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The Haymarket Series
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
The classic history of how the identity of “white worker” came to be, and the awful results.
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.
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.
240 pages, Paperback
First published September 17, 1991
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About the author
David R. Roediger
43 books117 followersDavid Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Ed from Northern Illinois University. He completed a doctorate in History at Northwestern in 1979. Roediger has taught labor and Southern history at Northwestern, University of Missouri, University of Minnesota, and University of Illinois. He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. He has written on U.S. movements for a shorter working day, on labor and poetry, on the history of radicalism, and on the racial identities of white workers and of immigrants. The former chair of the editorial committee of the Charles H. Kerr Company, the world's oldest radical publisher, he has been active in the surrealist movement, labor support and anti-racist organizing.
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January 9, 2024
I read Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness for class, and while I found it hugely illuminating in its continuing relevance–it was, also, frankly depressing.
Wages appeared in 1991 at a moment of renewed inquiry into the question of whiteness in relation to the US labor movement and has since left many porous boundaries for scholars to outline. since the 60s, activists of color have been challenging white people’s inability to see race in relation to themselves, but it wasn’t until the 90s that critical reassessments of whiteness have reached a point of avalanche in academic circles. the project of re-articulating whiteness as a constructed race was one pursued relentlessly by critics and scholars (such as Toni Morrison, Howard Winant, Michael Obi, Hazel Carby, and many others) and is the principle focus of this book.
in Wages of Whiteness, Roediger breaks sharply with Marxist interpretations of US labor history that preserve a strange silence about the social realities of race. “the main body of writing by white Marxists in the United States,” he writes, “has both ‘naturalized' whiteness and over-simplified race, reproduc[ing] the weaknesses of both American liberalism and neo-conservatism” (6). whiteness, according to Roediger, has enjoyed for far too long its status of normativeness and invisibility in labor scholarship. dislodging it from that normative spot in the center is therefore imperative for a more capacious understanding of the US labor movement.
building upon the generative insights of Black scholars (particularly those of Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois), Wages of Whiteness made new hay in labor scholarship by reconceptualizing race in America as a “white problem” (24). whiteness and white supremacy, Roediger argues, were not a peripheral condition of the formation of the working class, but central features of the white worker’s emerging class consciousness. the strength of Roediger’s argument here is to take seriously the agency of 19th century white workers as “historical actors making their own choices” (24). Roediger was, in other words, unwilling to cast white workers as unwitting victims of capitalism who were merely duped into racism. white workers, he asserts, not only accepted and promoted racial distinctions, but were deeply corrupted by an excessive “devotion to whiteness” (22). thus at stake in this book is the question, “why [did] the white working class settle for being white” (6)? the short version of the answer Roediger finds derives from W.E.B. Du Bois' notion of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” (20).
“the pleasures of whiteness,” Roedgier writes, “could function as a wage” (13) and in 19th century America they led “many workers [to] define themselves as white” (6). in Roediger's view, the Civil War and end of slavery stripped the white worker’s ability to derive satisfaction from defining themselves as “not slaves” (39). this, alongside the circumstances of economic exploitation and class oppression, generated for the working class an acute cultural and psychological anxiety that centered around definitions of being 'white.' put bluntly, if 19th century white workers could no longer project a sense of inferiority into Black enslaved people–how will they feel better about their own growing subordination to a rising class of capitalists?
the irony Roediger's analysis depicts is a biting one: whiteness as a 'psychological wage' compensated white workers for their own exploitation. white workers clung to the myth of whiteness, Roediger writes, as a way “of reassuring [themselves] in a society in which downward social mobility was a constant fear” that they “might lose everything but not whiteness”(60).
unable to release themselves from the implacable paradox of this investment in whiteness, white workers found it unthinkable to acknowledge the very obvious kinship between their condition of dependency and that of the slave. as a result, white workers mobilized downward against Black freed slaves instead of upward against their white capitalist masters. they, to put it sharply, preferred to live in exploitative poverty than, as Du Bois puts it, “see colored labor with a decent wage” (qtd. in Roediger, 20). indeed, such was the allure of whiteness and the power of racism that Irish immigrants could promote the worst forms of white supremacy by participating in violent riots against Black people without feeling self-conscious about their own similar condition of exilic displacement.
the strength of Roediger’s reflections in Wages is to make clear how a blind commitment to whiteness destroyed the greatest opportunity America ever saw to deal a decisive blow to the foundations of capitalist exploitation and build a truly united labor movement.
it is really difficult not to read this book without feeling the past pressing into the present. as Kathleen Clever astutely remarks in her introduction to this edition, “the spurious wages that white racism paid long ago continue to bedevil democracy and diminish our humanity” (25). in The Wages of Whiteness, the turbulent rifts in the 19th century labor mouvement spread from past to present, and the lesson that emerges becomes a horrific cautionary tale: there is no hope for a class revolution if we continue to pay whiteness its wages.
Wages appeared in 1991 at a moment of renewed inquiry into the question of whiteness in relation to the US labor movement and has since left many porous boundaries for scholars to outline. since the 60s, activists of color have been challenging white people’s inability to see race in relation to themselves, but it wasn’t until the 90s that critical reassessments of whiteness have reached a point of avalanche in academic circles. the project of re-articulating whiteness as a constructed race was one pursued relentlessly by critics and scholars (such as Toni Morrison, Howard Winant, Michael Obi, Hazel Carby, and many others) and is the principle focus of this book.
in Wages of Whiteness, Roediger breaks sharply with Marxist interpretations of US labor history that preserve a strange silence about the social realities of race. “the main body of writing by white Marxists in the United States,” he writes, “has both ‘naturalized' whiteness and over-simplified race, reproduc[ing] the weaknesses of both American liberalism and neo-conservatism” (6). whiteness, according to Roediger, has enjoyed for far too long its status of normativeness and invisibility in labor scholarship. dislodging it from that normative spot in the center is therefore imperative for a more capacious understanding of the US labor movement.
building upon the generative insights of Black scholars (particularly those of Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois), Wages of Whiteness made new hay in labor scholarship by reconceptualizing race in America as a “white problem” (24). whiteness and white supremacy, Roediger argues, were not a peripheral condition of the formation of the working class, but central features of the white worker’s emerging class consciousness. the strength of Roediger’s argument here is to take seriously the agency of 19th century white workers as “historical actors making their own choices” (24). Roediger was, in other words, unwilling to cast white workers as unwitting victims of capitalism who were merely duped into racism. white workers, he asserts, not only accepted and promoted racial distinctions, but were deeply corrupted by an excessive “devotion to whiteness” (22). thus at stake in this book is the question, “why [did] the white working class settle for being white” (6)? the short version of the answer Roediger finds derives from W.E.B. Du Bois' notion of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” (20).
