The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class

Description

An enduring history of how race and class came together to mark the course of the antebellum US and our present crisis. Roediger shows that in a nation pledged to independence, but less and less able to avoid the harsh realities of wage labor, the identity of "white" came to allow many Northern workers to see themselves as having something in common with their bosses. Projecting onto enslaved people and free Blacks the preindustrial closeness to pleasure that regimented labor denied them, "white workers" consumed blackface popular culture, reshaped languages of class, and embraced racist practices on and off the job. Far from simply preserving economic advantage, white working-class racism derived its terrible force from a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforced stereotypes and helped to forge the very identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks. Full of insight regarding the precarious positions of not-quite-white Irish immigrants to the US and the fate of working class abolitionism, Wages of Whiteness contributes mightily and soberly to debates over the 1619 Project and critical race theory.

David Roediger is widely credited as a founder of Critical Whiteness Studies. He writes as a historian and interdisciplinary scholar of race and labor in the US. Educated in public schools and in social movements, his major books include Wages of Whiteness, Seizing Freedom, and How Race Survived US History.

The Celestine Prophecy of whiteness studies. * SPIN * An extremely important and insightful book. * The Nation * A brilliant account of how white workers in antebellum America constructed a social identity fundamentally premised on their 'whiteness.' -- Steve Fraser * American Historical Review * Compelling. -- John White * Times Higher Education Supplement * Delivers powerful insights into the collective psyche of the U.S. working class. Striking. -- Chris Searle * Morning Star * An important contribution to our understanding of what has often been called 'American exceptionalism.' Sensitive and detailed handling of a wide range of original sources. -- Louis Kushnick * Race and Class * Brilliant. Remarkable for its subtlety, its penetrating and honest analysis. -- Fred Whitehead * People's Culture * Scholarly and thoroughly documented, The Wages of Whiteness is nonetheless a highly readable, compact and compelling narrative. A provocative illumination of the long and tortuous history of racism in the U.S. -- Franklin Rosemont * Heartland Journal * Casts a new light on a broad social, cultural and political landscape. -- Iver Bernstein * Journal of American History * Far and away the best treatment of white working-class racial attitudes in the nineteenth century that I have seen. -- George M. Fredrickson An indispensable addition to our knowledge of American working class formation. -- Joe W. Trotter * Journal of Social History * In this penetrating study of the origins of white working-class racial attitudes, Roediger profoundly illuminates the new labor history. A distinctive extension of the scholarly studies that locate the nexus of American society in race and labor. -- Joseph Boskin * Choice * A timely and important intervention in the current debates over 'race' and ethnicity. Roediger has opened up the question of white identity. -- Catherine Hall * New Left Review * Interesting and useful. Reconstructs how labor in America made racism part of its very being. -- John DeBrizzi * Telos * A brilliant, authoritative, carefully researched study of major importance. -- Michael Rogin * Radical History Review * A real contribution to the study of the dynamic relationship that exists between the variables of race and class. A very engaging and compelling book. Wages of Whiteness will have a broad appeal to students and researchers across a wide array of disciplines. -- Lisa Reilly and Cameron McCarthy * European Journal of Intercultural Studies * A welcome challenge to the old and new mythmakers. -- Noel Ignatiev * Labor [Le Travail] * A significant contribution, particularly necessary for those who want to see the struggle for labor unity across racial lines move forward. -- Paul Mishler * Science and Society * Roediger's lasting contribution ensures that the history of race and class can no longer be written from the perspective of romantic working class heroes, nor can it be written in a spirit of self-righteous 'anger.' -- Barry Goldberg * New Politics * Subtle, serious, commands our attention -- J. Milton Yinger * Ethnic and Racial Studies * Roediger's excellent book is must reading for those interested in American working-class formation. -- Andrew Kim * Critical Sociology * In The Wages of Whiteness David Roediger takes a courageous look at the development of white working-class racism and attempts to unravel its complex skein of economic, cultural, and psycho-political issues. -- Soledad Santiago * Foundation News * Of great originality and yet firmly grounded in a rich and diverse scholarship. There is no denying the enormous achievement of this book. Henceforth there will be no evading the question of racism in our contemplation of working-class formation in America. -- David Brody * Journal of Interdisciplinary