The Wages Of Whiteness: Race And The Making Of The American Working Class By David Roediger

There is an inextricable relationship between race, capitalism, and property and how it perpetuates the notion of whiteness through the exploitation of Africans and Native Americans. Property is a relationship of a person and an object; slaves were considered as objects. Race is constructed and produced from white workers’ ideology of whiteness and labor wage. Racism has been long constructed through the production of race and its relations to property, and we can see it through the notion of capitalism and the idea of whiteness. In The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class by David Roediger, an American labor historian, he examines the growth and social construction of race during the 1800s and its relations to white workers. Roediger states that by putting labels between the two race based on their skin

This mentality derived from the idea of profits. This was evident when white workers decided to call Africans/Native Americans as “colored” and how much wage they should received. Race was one of the ways to maximize profits through the recognition of cheap labor and the value of blacks/Native Americans to society. By putting labels of ‘colored’ or ‘freeman’, it prolonged the notion of ‘whiteness’ through acknowledgement of who has independence and freedom vs. who did not have it. The focus was not on labor alone because it also focused on property and enforcement of power to white folks and the powerlessness to the ‘others’. In Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto by Vine Deloria, Jr., a Native American author, he discussed the notion of property as a relationship to the idea of ‘whiteness’. Native Americans and everything they owned were regarded as property of the European settlers that discovered America. As Deloria