“the pleasures of whiteness,” Roedgier writes, “could function as a wage” (13) and in 19th century America they led “many workers [to] define themselves as white” (6). in Roediger's view, the Civil War and end of slavery stripped the white worker’s ability to derive satisfaction from defining themselves as “not slaves” (39). this, alongside the circumstances of economic exploitation and class oppression, generated for the working class an acute cultural and psychological anxiety that centered around definitions of being 'white.' put bluntly, if 19th century white workers could no longer project a sense of inferiority into Black enslaved people–how will they feel better about their own growing subordination to a rising class of capitalists?
the irony Roediger's analysis depicts is a biting one: whiteness as a 'psychological wage' compensated white workers for their own exploitation. white workers clung to the myth of whiteness, Roediger writes, as a way “of reassuring [themselves] in a society in which downward social mobility was a constant fear” that they “might lose everything but not whiteness”(60).
unable to release themselves from the implacable paradox of this investment in whiteness, white workers found it unthinkable to acknowledge the very obvious kinship between their condition of dependency and that of the slave. as a result, white workers mobilized downward against Black freed slaves instead of upward against their white capitalist masters. they, to put it sharply, preferred to live in exploitative poverty than, as Du Bois puts it, “see colored labor with a decent wage” (qtd. in Roediger, 20). indeed, such was the allure of whiteness and the power of racism that Irish immigrants could promote the worst forms of white supremacy by participating in violent riots against Black people without feeling self-conscious about their own similar condition of exilic displacement.
the strength of Roediger’s reflections in Wages is to make clear how a blind commitment to whiteness destroyed the greatest opportunity America ever saw to deal a decisive blow to the foundations of capitalist exploitation and build a truly united labor movement.
it is really difficult not to read this book without feeling the past pressing into the present. as Kathleen Clever astutely remarks in her introduction to this edition, “the spurious wages that white racism paid long ago continue to bedevil democracy and diminish our humanity” (25). in The Wages of Whiteness, the turbulent rifts in the 19th century labor mouvement spread from past to present, and the lesson that emerges becomes a horrific cautionary tale: there is no hope for a class revolution if we continue to pay whiteness its wages.
March 31, 2024
Very useful in both its historical detail and theoretical perspective. The sections on Irish immigration and on minstrel shows are marvelous. The central thesis seems well borne out, and demonstrates in an ancillary way that any social crisis has a reactionary as well as revolutionary potential. The post bellum 19th century in the US had moments of potential left revolution, similar to the Paris Commune, but those moments were hijacked by nativists, racists, and others whom we might think of as fascists now—in the cases examined here to maintain white privilege (not a term used in the text NB) rather than make common cause with all workers. It's a marxist argument, but one that preserves race as a category more than simply an epiphenomenon of class.
November 3, 2018
The point of this book is that it has been hugely influential and it is worth reading for that reason, even though it has merely opened the gate through which many later writers have poured. It does not make exaggerated claims for itself and the author’s preface lists defects in a way that I cannot. Instead I will make an effort to encapsulate its arguments, in so far as I have been able to digest them.
We should not require an explanation of why racism is vicious, obscene and absurd. We do need an explanation for the huge role played by racism in USA political life and its widespread acceptance within the white working class of the USA, and this book offers one profitable line of enquiry. It places USA racism in the context of the 19th Century development of a wage earning working class, a concept that was in sharp conflict with the Republican ideal of the self employed man of property who is able to stand on his own feet as an independent and effective citizen. According to Republican ideology, the Revolutionary War was fought by a volunteer army of free men in defence of liberty against an army of paid mercenaries and escaped slaves serving a British tyrant, and its objective was to prevent the threat of being enslaved. [Whether ending up more like Canada would have been quite such a bad thing is not considered.]
It was a culture dominated by the presence of chattel slavery and since this system was central to the economy, it was convenient to discount the grotesque cruelty and the human suffering involved. So the notion prevailed that slavery was the just destiny for those lacking the capacity or the courage to earn their liberty and perhaps even the best situation for people of their slavish temperaments. As an extra payoff for Republican ideology, the fate of these slaves [as also the genocide of the American Indians] was an ever present warning to anyone tempted to stray from the ethic of property rights and the virtue of economic productivity.
Yet for increasing numbers of Americans, especially new immigrants, economic and social independence was not realistically attainable and the development of an industrial economy created a growing demand for a labour force that was disciplined and compliant. The point of free labour was its availability for an impersonal, contractual relationship with employers, with an hourly wage and the freedom to hire and fire. For the emerging industrial workforce, this implied insecurity and a precarious capacity to earn a living wage. For these workers, beyond the fear of destitution was the real terror of being pressed into slavery, or the ignominy of being labelled and treated as a slave.
Attitudes to slavery were deeply irrational. At some level was the suggestion that slaves were protected from the most severe challenges facing free workers; each slave had an economic value to its owner, so they were housed and fed even in periods when they were underemployed and there were types of work which were not assigned to slaves because they were just too expensive to risk injury or death. Such tasks were instead assigned to free workers earning a wage – since when they were injured or killed the employer suffered no economic loss. Slaves found ways of working that subverted the disciplines and the general acceleration of work found in the factories. It was as though slaves retained some of the innocence which industrial workers were forced to let go and this was also expressed culturally, including in music and dance. “Sorrow songs” in the 1830s, for example, were said to “move the nation.”[p117]
This culminated in significant cultural events. “Negro election day, which began in the mid eighteenth century as an offshoot of more staid white New England election celebrations, initially took shape when slaves came to town with voting whites and began to choose Black ‘governors’ and other officials amidst great, African-influenced festivity. Over the years, Blacks consolidated a position of leadership within a hugely popular holiday that came to last four and even six days. No fewer than twenty-one New England cities left records of having celebrated the day, which was also marked to some extent in North Carolina...” [p101] “...The same amusements ... prevailed at Pinkster, along with spectacular African dancing, the building of beautiful arbours and the crowning of a Black king. Cooper portrayed Blacks as ‘beating banjos, singing African songs and .. laughing in a way that seemed to set their very hearts rattling in their cages.” [p102]
Roediger does muse, at one point, on the counterfactual prospect that such slave-led entertainment and the racial and social mixing it entailed, had the potential to play a beneficial and optimistic part in America’s social history. On the contrary, the “agents of the new industrial morality” [p102] – politicians, clergy and industrialists – were alarmed at the indiscipline reflected in these disruptive manifestations of an alternative possible social world [”...presenting to the eye of a moral observer a king of chaos of sin and folly, of misery and fun” p103 ]and alongside official measures to close them down came white, working class “hate riots” and racist violence to close down these opportunities for expression and mixing. This was taking place at the same time as a different form of public entertainment known as “blackface” emerged, in which white performers entertained white audiences with material that was deeply racist. Blackface seems to have brought together a profound envy of the supposed natural artistry and wild joy of which the slave population was capable, with a vicious hostility based on a surprisingly deep fear and loathing.
