Wages of Whiteness Roediger
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In David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, we see the author’s premise that black cultural forms were appropriated and then re-deployed by the white working-class. We see this phenomenon in modern society, with white rappers like Eminem who are often ostracized and criticized by the black community for appropriating and re-deploying black cultural forms for white audiences, in this case rap music. Roediger’s work, however, takes us back to an era when minstrel shows, black face, and other cultural forms were appropriated and re-deployed by the white working-class. W. E. B. Dubois often talked about double consciousness for blacks, that is, being a part of a culture but still being perceived as “other.” Roediger discusses a similar dynamic, projection/repression, which we will explore as a concept that enabled young, white, working-class men to “act” black. Roediger begins by demonstrating the origins of racism and stereotyping against blacks via his analysis of the use of language in societies that are making a transition of economies and lifestyles, i.e., forming new social classes and economic structures. Industrialism and capitalism created chaos in America during this era, an era when the rural rustics, primarily in the south, who would not adopt capitalist values were scorned. Social division and a lack of consensus existed among the white working class. It was this co
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laces in the new world of wage labor were problematic to stereotyping blacks”.
Thus, we can see that by shifting the meaning of these words from pre-industrial rural whites to blacks, the new social class created by the industrial era was able to help shape and form a consensus among the white working-class which it needed desperately in light of the diversity of that population, dire work conditions, and labor unions and general unrest among workers. Many of the anxieties and tensions were repressed among the white working class that was newly formed, and Roediger (100) suggests that the transition of character traits and language from white to black enabled many of these repressed anxieties to be projected onto blacks “Such an evolution of language suggests that…the growth of a sense of whiteness among antebellum workers, who profited from racism in part because it enabled them to displace anxieties within the white population onto Blacks. But the process of projection was not abstract. It took place largely within the context of working class formation and addressed the specific anxieties of those caught up in that process”.
We see much of the repressed anxieties of working class whites if we examine the acts and behavio
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Approximate Word count = 1376
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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