Columbia
Missourian, February 16, 1992
The
recent political success of David Duke among white working-class
voters prompted many commentators to attribute his popularity to
economic hard times rather than his racist politics. Analysts of all
political persuasions argued that the Duke campaign was only
superficially about race, and that the underlying issue was
economics, or class. But as historian David Roediger writes, this
analysis overlooks the fact that Duke’s supporters self-consciously
viewed themselves as a white working-class constituency. For some
reason, or combination of reasons, the white working class chooses to
define itself as much along racial as class lines.
In
The Wages of Whiteness, Roediger seeks to trace this racial
self-definition of the white working class to its origins in the late
eighteenth century. In a process that took place between the American
Revolution and the Civil War, Roediger argues that white workers,
forced to adjust to the new industrial order, used African-American
slavery as a point of reference in defining their own place in
society. By this standard, a wide range of ethnic groups were
integrated into a single, racially-defined, white working class. In
the words of the historian W.E.B. DuBois, white workers accepted an
inferior economic position for the higher “public and psychological
wage” that whiteness entailed.
As
Roediger argues, white workers used the ideology of
republicanism—with its emphasis on personal independence and public
good—to criticize the new social system. But they paid significant
costs, he says, through their racially exclusive identification, “not
only in terms of race relations but also the wedding of labor to a
debased republicanism.”
Before
the American Revolution, Roediger says, contrasting white labor and
slavery was problematic, because whites themselves worked at a
variety of levels of relative unfreedom. Many whites labored as
indentured servants, apprentices or impressed sailors, all positions
in which they were legally bound to their employer. But the
experience of the revolution affected the nascent white working-class
ideology in several ways. First, the metaphoric uses of the term
“slavery” by political leaders to describe the American relation
to Britain spread the ideal of independence among workers. Second,
the political ideology of republicanism provided white workers with a
world view explaining their role in the struggle for freedom.
Finally, the proximate existence of African-American slavery provided
a reference by which white workers could constantly measure
themselves.
White
workers maintained a strong sense of republicanism and independence
as they entered the industrial era in the nineteenth century. As work
gradually changed from the skilled labor of the craftsman to the
unskilled labor of the factory employee, workers sought to define
their role in the new order. Once again, slavery served as a negative
reference point. Only in the United States did slavery exist
simultaneously with the formation of the industrial working class.
Roediger
focuses much of his attention on the development of language in this
transformation. White workers actively sought to mold the language to
fit their developing self-definition. For example, in the early
nineteenth century, white workers rejected use of the term “servant”
as applicable to whites. As the British visitor Frances Trollope
commented in the 1830s, “It is more than petty treason to the
republic to call a free citizen a servant.” Similarly, white
workers differentiated themselves from slaves by dropping the term
“master.” In its place they substituted the Dutch word bos,
which they Americanized as boss.
This
growing racial consciousness was apparent in the popular culture of
the white working class. Roediger looks closely at minstrel shows,
one of the favorite working-class cultural activities of the
nineteenth century. The racism of the minstrel shows conveyed
multiple meanings, Roediger argues. The performers in blackface
represented the values of the white workers’ own pre-industrial
past, a past they simultaneously scorned and missed. Using this
“blackness” as a reference point, whites gradually and hesitantly
formed a unified working class based on the concept of “whiteness.”
The
symbolism of the minstrel blackface worked at a variety of levels. By
poking fun at the pretensions of the character Zip Coon, for
instance, minstrels commented not only on race relations but also on
social relations among whites. Songs such as “Carry Me Back to Ole
Virginny” and “Dixie” appealed to the recent rural past of many
in the audience, whether migrants from the American hinterland or
Ireland. But fundamentally, minstrel shows created a sense of
solidarity among white workers because, as Roediger says, “all
whites could easily participate in minstrelsy’s central joke, the
point of which remained a common, respectable and increasingly smug
whiteness under the makeup.”
This
sense of belonging was especially important to Irish immigrants,
Roediger says, because for some time it was hotly debated whether
Irish were white. Many of the same characteristics attributed to
blacks were also applied to the Irish, including such terms as
“savage,” “bestial,” “lazy” and “simian.” Coming into
America near the bottom of the social order, the Irish struggled to
establish their racial identity to gain the higher “public and
psychological wage” whiteness offered. Crucial in their effort was
the Democratic party. The Irish came in large enough numbers that
they constituted a sizeable voting bloc in several Northern cities
and thus were actively recruited by the Democrats. In joining the
Democratic party, which labeled itself as being “made my white men,
for the benefit of white men,” the Irish effectively precluded any
question of their qualifications for citizenship.
The
Civil War challenged the ability of whites to be satisfied simply by
defining themselves as “not slave” or “not black.” The
emancipation of blacks during the war—and particularly blacks’
role in their own liberation by quitting work and leaving the
plantations en masse in what DuBois termed a “general
strike”—held ambiguous meaning for white workers. On the one
hand, whites feared economic competition with freed blacks; on the
other hand, the emerging Northern working-class consciousness viewed
the liberation of black slaves as a model with lessons for the
growing labor union movement. But in the end, Roediger says,
established patterns of white supremacy reasserted themselves.
This
pattern of racism had several important legacies, Roediger argues.
Perhaps the most important is that white workers, believing they had
nothing to learn from black culture, failed to see the potential
value in what historian Eugene Genovese calls the “black work
ethic.” As white workers fully entered the post-war era of
industrial labor, they spurned the knowledge derived from the work
experience of blacks, who knew better than any other group how to
cope with and effectively resist regimented systems of mass labor.
The failure to share experiences across races and cultures, Roediger
says, has left the American working class impoverished ever since.
Most
books by academics feature prose so turgid and terminology so arcane
they seem designed specifically to scare off the lay reader. But,
despite an occasional obeisance to other scholars that at times makes
reading the book seem like invading a private club, The Wages of
Whiteness is easily accessible to the non-specialist. Roediger
draws on a wide variety of sources from nineteenth-century popular
culture to describe the elusive struggle for status by the white
working class. He shows how common people took an active role in
defining themselves, and also the ways in which the social order
served to severely limit the range of choices. The implications for
the present are clear: The ideology of racial superiority is not
natural but historically conditioned and overcoming it will involve
escaping patterns of thought and culture that extend back over two
centuries.
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