20 November 2007

In The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991), David R. Roediger explains that he lived in an all-white town where racial inequality was absent but sexuality and blackness were thoroughly confused. At the time when he grew up, tastes for black culture and praise for black athletes opened the possibility for anti-racism. Ironically, an open racism existed concurrently with an open appreciation for black artists, musicians, and athletes, adding an extra dimension to how the role of race defined how white working class Americans viewed blacks and themselves.

According to Roediger, race is a complex mixture of hate, sadness, and longing in the racist thoughts of white working class Americans. The 'white problem' is then defined as why and how whites conclude that their whiteness is somehow meaningful. He invokes Barbara Fields who distinguishes race from class: the former is ideological, the latter is objective. Therefore, she concludes that race is socially and historically constructed as ideology and constructed differently across time by people of different class positions. There is good reason Roediger thus invokes Fields: she calls for historical studies to focus on racism of class and society, thus supporting a Marxist historical treatment of the issue. (Roediger is a Marxist historian.)

From this Marxist historical perspective, Roediger's is a trifold thesis:

1) the working class formation and systematic development of 'whiteness' went hand-in-hand for white working class Americans,

2) priveleging class over race is not always productive, and

3) it is therefore necessary to set race within the social formations because inequality reduces race to class.

Roediger criticizes segmentation theory and the split labor market theory because they do not allow the possibility that racism comes from above and below. Instead, he poses two different questions: what is the specific role of the working class in creating popular culure's treatment of race and what is the meaning of racism for the working class?

Perhaps to add a quality of legitimacy to his argument, Roediger invokes W.E.B. DuBois and the Black Reconstruction, citing four pertinent factors:

1) African American students saw whiteness as real and problematic in intellectual, moral, and political terms.

2) White labor receives and resists racist ideas and embraces, adopts, and murderously acts upon those ideas.

3) The White working class were manipulated into racism and thinks itself and its interests are white.

4) The effects of defining whiteness include:

a) public and psychological 'wages' emphasizing status and the extent status is bound with real social gains,

b) pleasures of whiteness as the wages for white working class Americans,

c) America's Supreme Adventure for human freedom giving way to racism, causing capitalism to be adopted, forwarded, and approved by white labour and thus ruining democracy, and

d) white supremacy undermining a white working class unity leading to racism and laziness.

Roediger's main arguments - broad strokes - are thus:

1) Whiteness is a way white working class Americans responded to the fear of dependency on wage labor and the necessities of a capitalist work discipline.

2) The heritage of the Revolution made independence a powerful personal masculine ideal.

3) Slave labor and 'hireling' wage labor proliferated in the new nation causing the white working class to make peace with the latter by differentiating from the former.

4) Construction of identity was thus gained through otherness.

5) Changes in language betrayed the complexities of race and class perceptions.

The white working class Americans were thus disciplined and made anxious by fear of dependency that began during its formation to construct an image of the black population as the 'other' embodying what it simultaneously hated and longed for. Turning to history, Roediger identifies the first 65 years of the 19th Century as a formative period of working class whiteness. The Civil War called pride in whiteness into question where it became a central value founded on economic exploitation and racial folklore.

Above all, ambiguity of language began to afford it multiple and contradictory meanings that were at once: multifaceted, socially contested, and not absent and not unconnected with social relations.

Above all, it is Roediger's shining light on language that adds fire to my own argument for hyphenation. Indeed, the critical role of language - language as a form of power structuring the limitations, potentiality, and possibility of reality - is no less salient than in the realm of race, class, and (in)equality.