These profound ambiguities in the attitudes towards the slave population reflected the psychological trauma endured by the emerging working class as the USA became increasingly industrialised through the 19th Century. They were brought into special focus during the 1840s and 1850s when extreme hardship around the time of the Great Irish Famine drove several million impoverished Irish peasants, nearly a quarter of Ireland’s total population, to migrate from rural Ireland to the cities of North America. Lacking skills and resources, they were entirely dependent on the fortunes of the labour market, where only a minority were able to secure familiar types of work such as butchery or handling horses. Their poverty was compounded by unfavourable and frankly racist attitudes on the part of Anglo Saxon Protestants, to the extent that it was possible to see their situation being more desperate and less favourable even than that of Black slaves. They had to survive in the face of racism and they did this by appealing to racism in their turn, with a ferocious intensity. They were free workers and not slaves, White and not Black. Whiteness, in short, was an invented category by means of which the Catholic Irish could win a sufficient level of acceptance in a country dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestants and to this end it was of vital importance that the negative status of non-whites – primarily Black but also Mexican and Chinese – be strongly affirmed. The viciousness with which this affirmation was acted out is of course, nauseating.
I do not imagine for a moment that the book places responsibility for American racism on the Irish immigrants. They took up an existing ideology with depressing and disappointing energy because it offered such tangible benefits as they struggled to gain social and economic acceptance. It was not something imposed on them from above, serving the interests of the economic elite. Racism did indeed blossom under the conditions imposed by industrialisation and the emergence of wage labour but it was very much a part of working class culture and cannot be reduced in simplistic terms to the machinations of the capitalists. Nor can it be accounted for by appealing to any attribute or behaviour of its victims. Nothing that was ever done by Black people accounts for White racism. To understand racism, it is always going to be necessary to understand racists and ask what benefits they expect from this vicious ideology. Understanding, of course, is not the same as condoning, but it is a necessary step on the path to change.
”If my emails are any guide, an occasional reaction by students is that the book is ‘down on white people’. One student troubled herself to emphasize that she had not been so upset since she ‘had to read Malcolm X,’ a complaint that I confess to treasuring very much.” [page xv]
We should not require an explanation of why racism is vicious, obscene and absurd. We do need an explanation for the huge role played by racism in USA political life and its widespread acceptance within the white working class of the USA, and this book offers one profitable line of enquiry. It places USA racism in the context of the 19th Century development of a wage earning working class, a concept that was in sharp conflict with the Republican ideal of the self employed man of property who is able to stand on his own feet as an independent and effective citizen. According to Republican ideology, the Revolutionary War was fought by a volunteer army of free men in defence of liberty against an army of paid mercenaries and escaped slaves serving a British tyrant, and its objective was to prevent the threat of being enslaved. [Whether ending up more like Canada would have been quite such a bad thing is not considered.]
It was a culture dominated by the presence of chattel slavery and since this system was central to the economy, it was convenient to discount the grotesque cruelty and the human suffering involved. So the notion prevailed that slavery was the just destiny for those lacking the capacity or the courage to earn their liberty and perhaps even the best situation for people of their slavish temperaments. As an extra payoff for Republican ideology, the fate of these slaves [as also the genocide of the American Indians] was an ever present warning to anyone tempted to stray from the ethic of property rights and the virtue of economic productivity.
Yet for increasing numbers of Americans, especially new immigrants, economic and social independence was not realistically attainable and the development of an industrial economy created a growing demand for a labour force that was disciplined and compliant. The point of free labour was its availability for an impersonal, contractual relationship with employers, with an hourly wage and the freedom to hire and fire. For the emerging industrial workforce, this implied insecurity and a precarious capacity to earn a living wage. For these workers, beyond the fear of destitution was the real terror of being pressed into slavery, or the ignominy of being labelled and treated as a slave.
Attitudes to slavery were deeply irrational. At some level was the suggestion that slaves were protected from the most severe challenges facing free workers; each slave had an economic value to its owner, so they were housed and fed even in periods when they were underemployed and there were types of work which were not assigned to slaves because they were just too expensive to risk injury or death. Such tasks were instead assigned to free workers earning a wage – since when they were injured or killed the employer suffered no economic loss. Slaves found ways of working that subverted the disciplines and the general acceleration of work found in the factories. It was as though slaves retained some of the innocence which industrial workers were forced to let go and this was also expressed culturally, including in music and dance. “Sorrow songs” in the 1830s, for example, were said to “move the nation.”[p117]
This culminated in significant cultural events. “Negro election day, which began in the mid eighteenth century as an offshoot of more staid white New England election celebrations, initially took shape when slaves came to town with voting whites and began to choose Black ‘governors’ and other officials amidst great, African-influenced festivity. Over the years, Blacks consolidated a position of leadership within a hugely popular holiday that came to last four and even six days. No fewer than twenty-one New England cities left records of having celebrated the day, which was also marked to some extent in North Carolina...” [p101] “...The same amusements ... prevailed at Pinkster, along with spectacular African dancing, the building of beautiful arbours and the crowning of a Black king. Cooper portrayed Blacks as ‘beating banjos, singing African songs and .. laughing in a way that seemed to set their very hearts rattling in their cages.” [p102]
Roediger does muse, at one point, on the counterfactual prospect that such slave-led entertainment and the racial and social mixing it entailed, had the potential to play a beneficial and optimistic part in America’s social history. On the contrary, the “agents of the new industrial morality” [p102] – politicians, clergy and industrialists – were alarmed at the indiscipline reflected in these disruptive manifestations of an alternative possible social world [”...presenting to the eye of a moral observer a king of chaos of sin and folly, of misery and fun” p103 ]and alongside official measures to close them down came white, working class “hate riots” and racist violence to close down these opportunities for expression and mixing. This was taking place at the same time as a different form of public entertainment known as “blackface” emerged, in which white performers entertained white audiences with material that was deeply racist. Blackface seems to have brought together a profound envy of the supposed natural artistry and wild joy of which the slave population was capable, with a vicious hostility based on a surprisingly deep fear and loathing.
These profound ambiguities in the attitudes towards the slave population reflected the psychological trauma endured by the emerging working class as the USA became increasingly industrialised through the 19th Century. They were brought into special focus during the 1840s and 1850s when extreme hardship around the time of the Great Irish Famine drove several million impoverished Irish peasants, nearly a quarter of Ireland’s total population, to migrate from rural Ireland to the cities of North America. Lacking skills and resources, they were entirely dependent on the fortunes of the labour market, where only a minority were able to secure familiar types of work such as butchery or handling horses. Their poverty was compounded by unfavourable and frankly racist attitudes on the part of Anglo Saxon Protestants, to the extent that it was possible to see their situation being more desperate and less favourable even than that of Black slaves. They had to survive in the face of racism and they did this by appealing to racism in their turn, with a ferocious intensity. They were free workers and not slaves, White and not Black. Whiteness, in short, was an invented category by means of which the Catholic Irish could win a sufficient level of acceptance in a country dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestants and to this end it was of vital importance that the negative status of non-whites – primarily Black but also Mexican and Chinese – be strongly affirmed. The viciousness with which this affirmation was acted out is of course, nauseating.
I do not imagine for a moment that the book places responsibility for American racism on the Irish immigrants. They took up an existing ideology with depressing and disappointing energy because it offered such tangible benefits as they struggled to gain social and economic acceptance. It was not something imposed on them from above, serving the interests of the economic elite. Racism did indeed blossom under the conditions imposed by industrialisation and the emergence of wage labour but it was very much a part of working class culture and cannot be reduced in simplistic terms to the machinations of the capitalists. Nor can it be accounted for by appealing to any attribute or behaviour of its victims. Nothing that was ever done by Black people accounts for White racism. To understand racism, it is always going to be necessary to understand racists and ask what benefits they expect from this vicious ideology. Understanding, of course, is not the same as condoning, but it is a necessary step on the path to change.
