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The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. By David R. Roediger. (London: Verso, 1991. xiii + 191 pp. Cloth, $54.95, ISBN 0-86091-334-1. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-86091-550-6.)
David R. Roediger's friendly polemic against the "new labor history" takes its cue from the recent critical writings of George M. Fredrickson urging greater consideration of race as an independent psychocultural category of analysis and, like Fredrickson's work, calls to mind W. E. B. Du Bois's dissatisfaction with the materialist treatment of race by American Marxists during the 1930s. Roediger's title derives from Du Bois's observation in Black Reconstruction in America (1935) that whiteness functioned for workers of white skin color as a "public and psychological wage" that compensated in part for a low monetary wage. For Du Bois and Roediger, the tragic corollary was a clouding of the vision of white workers, who identified themselves as white free labor (that is to say, as not black and not slave) and tended, as a result of the privileges and pleasures of whiteness, to evade rather than fully challenge class exploitation.
Roediger's collection of essays casts a new light on a broad social, cultural, and political landscape in the United States in the nineteenth century; at the same time, it diverts attention from relations and processes essential to a full consideration of the place of the working class, black and white, in American culture.
The first three essays demonstrate how the presence of black chattel slavery in the...