Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History

by David R. Roediger

Towards the Abolition of Whiteness collects David Roediger’s recent essays, many published here for the first time, and counts the costs of whiteness in the past and present of the US. It finds those costs insupportable. At a time when prevailing liberal wisdom argues for the downplaying of race in the hope of building coalitions dedicated to economic reform, Roediger wants to open, not close, debates on the privileges and miseries associated with being white. He closely examines the way in which white identities have historically prepared white Americans to accept the oppression of others, the emptiness of their own lives, and the impossibility of change.

Whether discussing popular culture, race and ethnicity, the evolution of such American keywords as gook, boss and redneck, the strikes of 1877 or the election of 1992, Roediger pushes at the boundaries between labor history and politics, as well as those between race and class. Alive to tension within what James Baldwin called “the lie of whiteness,” Roediger explores the record of dissent from white identity, especially in the cultural realm, and encourages the search for effective political challenges to whiteness.

Genres: Race, History, Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology, United States, Cultural

218 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1994

About the author

David 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.

Reviews

[Ai Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title essay is an essay I'd recommend in lieu of certain popular books about whiteness; though it references a specific historical moment I don't know much about (and I would love to know more!) it really cuts down to the heart of whiteness-as-violence and how we must be anti-white in our anti-racist movements. The other essays are maybe of less interest to folks who are not labor historians, and some of the reflective work on labor historiography was not super interesting to me, though it does mean I know I have a lot more reading to do. But there was also stuff in other essays I love--white communists trying and failing, mostly, and some fascinating looks at the construction of whiteness in the United States.

That opening essay though really turned kicked my butt and I want everyone to read it so pick this up even just for that!