History * Offers a compelling understanding of working-class racism. A rich and detailed history that traces notions of whiteness from the early seventeenth century to the late nineteenth. -- Rhonda Levine * Contemporary Sociology * Much has been written about the sources of racism and the wellsprings of racial conflict but few historians have shown David Roediger's sensitivity to the process by which race figured in defining the very nature of American society. The author's most important contribution is to elucidate how racial identity was critical to the formation of the working class during the nineteenth century. Roediger's central argument is most compelling. -- Ronald Mendel * Labour History Review * David Roediger's fascinating and vital study will satisfy even the most jaded intellectual palate and deserves the widest circulation. -- Martin Crawford * History * The book speaks so clearly to what historians know about the American working class, but with enormous originality. Broadly accessible to a wide audience, it connects the histories of slave labor and free labor thus providing a more profound understanding of American working class formation. Theoretically sophisticated, pulling together subtle but significant connections among race, class and gender. Blindingly revealing and of lasting scholarly value. * Organization of American Historians Prize Committee on awarding Wages the 1992 Merle Curti Prize * At last an American labor historian realizes that white workers have a racial identity that matters as race matters to those who are not white. -- Neil Irvin Painter Praise for Black on White: Black Writers on what It Means to be White edited by David R. Roediger: Although long dismissed as irrelevant or biased, African American views on whiteness are in fact crucial to any intelligent discussion on race. By documenting the history of these views, David Roediger is not only addressing a compelling need, he is enriching the ?eld of Race Studies. -- Toni Morrison Praise for Black on White: Black Writers on what It Means to be White edited by David R. Roediger: Black on White is a brilliantly disturbing collection of work by black authors who are the often unappreciated foreparents of contemporary debates about the fallacies and functions of whiteness. These writings throw generous light on Fannie Lou Hamer's deliciously cryptic claim: the mistake that whites made with blacks is that they put us behind them leaving blacks little choice, for survival's sake, but to learn and master white culture. Black on White is proof that not only was Hamer right, but that if white Americans are to survive the madness of whiteness, they must now listen to and learn from those who made a glorious art out of a painful necessity. -- Michael Eric Dyson author of Race Rules Praise for Black on White: Black Writers on what It Means to be White edited by David R. Roediger: Brilliant, wide-ranging and beautifully executed, Black on White puts to rest any claims that 'whiteness' is a passing fad meant to put white folks at the center again. -- Robin D.G. Kelley Praise for Black on White: Black Writers on what It Means to be White edited by David R. Roediger: Yet another ?ash of brilliance illuminates and largely defines a vital subject area. Black on White deserves the widest reading. -- Sterling Stuckey, Presidential Chair, University of California Riverside and author of Slave Culture Praise for Black on White: Black Writers on what It Means to be White edited by David R. Roediger: This valuable collection provides a new and badly-needed perspective on America's deep seated problems of racial inequality and antagonism. Much has been written and anthologized to show what whites thought and felt about blacks. This is the ?rst effort to present a range of black opinion on the meaning of whiteness, and it is a notably successful one. -- George M. Fredrickson, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History, Stanford University Praise for Black on White: Black Writers on what It Means to be White edited by David R. Roediger: Black on White is a superb collection of writings by African Americans about the nature of White identity in the United States. David Roediger's informed and inspired introduction and the eloquent and insightful works he has collected expose the ideas, attitudes, and actions that transform the ?ction of white racial identity into an all too real social fact. At a time when white politicians, pundits, and private citizens base many public policies and even more private decisions in the knowledge they claim to have about black people, whiteness seems to disappear. Black on White redirects our focus to the way white people appear to blacks, to the insights, analyses, and interpretations emanating from people who became experts on whiteness out of dire necessity. -- George Lipsitz, University of California, San Diego Praise for The Sinking Middle Class: An incisive, timely, clear-eyed analysis of race and class in America. -- Robin D.G. Kelley Praise for The Sinking Middle Class: Brilliant and Insightful [it] explores the ways in which appeals to save the middle class in electoral politics harm the very constituencies they purport to help. -- George Lipsitz Praise for Class, Race, and Marxism: No contemporary