On the Wages of Whiteness

I don’t know if I would call this work the definitive book on whiteness studies, but it does have an important role as a foundational piece. Much of the literature has since moved on and surpassed what Roediger has written here, but this is definitely the starting point.

Ultimately, I think The Wages of Whiteness almost acts as an extended footnote to Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. Although I have not yet read DuBois’s work, it is now on my reading list. One argument that DuBois makes is that white working-class racial formation took place because they were also paid in the status of being “white.” As a result, they did not experience the same alienation from their labor that working-class individuals in other countries, or the black working class, experienced. To Roediger and DuBois, the white working class is worse for it, as status does not necessarily translate to an increased standard of living (although it can surely help).

That said, Roediger pushes back a bit on DuBois’s Marxist analysis, as well as that of Oliver Cromwell Cox. While DuBois was not a class reductionist, Cox was. The argument here is that racial formation is fundamentally a product of economic circumstances, and DuBois draws a bit on this idea as well. If capitalism is abolished, racism will be abolished as well. Roediger’s primary intervention is to say, “Hey, that’s not quite right, neither race nor class were built upon one another, but they did emerge in tandem.” Roediger has the right idea here, and I’m glad to see it.

Yet, there is a major problem in his text—Roediger, as well as Kathleen Cleever in the introduction to my edition, both rely on late 20th and 21st century conceptions of race in making their argument. This is something that more recent literature has succeeded in (largely) overcoming, although it is still a problem at times. While the “white race” certainly existed in law, other scholars like Matthew Frye Jacobson have shown us that there was actually a cacophony of vertically-oriented hierarchies built into the “white race.” This is something that I think Roediger misses when he talks about race formation among the Irish working class (and how they became white). Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race is much better for this.

Nevertheless, this is well worth the time, maybe not so much for itself—which can be found elsewhere. Instead, the better purpose is to make sense of the debates that take place within whiteness studies and discussions over racial formation.