”If my emails are any guide, an occasional reaction by students is that the book is ‘down on white people’. One student troubled herself to emphasize that she had not been so upset since she ‘had to read Malcolm X,’ a complaint that I confess to treasuring very much.” [page xv]
December 8, 2025
A useful account of how racial identity shaped the early American working class. Roediger shows that whiteness generated a “public and psychological wage,” first named by Du Bois, that guides the formation of white labor.
Roediger’s discussion of the Irish worker is especially valuable. He shows how Irish immigrants, who entered the United States with their own history of colonial domination, initially occupied an ambiguous racial position and at times expressed meaningful affinities with Black Americans. Their eventual incorporation into an incipient and ever-expanding concept of whiteness illustrates how racial identity served as compensation for the losses and insecurities of industrial capitalism. This strengthens the thesis: material and social advantages associated with whiteness created incentives that overwhelmed potential cross-racial solidarity.
Where Roediger succeeds, he does so with precision and careful documentation. At the same time, readers familiar with Gerald Horne's incredible body of work will see the limits of Roediger’s geographic and political frame. Horne’s work places the formation of racial hierarchy in a global and explicitly imperial context, with the Atlantic world, colonial warfare, and counterrevolution front and center. Roediger stays inside the domestic sphere and avoids the world-systemic scale that Horne treats as indispensable. As a result, Roediger excels at describing how whiteness operated inside the United States, but Horne offers a clearer view of why that system took shape and how deeply it connected to international struggles. Sakai, though more polemical and less archival, also addresses this larger structural picture somewhat more directly (in my opinion).
Even with these differences, The Wages of Whiteness deserves its status. It provides a sharp account of how whiteness worked inside the American labor force and why so many white workers accepted the advantages that came with it. For readers who appreciate Horne’s global scope or Sakai’s structural bluntness, Roediger supplies a detailed domestic foundation that complements both.
Roediger’s discussion of the Irish worker is especially valuable. He shows how Irish immigrants, who entered the United States with their own history of colonial domination, initially occupied an ambiguous racial position and at times expressed meaningful affinities with Black Americans. Their eventual incorporation into an incipient and ever-expanding concept of whiteness illustrates how racial identity served as compensation for the losses and insecurities of industrial capitalism. This strengthens the thesis: material and social advantages associated with whiteness created incentives that overwhelmed potential cross-racial solidarity.
Where Roediger succeeds, he does so with precision and careful documentation. At the same time, readers familiar with Gerald Horne's incredible body of work will see the limits of Roediger’s geographic and political frame. Horne’s work places the formation of racial hierarchy in a global and explicitly imperial context, with the Atlantic world, colonial warfare, and counterrevolution front and center. Roediger stays inside the domestic sphere and avoids the world-systemic scale that Horne treats as indispensable. As a result, Roediger excels at describing how whiteness operated inside the United States, but Horne offers a clearer view of why that system took shape and how deeply it connected to international struggles. Sakai, though more polemical and less archival, also addresses this larger structural picture somewhat more directly (in my opinion).
Even with these differences, The Wages of Whiteness deserves its status. It provides a sharp account of how whiteness worked inside the American labor force and why so many white workers accepted the advantages that came with it. For readers who appreciate Horne’s global scope or Sakai’s structural bluntness, Roediger supplies a detailed domestic foundation that complements both.
April 11, 2011
Tough to comment on so hard on the heels of finishing it. Marxist interpretations of racial formation can be a little tough to handle. I think a lot of people struggle to digest Roediger for a variety of reasons. Some people don't want to talk about race at all. Some people don't want to talk about whiteness in particular. Some people think Marxist interpretations of race come off as dispassionate, or just flat out misguided. It's certainly a germinal text (if not _the_) in whiteness studies, so anyone interested in American racial formation and theory should read it; the same goes for anyone curious about whiteness studies. It's a complex read though, particularly for anyone not accustomed to reading labor history. It is definitely worth giving a crack (or several -- it probably takes several reads, in companion with other works on race & whiteness to get somewhere with this text).
February 24, 2019
One of my pet peeves in politics these days is when pundits pit racial politics vs. class politics. Or Identity politics vs. labor politics. Books like this help illustrate that you can't do one without the other. They don't contradict each other. In fact, class and labor politics were built on anti-blackness from the beginning. This book, black reconstruction, slavery and freedom and a few other books are essential reading now more than ever so we don't keep making the same political mistakes
Read
October 3, 2019I appreciate this book more each time I re-read it. It is a work that still inspires further research and thinking about race and class, and it opened up the historical conversation that continues today.
This is my update of the last time I taught the book, June 9, 2014, when I wrote: Pathbreaking study despite its flaws (mostly flaws that Roediger recognizes openly in his afterword to the revised edition).
This is my update of the last time I taught the book, June 9, 2014, when I wrote: Pathbreaking study despite its flaws (mostly flaws that Roediger recognizes openly in his afterword to the revised edition).
September 20, 2016
This is a really quick read and is very relevant to the current American race-class climate. I noticed this book got a lot of bad reviews on here and I disagree with the problems other people found with the book. It seems like either they didn't actually read it, were made uncomfortable by the book's topic or put on blinders to the nuances of Roediger's argument and searched for things he did wrong that really weren't there. Regardless, I appreciated his approach to the subject matter and his critical analysis of the scholarship on antebellum America.
February 20, 2008
This book is totally overrated. He basically argues that the white working-class was the historical force that produced white supremacy.
Where was capitalism in all this?
Where was capitalism in all this?
April 11, 2013
David R. Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, published in 1991, is among the first scholarly works to seriously address the emergence of American “whiteness”. One might expect such a treatment, which comes on the heels of the politically correct resurgence (think of the 1994 film, “PCU”), to be a reactionary defense of how white Americans had been depicted or treated in the historical analysis of the previous two decades. However, Roediger instead tracks the growth of white racism in the antebellum period, linking it to the emerging working class identity of the era, especially as it was experienced and proliferated by Irish Catholic immigrants. For Roediger, “whiteness was a way in which workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and to the necessities of capitalist work discipline” (13). As society became more industrial, particularly in the Northeast, changing the social and moral construct of society, individual anxieties about one’s future proliferated. White workers began to focus on the things which distinguished them from other laborers, namely, that they were white and free. Through this formed the racial constructs of “white” versus “black”, which to white laborers meant the difference between a civilized, moral, and disciplined capitalist lifestyle, versus one of pre-industrialism, even a “natural” self, which to whites seemed childish and ethically lackadaisical. Nevertheless, even as whites condemned what were in effect their former selves, whether they made the association consciously or not, there also appeared to coincide the lamentable acknowledgement that such care-free days were behind them.
