Towards the Abolition of Whiteness Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History

by ROEDIGER, DAVID R.

• ISBN13: 9780860916581
• ISBN10: 0860916588
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-03-17
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

It finds those costs insupportable. At a time when prevailing liberal wisdom argues for the downplaying of race in the hope of building coalitions dedicated to economic reform, Roediger wants to open, not close, debates on the privileges and miseries associated with being white. He closely examines the way in which white identities have historically prepared white Americans to accept the oppression of others, the emptiness of their own lives, and the impossibility of change. Whether discussing popular culture, race and ethnicity, the evolution of such American keywords as gook, boss and redneck, the strikes of 1877 or the election of 1992, Roediger pushes at the boundaries between labor history and politics, as well as those between race and class. Alive to tension within what James Baldwin called 'œthe lie of whiteness,' Roediger explores the record of dissent from white identity, especially in the cultural realm, and encourages the search for effective political challenges to whiteness.

Author Biography

David Roediger is Kendrick Babcock Chair of History at the University of Illinois. Among his books are Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (with Philip S. Foner), How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon, and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. He is the editor of Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson, The North and Slavery and Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White as well as a new edition of Covington Hall’s Labor Struggles in the Deep South. His articles have appeared in New Left Review, Against the Current, Radical History Review, History Workshop Journal, The Progressive and Tennis.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: From the Social Construction of Race to the Abolition of Whiteness	p. 1
The New Labor History and Race	p. 19
'Labor in White Skin': Race and Working Class History	p. 21
The Greatness of Herbert Gutman	p. 39
Precapitalism in One Confederacy: A Note on Genovese, Politics and the Slave South	p. 47
Where Communism Was Black	p. 55
Notes on Working Class Racism	p. 61
The Crisis in Labor History: Race, Gender and the Replotting of the Working Class Past in the United States	p. 69
Studies in Whiteness and the Replotting of US History	p. 83
'The So-Called Mob': Race, Class, Skill and Community in the St Louis General Strike	p. 85
Gook: The Short History of an Americanism	p. 117
The Racial Crisis of American Liberalism	p. 121
Gaining a Hearing for Black-White Unity: Covington Hall and the Complexities of Race, Gender and Class	p. 127
Whiteness and Ethnicity in the History of 'White Ethnics' in the United States	p. 181
Index	p. 199
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.