The Wages Of Whiteness

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Over the latter half of the twentieth century, historiography on racism in the United States has steadily shifted from the individualized racial prejudice model in the 1940s, to the systemic analysis of institutionalized racism in the 1960s, then to the socially constructed racism ideology in the 1990s. Historians view whiteness identity as a mutable set of conceptions and perceptions shaped by patterns of dominance and resistance within the culture at large. Historians have examined the complex discourses of race in shaping the diverse aspects of political parties, popular culture, immigrant assimilation, and American social lives.
In The Wages of Whiteness, labor historian David R. Roediger combines the approaches of Marxism, psychoanalytic …show more content…
Roediger analyzes folklore, song, street language, popular humor, and entertainment, and pursues the meaning of the language and social culture. Although American workers used terms like “white slavery” and the “slavery of wages” quite extensively during the labor struggles of the 1830s and 1840s, Roediger shows how such terms largely faded from use by the eve of the Civil War. “Free labor” and “free white labor” almost universally expressed the white working class perception of itself. Antebellum white workers, sensing the obvious comparison between their own new condition of dependency to that of the slave, finding it intolerable to acknowledge that kinship. Some dropped the slavery usages because they recognized differences between their own status and slaves, others discontinued the terminology in order to dissociate their status from the presumed degradation of being black, slave or free. By the early 1830s, the transition from “servants” to “hired people”, the shift from “master” to “boss”, and the growing use of the term “freeman”, identified white labors’ freedom and dignity in work as being suited to those who were not slaves or not “negurs” (p. 49). What Roediger calls “Herrenvolk Republicanism” vouchsafed white workers from the downward spiral into slavery in a slaveholding and racist republic. Republicanism, which was once articulated a militant hatred of slavery, …show more content…
Roediger examines the plebeian culture of the working class as it was expressed in the minstrel show. He shows the transformation in working class entertainment from a multiracial vaudeville type to an explicitly racist minstrel show over the course of the early nineteenth century. This process showed the development of white republicanism in working class ideology. Roediger argues that white workers, in their confrontation with the new social morality propagated by the industrial middle class, used the racist caricatures of the minstrel show to set themselves apart from their own preindustrial selves. African Americans were portrayed in the minstrel shows as the antithesis of republican citizens (p. 36) having the characteristics of a preindustrial people. In viewing the blackfaced minstrels, white workers could see those characteristics as racial rather than historical, and therefore separate themselves from them. The minstrel shows thus expressed the ambivalence of the white working class towards the new social morality of the capitalist
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