Within this psychological framework Roediger pays particular attention to blackface minstrelsy, and this provides readers with the strongest and most compelling insights offered by the book. This immensely popular form of entertainment, which dominated stages before and, for a time, after the Civil War, employed racially charged lyrics and buffoonish black caricatures, all meant to reinforce the prejudice of black inferiority. In Roediger’s contention, it was essential for minstrel performers to convincingly adopt “blackness” and just as easily to take it off, thereby further drawing a distinguishing line between races (116). It also gave early white industrial workers license to adopt, at least temporarily, their associations of blackness, throwing decorum to wind in a way that would not have been granted if white-faced, allowing whites to indulge in nostalgia for the very characteristics which they imposed and condemned in blacks (122).
Each chapter of Wages serves largely as an isolated essay, allowing Roediger to delve into a particular aspect’s various facets. However, such a structure can be trying on the reader as the main points are not carried strongly throughout the book. It can be difficult to ascertain which contentions are important to bear in mind as one continues reading and the lack of clear focus can make the importance of some arguments unclear, at least as they relate to the thesis. Add to this Roediger’s tendency to engage in historiographic debate with other scholars and at times the reading can even become tedious. This is especially so in the first half of the book. Fortunately, as mentioned above, the later chapters dealing directly with “whiteness” as it informed blackface minstrelsy mark sections of the book that are both informative and pleasurable to read.
Roediger derives heavy inspiration from W.E.B. DuBois and he wears his admiration for the historian and sociologist on his sleeve. In particular, Roediger owes much to DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935, the style of which he seeks to “emulate” in Wages and even adopt that work’s “tragic” tone (13). However, though the subject matter is certainly dark, dealing as it does with the more base aspects of the human psyche, Roediger’s tone at the end is hardly tragic, and at least in one instance might be even called overly optimistic. In speaking of white workers post-emancipation at around 1866, Roediger declares, “No longer could whiteness be an unambiguous source of self-satisfaction” (175). Yet the evidence would suggest otherwise. Though minstrelsy’s dominance as the stage performance of choice for most Americans gave way after the Civil War to vaudeville and other emerging forms of entertainment, blackface remained a staple well into the twentieth century. In David Nasaw’s examination of blackface in the 1890s in his book Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements, in the comparison of it to other forms of ethnic caricatures inspired by newly arrived immigrants, he is able to conjure Roediger’s antebellum contentions when he says that “these negative [blackface] qualities attributed to ‘blackness’ on stage served to unite the audience in a celebration of its own ‘whiteness’” (Nasaw 54). He then proceeds to quote Roediger directly, reappropriating Roediger’s words to explain the following generation of Americans. Clearly Nasaw believes that whiteness could still be a “source of self-satisfaction” several decades after Roediger’s claim that such a possibility died with slavery. Indeed, even as blackface became less popular in the twentieth century (though not entirely gone – Al Jolson, anyone?), the cruel stereotypes it spawned proved resilient, and we are still dealing with the residual prejudices in our own time. Perhaps a desire for closure impelled Roediger to overstate the effect of emancipation on blackface’s allure to whites, coming as it does in the last pages of his book, but his seeming declaration of its demise is premature and offers a more jubilant reflection on the subject when his originally intended tone of tragedy would have been appropriate.
It is easy to see why Wages of Whiteness has been so influential. It deals seriously with an issue that most would likely find uncomfortable and that much of the population would seemingly prefer to forget. It accomplishes its task, for the most part, with reasoned argument and scholarly conviction. Nevertheless, it leaves the reader feeling like an initial step in the right direction with many more milestones yet to tread. Its disjointed character may contribute to this, as might its relative brevity. Regardless, it will rightfully be considered a milestone in itself in the examination of American whiteness and the detrimental effect it had/has upon society, spawning future more cohesive and comprehensive works which may very well exceed and outshine this slim progenitor.
Within this psychological framework Roediger pays particular attention to blackface minstrelsy, and this provides readers with the strongest and most compelling insights offered by the book. This immensely popular form of entertainment, which dominated stages before and, for a time, after the Civil War, employed racially charged lyrics and buffoonish black caricatures, all meant to reinforce the prejudice of black inferiority. In Roediger’s contention, it was essential for minstrel performers to convincingly adopt “blackness” and just as easily to take it off, thereby further drawing a distinguishing line between races (116). It also gave early white industrial workers license to adopt, at least temporarily, their associations of blackness, throwing decorum to wind in a way that would not have been granted if white-faced, allowing whites to indulge in nostalgia for the very characteristics which they imposed and condemned in blacks (122).
Each chapter of Wages serves largely as an isolated essay, allowing Roediger to delve into a particular aspect’s various facets. However, such a structure can be trying on the reader as the main points are not carried strongly throughout the book. It can be difficult to ascertain which contentions are important to bear in mind as one continues reading and the lack of clear focus can make the importance of some arguments unclear, at least as they relate to the thesis. Add to this Roediger’s tendency to engage in historiographic debate with other scholars and at times the reading can even become tedious. This is especially so in the first half of the book. Fortunately, as mentioned above, the later chapters dealing directly with “whiteness” as it informed blackface minstrelsy mark sections of the book that are both informative and pleasurable to read.
Roediger derives heavy inspiration from W.E.B. DuBois and he wears his admiration for the historian and sociologist on his sleeve. In particular, Roediger owes much to DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935, the style of which he seeks to “emulate” in Wages and even adopt that work’s “tragic” tone (13). However, though the subject matter is certainly dark, dealing as it does with the more base aspects of the human psyche, Roediger’s tone at the end is hardly tragic, and at least in one instance might be even called overly optimistic. In speaking of white workers post-emancipation at around 1866, Roediger declares, “No longer could whiteness be an unambiguous source of self-satisfaction” (175). Yet the evidence would suggest otherwise. Though minstrelsy’s dominance as the stage performance of choice for most Americans gave way after the Civil War to vaudeville and other emerging forms of entertainment, blackface remained a staple well into the twentieth century. In David Nasaw’s examination of blackface in the 1890s in his book Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements, in the comparison of it to other forms of ethnic caricatures inspired by newly arrived immigrants, he is able to conjure Roediger’s antebellum contentions when he says that “these negative [blackface] qualities attributed to ‘blackness’ on stage served to unite the audience in a celebration of its own ‘whiteness’” (Nasaw 54). He then proceeds to quote Roediger directly, reappropriating Roediger’s words to explain the following generation of Americans. Clearly Nasaw believes that whiteness could still be a “source of self-satisfaction” several decades after Roediger’s claim that such a possibility died with slavery. Indeed, even as blackface became less popular in the twentieth century (though not entirely gone – Al Jolson, anyone?), the cruel stereotypes it spawned proved resilient, and we are still dealing with the residual prejudices in our own time. Perhaps a desire for closure impelled Roediger to overstate the effect of emancipation on blackface’s allure to whites, coming as it does in the last pages of his book, but his seeming declaration of its demise is premature and offers a more jubilant reflection on the subject when his originally intended tone of tragedy would have been appropriate.
