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

David R. Roediger

Verso, 1999 - History - 200 pages

Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger's widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks.

In an afterword to this new edition, Roediger discusses recent studies of whiteness and the changing face of labor itself. He surveys criticism of his work, accepting many objections whilst challenging others, especially the view that the study of working class racism implies a rejection of Marxism and radical politics.

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Contents

• Settler Colonialism: 19
• Race and the Languages of Class from the Revolution: 41
• White Slaves Wage Slaves and Free White Labor: 65
• Work Culture and Whiteness in Industrializing America: 93
• Minstrelsy and White Working: 115
• IrishAmerican Workers and White Racial Formation: 133
• The Limits of Emancipation and the Fate: 165
• Afterword to the Revised Edition: 185
• Index: 191

Popular passages

Page 63 - Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976...‎

Page 62 - Francis J. Grund, The Americans in Their Moral, Social and Political Relations...‎

Page 146 - The niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard, or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything!‎

Page 91 - Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).‎

Page 162 - David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971...‎

Page 174 - I'll resign, and let Sambo take it, On every day in the year! On every day in the year, boys, And wid none of your nasty pride, All my right in a Southern bagnet prod Wid Sambo I'll divide. The men who object to Sambo Should take his place and fight; And it's better to have a naygur's hue Than a liver that's wake an‎

Page 60 - They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a state in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote ag'in.‎

Page 39 - To Serve Well and Faithfully": Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).‎

Page 17 - Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution...‎

Page 162 - Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 52. 1 1 . Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States...‎

About the author

David Roediger is Kendrick Babcock Chair of History at the University of Illinois. Among his books are Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (with Philip S. Foner), How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon, and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. He is the editor of Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson, The North and Slavery and Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White as well as a new edition of Covington Hall's Labor Struggles in the Deep South. His articles have appeared in New Left Review, Against the Current, Radical History Review, History Workshop Journal, The Progressive and Tennis.

Mike Davis is the author of several books including Planet of Slums, City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Magical Urbanism. He was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in Papa'aloa, Hawaii.

Michael Sprinker was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the History of Historical Materialism and History and Ideology in Proust are also published by Verso. Together with Mike Davis, he founded Verso's Haymarket Series and guided it until his death in 1999.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class; Haymarket (Paperback); Haymarket series
• Author: David R. Roediger
• Edition: revised
• Publisher: Verso, 1999
• ISBN: 1859842402, 9781859842409
• Length: 200 pages
• Subjects: History / United States / General; Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations