Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger Research Proposal

It seems to this reviewer that the practices of the white workers that Roediger describes are not far removed from this. Though they did not own the blacks, they worked to hold them down so that they themselves could be made to feel superior. Roediger may want to call such behavior prepolitical, apparently in the belief that only when class distinctions enter does the relationship become political. However, class and race here seem closely mixed as means of control. While it may be understandable that industrialized workers wanted to find means of escape from and control over the alienationof their situation, by appropriating false means of self-justification, they made it difficult to accept their reasoning.

Had the workers, instead of turning to racism for self-justification, turned to religion, one wonders whether Roediger would have been as sympathetic. The book presents a provocative argument and a structure that supports the purpose of the argument. However, this reader found the reasoning unpersuasive in the end. The wages of whiteness, much like the wages of sin that is their namesake, promote only loss of self and salvation in the final analysis.

Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness, Second Edition (New York: Verso, 1999), p. 6.

Ibid, p 172.

Allen Theodore. "On Roediger's Wages of Whiteness," Cultural Logic 4:2 (2001), http://clogic.eserver.org/4-2/allen.html#note1

Ibid, p.3

Johnson Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard, 2001)