It is easy to see why Wages of Whiteness has been so influential. It deals seriously with an issue that most would likely find uncomfortable and that much of the population would seemingly prefer to forget. It accomplishes its task, for the most part, with reasoned argument and scholarly conviction. Nevertheless, it leaves the reader feeling like an initial step in the right direction with many more milestones yet to tread. Its disjointed character may contribute to this, as might its relative brevity. Regardless, it will rightfully be considered a milestone in itself in the examination of American whiteness and the detrimental effect it had/has upon society, spawning future more cohesive and comprehensive works which may very well exceed and outshine this slim progenitor.
December 2, 2024
Important and eye opening read on how the powers that be in the United States from the beginning have worked to ensure white workers will become reliable class traitors thanks to institutional and deeply ingrained racism.
June 23, 2025
5 years later and I'm still thinking about the profesor who tried to tell me Italian Americans had it worse than Black people, hope he reads this someday
January 16, 2020
Controversial, provocative, and intentionally so. Reading the afterward (in the revised edition) provides a lot of insight into Roediger’s perspective since he wrote the book. He admits to faults within his own argumentation and points to other works which have done a better job than some of the chapters in his own book. As a Marxist, I find it is important to identify our own deficiencies in dealing with the origins of American and working class racism—it needn’t be a definitive assessment of how it came to be, nor what will solve it. Getting to a class-based, historical materialist view of history, and working towards a Marxist vision of society, is merely the beginning of the infinite road towards true human progress. I think Roediger’s book complicates the held view among some Marxists that racism is a problem to be rolled up in the fight against the capitalist class. While it is true that the working class must band together, which in essence means putting aside some specific battles being waged under the banner of identity politics, it certainly doesn’t mean that racism isn’t real within the working class and worth addressing and denouncing. Roediger helps, with his immense amount of original document evidence, to show that racism, regardless of its roots, is alive and well regardless of class distinction. To try and argue around this is pointless and likely more damaging to the cause. Still, as with most any radical political leftist reading material, it is all a part of a larger conversation and dialogue between different texts, and is worth the rigor to question everything always.
January 9, 2015
I teach this book every year and like it every time. In under 200 pages, it pretty much decimates all the "it's class not race" arguments that are used to sidestep the issue of white working-class racism. It points out numerous contradictions in the new labor history that argued for the significance of working-class self activity and agency - except if that agency was in favor of white supremacy or masculine privilege. It is an accessible use of basic Freudian analysis with Marxism and is well-supported with evidence drawn from Roediger's many years as a scholar of labor history.It is also a valuable synthesis of scholarship on 18th and 19th century labor republicanism and the connection of this ideology to race. It does not privilege class over race or race over class, and the fact that it has been criticized by different people for doing both is suggestive. The backlash against it in labor history has been profound, which perhaps also says something about its continued relevance and the continued race problem in labor and working-class history.
I've learned over the years that students are often befuddled by what I think of as a jargon-free book because they lack any background in labor history, 19th century American history, or Marxist vocabulary. Nonetheless, it's still a great book to teach, has aged well and is still (sadly) relevant.
I've learned over the years that students are often befuddled by what I think of as a jargon-free book because they lack any background in labor history, 19th century American history, or Marxist vocabulary. Nonetheless, it's still a great book to teach, has aged well and is still (sadly) relevant.
Read
January 24, 2018Roediger's seminal 1991 study explores the role of race for white workers and how, when, and why whiteness became important to white workers (5). Arguing against Marxist analyses that privilege class over race and ignores the importance of the working class as historical actors in perpetuating cultural forms, he shows that between 1800 and 1865, the creation of the working class and whiteness developed "hand in hand" (9) by white laborers in America. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois' analysis of the compensation of the "public and pyschological wage" of whiteness, Roediger argues that whiteness developed in reaction to a fear of economic dependency on wage labor and changes in the capitalist work discipline. By contrasting republicanism and wage labor with chattel slavery through changing language and identification, othering free blacks and slaves through blackface and minstrelsy, and an acceptance of Irish Americans as white, white workers created a sense of whiteness that united them. Although the Civil War and emancipation allowed a contestation of whiteness, by 1865, whiteness had so solidified that it was impossible to wash away completely, thus dooming interracial unity within the labor movement and reemerging in new forms of white supremacy.
August 6, 2020
I had read a bit of David Roediger as a part of my African Diaspora minor in undergrad, so when I found this book at a book sale I decided to pick it up. For those unfamiliar with Roediger, this is definitely highly academic writing and often in less-than-accessible language. If you're expecting a quick, easy digestible read on race and racism, you will not find that here. This is a book you will need to make notes on as you read. Beyond that, this book is extremely well-researched and brings up unique points on the formation of the white working class and "whiteness." A fellow reviewer writes, "In under 200 pages, it pretty much decimates all the "it's class not race" arguments that are used to sidestep the issue of white working-class racism," and I think that is a brilliant way to explain the book and the arguments made. I would recommend this book to those doing research on the history of race/class in America.
Read
November 6, 2019I'm of two minds on this book. On the one hand, I think Roediger draws out a lot of valuable analyses of her whiteness has historically been constructed in American society, particularly in the opposition of white wage labor and black slave labor (and later even-more-underpaid wage labor). On the other hand, he seems to lay far, far too much blame on the working classes themselves rather than the opinion-makers who were, at the time, very explicitly guiding them towards racist distinctions (something something false consciousness), despite some of his claims to the contrary.
For a better analysis, see Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White. Or just watch a few episodes of F Is for Family.
For a better analysis, see Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White. Or just watch a few episodes of F Is for Family.
September 25, 2021
Once he wrote the book, the author’s thesis about the impact of racism on the American wage labor system came to seem self-evident. Great book. Great author.
November 28, 2021
David Roediger borrows W.E.B. Du Bois's conception of the "wages of whiteness" from Black Reconstruction to argue that between 1800 and 1865 a working class consciousness developed that rested on a foundation of race (not just class). Roediger works in a particular strand of Marxism (similar to E.P. Thompson) that emphasizes consciousness and identity rather than a more materialist conception of where historical actors fit within modes of production. Roediger grants agency to white workers by demonstrating how they actively shaped themselves as not only working class, but white and non-slaves. Before the Revolution, this coupling of race and worker independence was largely absent. It was only with the onset of republicanism and its emphasis on independence that white workers began to posit themselves in relation contrast to black slaves. This took place mainly through the use of language, as whites tried to distance themselves from any comparisons to slaves. "Hireling" became decoupled from "slave", just as "boss" rose as a replacement for the word "master," and "freeman" grows in popularity as a particularly resonant identity that specifically excluded free blacks. Similarly, white laborers in the 1830s and 1840s move away from "wage slavery" to talk about "white slavery" as a way to distinguish selves from blacks and often implicitly support the slave system - although this shifts by 1850s towards a more antislavery oppositional language of free labor. Roediger modifies the idea of "herrenvolk democracy" to "herrenvolk republicanism" in describing how blacks were not just seen as non-citizens, but actively as anti-citizens, and a danger to republicanism.
