of racial engineering. Not o

nly was a canal buil
t but also a cosmos-a culture st
itched together by

white-defined dictates of work discipline and efficiency in which blacks were the butt, the sign of all that was incompetent, the black nature through which the white canal had to bore in order to join the oceans for commercial might. Intrinsic to the refrain, and as natural as the endless complaints about the ghastly climate with its heat, humidity, mold, malaria, yellow fever, and death, was that of how poorly the negroes worked. "It was a common saying in the Zone," writes Frederic J. Haskin in his book bearing the endorsement of officialdom. The Panama Canal (published as early in the canal history as 1913), "that if the negro were paid twice as much he would work only half as long." This is the infamous "b[l]ackward slopi