional perspective is most convincing. Elrick shows that the cultural and moral traits which bureaucrats ascribe to applicants – integrity, ambition, trustworthiness, initiative and self-reliance – are part of both racial classification systems and class classification systems. I therefore conclude by proposing to think of the intersection of class and race in state classificatory practices as consisting in an overlap in the criteria for allocating individuals to the categories of class and race.