Roediger also argues that during this process whites faced the wrenching changes of an industrializing society imposing a new form of capitalist work-discipline (borrowed from Herbert Gutman). As a way of coping with these changes, whites envision blacks as the symbol of their own preindustrial and hedonistic past that they both scorned and longed for. This went hand in hand with the rising popularity of minstrel shows, which allowed whites to highlight their own whiteness while simultaneously allowing them to temporarily escape into their own preindustrial past. Finally, Roediger charts how the Irish were faced with immense discrimination upon immigration, but instead of that resulting in solidarity with blacks, resulted in their aggressive use of blacks a springboard to assert their own whiteness. This crystallized through their participation in the Democratic party, which helped to paper over ethnic divisions between white northerners in favor of a more universal whiteness. A foundational text in Whiteness Studies; 5/5 stars.
Roediger also argues that during this process whites faced the wrenching changes of an industrializing society imposing a new form of capitalist work-discipline (borrowed from Herbert Gutman). As a way of coping with these changes, whites envision blacks as the symbol of their own preindustrial and hedonistic past that they both scorned and longed for. This went hand in hand with the rising popularity of minstrel shows, which allowed whites to highlight their own whiteness while simultaneously allowing them to temporarily escape into their own preindustrial past. Finally, Roediger charts how the Irish were faced with immense discrimination upon immigration, but instead of that resulting in solidarity with blacks, resulted in their aggressive use of blacks a springboard to assert their own whiteness. This crystallized through their participation in the Democratic party, which helped to paper over ethnic divisions between white northerners in favor of a more universal whiteness. A foundational text in Whiteness Studies; 5/5 stars.
August 28, 2025
answers questions like: how did white racial identity form in the USA after the War of Independence when there was a newfound sense of egalitarianism? How was this internal egalitarianism amongst those who identified with 'whiteness' counterposed to slavery in a racialized slave society? Why was it not counterposed as heavily with indigenous peoples?
In antebellum America, how did Blackness and whiteness represent developing forms of morality in an industrializing society that demanded temperance and strict time management? What role do expressions of minstrelsy and blackface by white performers play in this developing industrial morality?
also mentions explorations of herrenvolk republicanism, Irish identification with whiteness (at the expense of Irish solidarity with the antislavery movement) as an example of what many other groups have gone thru in US history (like Germans and eastern europeans).
In antebellum America, how did Blackness and whiteness represent developing forms of morality in an industrializing society that demanded temperance and strict time management? What role do expressions of minstrelsy and blackface by white performers play in this developing industrial morality?
also mentions explorations of herrenvolk republicanism, Irish identification with whiteness (at the expense of Irish solidarity with the antislavery movement) as an example of what many other groups have gone thru in US history (like Germans and eastern europeans).
July 16, 2025
Despite being such a famous bummer, this book excited me. I enjoyed 'performatively' reading this on subways, but then got embarrassed whenever Black people sat across from me. Seriously though, I was surprised by how much fun it was to read. After reading that Chinese workers were accused of introducing oral sex to the USA, the blush had barely left my pale face when I realized I'd finished a book that in the 1990s had some leftists shaking with indignant rage.
Considering how whiteness has basically elected an orangefaced minstrel show to dismantle the republic; this history of racism in the formative period of the American working class is more relevant than ever. So check your fragility and dig in!
I borrowed this from the FB Afrikawissenschaften und Orientalistik in Vienna where it had call number P.1.8.1
Considering how whiteness has basically elected an orangefaced minstrel show to dismantle the republic; this history of racism in the formative period of the American working class is more relevant than ever. So check your fragility and dig in!
I borrowed this from the FB Afrikawissenschaften und Orientalistik in Vienna where it had call number P.1.8.1
August 5, 2025
A really great study about the formation of the white working class and their desperation to cling to whiteness even in the midst of intense exploitation. A stark reminder that whiteness is always a wage, a psychological toll, and Roediger makes that very clear throughout. He shows what the white working class missed out on and continues to miss out on by clinging to whiteness rather than working with marginalized communities.
A great read, but I gave it a four because the academic jargon is intense at certain points.
A great read, but I gave it a four because the academic jargon is intense at certain points.
August 8, 2024
I just read Jules’s review. There’s no afterword in this one so yeah. Some of it I get. Some of it lost me. I liked the last couple chapters. PS the copy I have was Noel’s copy 😎 from when they gave away his books at his memorial.
October 15, 2020
In his important 2016 book Traces of History Patrick Wolfe explores the point that it is all well and good for us to say that ‘race’ is a social construct, but that has little meaning if we don’t explore how is constructed in specific settings. Returning (after nearly 30 years) to re-read David Roediger’s important, if flawed, Wages of Whiteness reminds just how important and how difficult Wolfe’s challenge is.
Roediger focuses (although not exclusively) on the antebellum era, so for the most part deals with the USA when a majority of its Black population was still enslaved, and when its western borders were still in flux. This means that to a large degree he is focused on the working class he is discussing north-eastern and of the northern mid-west; his analysis does not focus on that part of the American working class that was enslaved as chattels, but does engage extensively with ‘free’ labourers’ deployment of the discourses of enslavement as a foil and as a tool of identity construction. He deals with ‘the white worker’ in the nascent and emerging industrial sector, separating them off from labour processes of settler colonialism, and highlighting less the labour processes and material conditions of working class life than the discursive and cultural practices of working class life and politics.
He is especially attuned to the shifting character of language, exploring ways that the word ‘slave’ or the image of ‘coon’ were deployed in creating forms of Whiteness, reminding me of important parts of Nancy Isenberg’s excellent White Trash as a more recent exploration of the associations of class and whiteness in the US context. Given his base in Marxist and in forms of the labour history redefined by scholars working in the tradition of EP Thompson I welcomed in particular the emphasis on cultural practices (crowds, minstrelsy and the like) as well as shifting class identities.
The afterword to this edition (I last read the first edition) is a welcome commentary and corrective, especially in the way Roediger notes the ways that deep seated presumptions of class and race shaped the way he wrote, and by implication how he might do it differently. This is notable in his self-critical comments on the presumption in the sub-title that the working class is and was White: it’s a potent mea culpa and a reminder of the challenges of sloughing off dominant discourses.
Crucially, and despite the passage of 30 years, the book has lost little of its explanatory power, even though it should be read alongside other parallel work by Roediger and works such as Theodore Allen’s 2 volume Invention of the White Race. It remains highly recommended.
Roediger focuses (although not exclusively) on the antebellum era, so for the most part deals with the USA when a majority of its Black population was still enslaved, and when its western borders were still in flux. This means that to a large degree he is focused on the working class he is discussing north-eastern and of the northern mid-west; his analysis does not focus on that part of the American working class that was enslaved as chattels, but does engage extensively with ‘free’ labourers’ deployment of the discourses of enslavement as a foil and as a tool of identity construction. He deals with ‘the white worker’ in the nascent and emerging industrial sector, separating them off from labour processes of settler colonialism, and highlighting less the labour processes and material conditions of working class life than the discursive and cultural practices of working class life and politics.
