"W.E.B DuBois once observed that low-paid white workers in the USA 'were compensated in part
by a public and psychological wage'. This 'bonus' was a belief in their inherent racial superiority over non-whites, a conviction that sustained them in their unequal struggle with American capital.
Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis and the new labor history pioneered by E.P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger here 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 which reinforce racial stereotypes and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to blacks. Scholarly and accessible, with fascinating accounts of the origin of working-class racism in colonial settler attitudes, of the history of ideas like 'free white labor' and of the struggle for 'whiteness' of the immigrant Irish working class, this work is a major contribution to the study of ideologies of racial superiority."
-The Wages of Whiteness Race and the Making of the American Working Class
by David R. Roediger
David R. Roediger teaches history at the University of Missouri. He is the author, with Philip S. Foner, of Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day.
