The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Haymarket) - Softcover

Roediger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844671453 ISBN 13: 9781844671458

Publisher: Verso, 2007

Synopsis

This is the new, fully updated edition of this now-classic study of working-class racism. Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger's widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to blacks. In a lengthy new introduction, Roediger surveys recent scholarship on whiteness, and discusses the changing face of labor in the twenty-first century.

About this title

Review:

"At last an American labor historian realizes that white workers have a racial identity that matters as race matters to workers who are not white."--Nell Irwin Painter, Princeton University

"A timely and important intervention in the current debates over 'race' and ethnicity."--Catherine Hall, New Left Review

"Roediger's exciting new book makes us understand what it means to see oneself as white in a new way. An extremely important and insightful book."--Lawrence Glickman, The Nation

"The Celestine Prophecy of whiteness studies."--SPLN

About the Author:

David R. Roediger is Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His books include Working Toward Whiteness and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, also from Verso.

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1844671453
• ISBN 13: 9781844671458
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224