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| David Roediger |
David Roediger wrote
about the efforts of white workers to differentiate themselves first
from African slaves and later from emancipated free Blacks. He found
strong support for his thesis that the way lower class white workers
differentiated themselves first from Black slaves, and later from Blacks in
general, contributed to the magnification of racism in the United States.
The book covered the period of the American Revolution through to the
Reconstruction and the Industrial Age. Aside from a few comparisons to
what happened in Great Britain or other European countries, for the most part
the book focused on the labor movement in the United States. Roediger
considered Marxist, Republican and Democratic treatments of racism in the
context of the class struggle and labor movement. He disagreed with
Marxists that subordinated racism to the economic struggle and shoed how white
views on slavery helped to shape the Republican and Democratic political
parties. He agreed with psychologists and sociologists who claimed that
white anxieties as they climbed the ladder of success inadvertently fed into
fears and self-doubt that they projected onto Blacks. He gave examples of
how this projection occurred in colonial times right up to the emancipation and
continued to play out in the labor movement in factories in the Northeast after
the civil war. In the end closing chapters he focused on the Black minstrelsy
phenomenon with whites painting their faces black and strained relations
between Blacks and Irish-Catholic immigrants. Roediger referenced the political
ideologies of early revolutionary colonial such as John Adams, Thomas Paine and
Benjamin Franklin as well as political theorists like Karl Marx and his
followers. He set these aside to take up theories he preferred such as
those of famous Black authors such as W.E.B DuBois and Frederick Douglass, and
sociologists such as Herbert Gutman, Ira Berlin, David Halle, Daniel Rodgers,
George Evans and George Rawick. The idea of whites projecting their
own inadequacies onto Blacks and then castigating and segregating them because
of it is a standard scapegoat scenario, but it is not often pointed out so clearly
as Roediger does in this book. His observation that Marx’s myopic focus
on economic factors in the class struggle caused him to completely miss other
important factors (such as racism) that played a bigger role in the class
struggle in America.
David Roediger, Wages
of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London:
Verso, 2007)