He is especially attuned to the shifting character of language, exploring ways that the word ‘slave’ or the image of ‘coon’ were deployed in creating forms of Whiteness, reminding me of important parts of Nancy Isenberg’s excellent White Trash as a more recent exploration of the associations of class and whiteness in the US context. Given his base in Marxist and in forms of the labour history redefined by scholars working in the tradition of EP Thompson I welcomed in particular the emphasis on cultural practices (crowds, minstrelsy and the like) as well as shifting class identities.
The afterword to this edition (I last read the first edition) is a welcome commentary and corrective, especially in the way Roediger notes the ways that deep seated presumptions of class and race shaped the way he wrote, and by implication how he might do it differently. This is notable in his self-critical comments on the presumption in the sub-title that the working class is and was White: it’s a potent mea culpa and a reminder of the challenges of sloughing off dominant discourses.
Crucially, and despite the passage of 30 years, the book has lost little of its explanatory power, even though it should be read alongside other parallel work by Roediger and works such as Theodore Allen’s 2 volume Invention of the White Race. It remains highly recommended.
March 24, 2021
This is the sort of interdisciplinary and intersectional history that used to leave me intellectually wet when I was in graduate school (where I just missed this book coming out as illness was busy strangling my academic career at the time).
Indebted to W.E.B DeBois's thesis that whiteness in the US confers a "psychological wage" that offsets the economic exploitation of capitalism, Roediger examines how that "wage" developed between the founding of the Republic and the Civil War--and how the white working class (particularly Irish immigrants) were instrumental in developing it. He argues that white laborers, who had no real promise of ever being their own "masters" (as opposed to apprentices or journeymen) under capitalism, were always anxious about downward mobility or outright starvation, and longing for the relative laxity of pre-industrial farm life, projected their frustrations, guilt, and longings onto the one group who couldn't fight back: free blacks.
While reading White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism last year, I kept hoping she was going to explain, well, why it was so hard for white people to talk about racism. Why are white people so damn fragile? Except DiAngelo really never does answer those questions. Roediger does. While his book isn't going to be as accessible as DiAngelo's--it is an academic text, after all--it does a better job of explaining why we are where we are. In the edition I read, there is an introduction in which Roediger addresses some of the criticisms of the book, including that it only lightly touches on feminism. And it's true, that would have made this book even better. But even as is, I think one can extrapolate from the little bit of intersection with feminism there is to grasp just why so many white men are so fragile. That psychological wage is being taken from them--which, to be very clear, is a wage they were NEVER inherently entitled to--at the same time that most people are finding their economic wage is worth less and less despite their labor making more and more money for Capital.
It's not just about race, nor just about class. In this country, the two are so inextricably intertwined that we will not solve one problem without solving the other (and frankly, Europe has a lot of these dynamics going on too, they just don't have think about it as much because they kept their racist shit offshore).
Indebted to W.E.B DeBois's thesis that whiteness in the US confers a "psychological wage" that offsets the economic exploitation of capitalism, Roediger examines how that "wage" developed between the founding of the Republic and the Civil War--and how the white working class (particularly Irish immigrants) were instrumental in developing it. He argues that white laborers, who had no real promise of ever being their own "masters" (as opposed to apprentices or journeymen) under capitalism, were always anxious about downward mobility or outright starvation, and longing for the relative laxity of pre-industrial farm life, projected their frustrations, guilt, and longings onto the one group who couldn't fight back: free blacks.
While reading White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism last year, I kept hoping she was going to explain, well, why it was so hard for white people to talk about racism. Why are white people so damn fragile? Except DiAngelo really never does answer those questions. Roediger does. While his book isn't going to be as accessible as DiAngelo's--it is an academic text, after all--it does a better job of explaining why we are where we are. In the edition I read, there is an introduction in which Roediger addresses some of the criticisms of the book, including that it only lightly touches on feminism. And it's true, that would have made this book even better. But even as is, I think one can extrapolate from the little bit of intersection with feminism there is to grasp just why so many white men are so fragile. That psychological wage is being taken from them--which, to be very clear, is a wage they were NEVER inherently entitled to--at the same time that most people are finding their economic wage is worth less and less despite their labor making more and more money for Capital.
It's not just about race, nor just about class. In this country, the two are so inextricably intertwined that we will not solve one problem without solving the other (and frankly, Europe has a lot of these dynamics going on too, they just don't have think about it as much because they kept their racist shit offshore).
July 22, 2015
An extended review essay, albeit a very good and influential one. The autobiographical intro is quite excellent, and most of the material, though treated better elsewhere, is top-notch. But it's not especially compelling, certainly not in 2015, because...it just isn't, you know. Roediger's continued to do fine work, and this will be what he's known for...and it was a start, but it no more answered antebellum labor questions than Wilentz's more focused area study Chants Democratic (the only really good thing Wilentz ever did, a masterpiece). But it has to be read alongside D. Montgomery's The Fall of the House of Labor, because it's both important and, at least for the moment, Important. The list of "critical whiteness studies" readings at the end, mostly a selection of review essays, surely must be something of a joke.
January 28, 2013
I felt torn about how to rate this book. On one hand, it's an excellent exploration of why class and race are deeply tied in the United States. It also does a fantastic job talking about the consolidation of whiteness in opposition to blackness. Yet, I found it strangely dated. Perhaps that's a product of having read so many books that cite "Wages of Whiteness"-- I already knew how folks adapted, expanded, and revised the arguments Roediger presents. These works add nuance that, I think, is lacking in Roediger's analysis (a fact he acknowledges in the Afterward to this edition).
It is a dense read and assumes a fair amount of knowledge on the part of the reader. However, it is essential reading for anyone interested in the American labor movement, Civil War, or race relations.
It is a dense read and assumes a fair amount of knowledge on the part of the reader. However, it is essential reading for anyone interested in the American labor movement, Civil War, or race relations.
December 20, 2011
Using a fair amount of neo-marxism, Roediger runs the gauntlet of race in the antebelum United States. He argues for the establishment of Unions and the modern working condition as a result of the mobility of being white. In a somewhat less than idealistic manner indentured white people accessed their status of being "non-black" or "non-slave" to manipulate the system into letting them out of indenturement. The book is packed with interesting tidbits of history that help lock the argument down in a more relatable way than simple Marxist rhetoric. Even if you do not agree with the hypothethis it is a fascinating and enlightening read.
October 4, 2016
Gave up after 25 pages in which the author flits from construct to construct, and reference to reference (many to the book itself, or even the author's utterly unremarkable childhood), but without arguing the case, which seems to have been better put in quotes from authors who wrote decades ago. The book claims influences by "The Making of the English Working Class" by E. P. Thomson, but flatters itself in doing so, for it is almost devoid of any sense of time or place.
September 5, 2007
Whiteness needs to be examined to truly address racism, and this history of the "whiting" of the labor movement and those immigrant groups who assimilated into the labor movement is seminal.
It examines not just how groups assimilate, but also tellingly how that assimilation came at the expense/expulsion of others from the ranks of organized labor.
This book kicks ass.
It examines not just how groups assimilate, but also tellingly how that assimilation came at the expense/expulsion of others from the ranks of organized labor.
This book kicks ass.
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