Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past

by David R. Roediger

David R. Roediger's powerful book argues that in its political workings, its distribution of advantages, and its unspoken assumptions, the United States is a "still white" nation. Race is decidedly not over. The critical portraits of contemporary icons that lead off the book--Rush Limbaugh, Bill Clinton, O.J. Simpson, and Rudolph Giuliani--insist that continuities in white power and white identity are best understood by placing the recent past in historical context. Roediger illuminates that history in an incisive critique of the current scholarship on whiteness and an account of race-transcending radicalism exemplified by vanguards such as W.E.B. Du Bois and John Brown. He shows that, for all of its staying power, white supremacy in the United States has always been a pursuit rather than a completed project, that divisions among whites have mattered greatly, and that "nonwhite" alternatives have profoundly challenged the status quo.

Colored White reasons that, because race is a matter of culture and politics, racial oppression will not be solved by intermarriage or demographic shifts, but rather by political struggles that transform the meaning of race--especially its links to social and economic inequality. This landmark work considers the ways that changes in immigration patterns, the labor force, popular culture, and social movements make it possible--though far from inevitable--that the United States might overcome white supremacy in the twenty-first century. Roediger's clear, lively prose and his extraordinary command of the literature make this one of the most original and generative contributions to the study of race and ethnicity in the United States in many decades.

Genres: Sociology, Race, Politics, History

340 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

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

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never "got" American racism. I get Australian racism obviously and there it is...or is it?
Race is intimately connected and contextualized with class, history and not with biology.
This book tackles a broad range of topics from O.J. Simpson, blackface, "ethnics", how the Irish became white and most profoundly "whiteness as property".
Don't let the title fool you because Roediger believes America has not and probably will not transcend its racial past.
A book that is certainly more than a primer on this topic. It is academic and passionate.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roediger's book is a historically-contextualized argument about how various strategies of white privilege circulate in the contemporary self-proclaimed "post-racial" age. Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh are submitted to the most intelligent and damning critiques I've seen anywhere, and the author has really smart things to say about the public framing of Bill Clinton and OJ Simpson as well.