intellectual has better illuminated the interwoven social histories and conceptual dimensions of race and class domination. With this stunning new collection of essays, David Roediger once again demonstrates that he is a vital thinker for all of us seeking to bridge the imperatives of economic and social justice. -- Nikhil Singh, New York University Praise for Class, Race, and Marxism: David Roediger's work is always as learned as it is profoundly engaged with the pursuit of social justice. From his signature study of the 'wages of whiteness,' to the analysis of links between settler colonial dispossession, gendered social reproduction, plantation management, and immigrant labor in the making of modern racial capitalism-Roediger's bold commitments to demonstrating the historical and ongoing implications of race and class in the United States are timely, and more necessary than ever. -- Lisa Lowe, Tufts University Praise for Class, Race, and Marxism: These bracing essays express hard truths and grounded hopes as they help us to rethink a past too much with us still. Portraying a history of oppression and resistance made at the intersections of social identities, Roediger makes sophisticated analyses of culture and political economy accessible to scholars and to activists. -- Kimberle Crenshaw, Columbia University School of Law Praise for Class, Race, and Marxism: When it comes to thinking about the history of racism, anti-racism and the US working class, David Roediger has no peer. Incisive, provocative, and uncannily timely, Class, Race, and Marxism reckons honestly with the challenges of building class solidarity across the fissures of race, the difficulties of writing about it, and the ways in which the two are entwined. If there is a single lesson here, it is that solidarity is not forever-it is elusive, fragile, and hard as hell. -- Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression Praise for Class, Race, and Marxism: David Roediger wades into the fray with refreshing nuance and generosity. * In These Times * Praise for Class, Race, and Marxism: Roediger's book couldn't have appeared at a more timely moment. * Brooklyn Rail * Praise for Class, Race, and Marxism: A scintillating compilation . Roediger's book explains exactly why even the most sickening atavisms of racism are fully compatible with the capitalist order, with ramifications into the 21st century. -- Alan Wald * Against the Current * Praise for Class, Race, and Marxism: Roediger addresses the challenges that class and race continue to present for U.S. radicals . should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the era of Trumpian politics. This is an important book, with lessons that some way wish to ignore, but at their peril. * Working Class Studies Association C.L.R. James Award * Praise for Class, Race, and Marxism: Studying, understanding, struggling against, and ultimately replacing this centuries-old, foundational, and deep societal reality remains essential, as Roediger, a consistently pathbreaking historian, makes clear in these insightful essays. * Monthly Review * Praise for Class, Race, and Marxism: Amid the cacophony of competing perspectives, David Roediger's Class, Race and Marxism not only expertly evaluates the historical, theoretical, and political stakes of contemporary debates on race and class, but also significantly contributes to scholarship that 'refus[es] to place race outside of the logic of capital.' * Black Scholar Journal * Praise for Seizing Freedom: Seizing Freedom persuasively documents the self-emancipation of the enslaved Black folk of the American South. A meticulously researched book, it offers close readings of verbal and visual texts, unfailingly attentive to issues of race, gender, and labor coming together and falling apart. It brilliantly brings together disability studies, race in the Civil War, and the disappearance of the gold standard. A worthy supplement to Du Bois's Black Reconstruction. -- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University Praise for Seizing Freedom: This sparkling book does more than merely restore and underscore the agency of bold worker-slaves in attempts to make the US democratic and free. It aims artfully at the underlying mechanisms of revolutionary transformation: imagination and solidarity, time, labor and the human body, gender, class and race. In Roediger's hands, these are neither dry nor overly abstract categories. The insurgent history of abolition gets resuscitated and used vividly to address a host of stalled contemporary debates and ossified styles of thought. -- Paul Gilroy, King's College London Praise for Seizing Freedom: Sweeping in its scope and filled with brilliant and original insights, this book reminds us of how little still is our appreciation both for what slaves accomplished between 1860 and 1865 and how beholden the national labor movement and the woman suffrage campaigns were to the 'general strike' they won...Evocative and inspiring, Seizing Freedom represents a landmark study by one of the foremost scholars of the history of race and labor in our time that will fundamentally challenge the way we understand the moral and practical power of emancipation. -- Thavolia Glymph, Duke University Praise for Seizing Freedom: Seizing Freedom, David Roediger's spellbinding account of black self-emancipation and the array of movements accelerated by this 'general strike of the slaves' as DuBois put it, reminds us that it is never too late to take up the democratic promise of Radical Reconstruction. -- Angela Y. Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz Praise for How Race Survived US History: Sometime in the US of the past quarter-century, calling policies and the people who dream them up racist became a worse offense than for them to be racist. This inversion, always dressed in self-righteous indignation, is actually part of the social evolution of white supremacy. David Roediger's book details in sharp and readable prose how race survived US history. It is a must-read for all who strive to understand-and abolish-what underlies the strangely strident rhetoric enveloping everything from presidential contests to prison expansion. -- Ruth Wilson Gilmore Praise for How Race Survived US History: In a trenchant, broad-ranging analysis, the leading US historian of racism, David Roediger, demonstrates white supremacy's incredible staying power against major societal forces that should long ago have dismantled it. Not capitalism, not emancipation, not labor movements, not mass immigration, not the civil rights movement, not colorblind liberalism, and not the Barack Obama presidential campaign-not one of these forces separately, and not all of them together-have been able to destroy the deep structures of white racism in the United States. -- Joe R. Feagin Praise for How Race Survived US History: David Roediger's bold and brilliant book presents an extraordinary new framework for understanding the persistence of racism in the history of the United States. This book is a wake-up call and a warning, an appeal for understanding and action. It offers a clear and convincing demonstration that white supremacy is not merely a relic of the past but rather a perpetually renewed and infinitely renewable resource for inequality and injustice in the present. -- George Lipsitz Praise for How Race Survived US History: A staggering re-interpretation of the whole course of American history in which the skeletons in the closet walk again. From genocide and massacre to lynching to the coded tongue of liberalism, the bankruptcy of white supremacy is found in the racialized structures maintained by the enclosures of incarceration and the foreclosures of impignoration -- Peter Linebaugh Praise for How Race Survived US History: An extremely timely argument about the enduring significance of 'race' in American society, as well as a sophisticated polemic against the complacent assumption that the Obama phenomenon spells the end of American racism. -- Richard Seymour Praise for Colored White: David Roediger has been showing us all for years how whiteness is a marked and not a neutral color in the history of the United States. Colored White . . . marks yet another advance. In the burgeoning literature on whiteness this book stands out for its groundedness, its analytic clarity, and its scope. -- Michael Rogin Praise for Colored White: No other writer on whiteness can match Roediger's historical breadth and depth; his grasp of the formative role played by race in the making of the nineteenth-century working class, in defining the contours of twentieth-century US citizenship, and in shaping the meaning of emerging social identities and cultural practices in the twenty-first century. -- George Lipsitz Praise for Working toward Whiteness: Whiteness Studies can enable us to see American history in a wholly new light, and for the development of the field we must thank Roediger . . . full of thought-provoking observations. * Boston Globe * Praise for Working toward Whiteness: A tour de force. Roediger marshals vast knowledge extending from social and labor history to popular culture and the role of the state. This book will be the point of departure for future studies of whiteness. -- Rudolph J. Vecoli Praise for Working toward Whiteness: This book is a major achievement by all standard. A more than worthy successor to Roediger's groundbreaking The Wages of Whiteness, this new book tells in rich detail how the 'new immigrants' from eastern and southern Europe . . . went from being an 'in-between' racial group to to one that was unequivocally white. -- George Fredrickson Praise for Working toward Whiteness: Roediger has given us another of our most compelling, incisive, and elegant analyses of racial subjugation and privilege-in-the-making in the US. A brilliant investigation of that historical zone where institutions, ideas, and street-level experiences meet and give form to one another. It may be Roediger's most powerful contribution yet. -- Matthew Frye Jacobson Praise for History against Misery: This wonderful collection of essays is not only a powerful indictment of late capitalism . . . but also a fascinating survey of resistance voices, from the IWW to the Surrealists, from the Chicago Idea Anarchists to Black Liberation. -- Michael Loewy Praise for History against Misery: It is to the summer of our discontent that the surrealist brings us a wintry elation: humor, a poetics of resistance, purposeful deviance motivated by genuine compassion and a love of truth. -- Blake Schwarzenbach