David Roediger The Wages Of Whiteness Summary

David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, provides the answer to the question of why members of the White working class racially distinguished themselves from their Black counterparts in Antebellum America through their “whiteness”. Through new labor history and analysis of the “prehistory” of the White worker, after the American Revolution, continuing to the end of the American Civil War, Roediger argues that this disassociation and racist mindset evolved due to several factors. (21) Throughout his book, Roediger argues that themes of republicanism, socio-economic status, political power, and even ethnicity play large roles in the creation of the working class. These factors are the basis

These workers “connected their freedom and their work” which created a gap in status over slaves and even freed slaves as they were considered the “antithesis of republican citizens” because of their inability to defend themselves. (33&36) Roediger quotes Franklin and Jefferson in their written articles which debate this thinking from an artisan point of view, but it was not fully accepted en masse. This mindset expediated the formation of white working-class racism who would continue to separate themselves from Blacks through use of

A popular form, in the-mid 19th century, was Minstrel theater. Through Minstrel theater, White working-class actors produced shows and variety acts in blackface which allowed to “displace white anxieties within the white population onto Blacks.” (100) During these acts, the focus was on Blacks, but White ethnicities such as the Irish and the Germans were slandered as well. Roediger establishes that the Irish “were not considered white” and had to establish themselves as White. (133) In order to do so, the Irish became anti-Black, which dumbfounded abolitionist Frederick Douglass because the Irish are “so relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion.” (137) Although counter-intuitive, the need to be integrated with ‘Whiteness’ took precedent, as it had with other members of the working-class and the only possible route to that was to be