The Wages of Whiteness

David R. Roediger. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
Verso, 1991, 2007 (Second Edition)

Roediger addresses one glaring shortcoming of a purely materialist interpretation of nineteenth-century working class racism from a Marxist perspective. This study examines the shortcomings of regarding such racism as being primarily either a reaction to perceived job competition or an ideological device used to divide the working class on behalf of the rising capitalist class. Roediger argues that the former ignores the degree to which "whiteness" was a key element of white labor's image of itself, and the latter for denying the agency with which the white working class often defined itself explicitly as "white."

It is the latter point which is more important here. Roediger acknowledges that there was certainly a "pre-history" of whiteness as a self-conscious identity prior to the antebellum period, but the colonial era was also marked by a great deal of deference and social hierarchy along with the degradation of indentured servitude to mitigate against "whiteness" becoming a fully-developed, positively-asserted identity. Borrowing from W.E.B. DuBois, Roediger argues that the Revolution asked questions of older assumptions about social and economic relations even as it provided a new language for citizens to frame themselves within. Nothing new there, except that DuBois argued strongly that too often Americans try to separate race and class as distinct categories. Roediger seeks to show that DuBois was right--they were intimately intertwined in America and cannot be easily separated.

The real rise of the self-consciously "white" working class took place in the antebellum period, as white workers found their own status as independent artisans being degraded and denied. Blacks--defined in the public square as being truly degraded due to their inability to throw off the chains of slavery, were unfit for Republican citizenship--and lower-class whites soon found them a useful "other" to measure themselves against. In the crudest possible terms, working class whites could become poor and destitute, but they could never be black. Their whiteness, then, became a key part of their identity.

Nobody in antebellum America more desperately cherished this lifeline from "wage slavery" than the Irish, who suffered from discrimination and economic marginalization at the hands of "native" whites to a much greater degree than any other European immigrant group. The Irish ultimately chose whiteness over solidarity with the free blacks they often lived in close proximity with. As Roediger notes, the notion of job competition is probably highly overstated, as in reality the Irish had very little trouble pushing blacks aside for the menial labor jobs they were competing for. It wasn't the competition they were fighting against, it was the notion that they were doing "nigger work". One way to combat that was to exclude blacks altogether.

The Civil War undermined the antebellum commitment to overt white supremacy among the white working class, but ultimately old habits of thought and the failure of the Republican Party to craft a new coalition of northern whites and southern blacks doomed the possibilities of Reconstruction race relations and beyond.