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 condition that lead to a hesitant, emerging consensus which, according to Roediger (97), “[held] together a very diverse white working class and that part of that consensus derived from the idea that blackness could be made permanently to embody the pre-industrial past that they scorned and missed.”
This movement was achieved through language as a means of appropriating pre-industrial stereotypes, formerly white stereotypes, and re-deploying them via cultural forms like minstrel show...