The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class

The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Revised Edition)

DAVID R. ROEDIGER, 1999

London: Verso

pp. viii + 200, $35.00

The history book that got everybody talking about whiteness, from anthropologists to legal theorists to theologians to activists, has been reissued. The "Revised Edition" of David R. Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness, actually an unrevised reprint with a brief Afterword, provides a suitable excuse to return to the source of all the hullabaloo. The author himself does so in the Afterword, where he offers a modest response to his fans and critics. These, he notes, have been possessed of such a multitude of ulterior agendas that he often felt they were reading "a book I could not remember writing" (185).

In fact, in its original conception, Wages had a more precise purpose: to get historians to treat the creation of a collective white identity as a formative aspect of the American working class, and as an important reason for its limitations. As such, the book, the author himself now reflects, "was designed as a provocation" (185). Indeed, its brilliance lies much more in the appeal of its theoretical, interpretative, and speculative imagination than in its archival project (the vast bulk of the sources were culled from the works of other historians) or in any strict fit between those sources and the book's conclusions.

Roediger's fusing of class and race formation nevertheless has intellectual roots deep in some of the most revered veins of social-historical analysis: labor history's treatment of struggles over worker autonomy during the early advance of capitalist discipline; and W.E.B. DuBois' notion that workers who could define themselves as white received a "public and psychological wage" which partly compensated them for their powerlessness. Roediger focuses above all on the psychological aspects of racial identity, taking from George Rawick the idea that white racism is based on a yearning for the attributes whites think blacks represent as well as a guilt-ridden...