Race was long considered to have biological meaning, while ethnicity was seen as having a social meaning and not a biological one. Race has been given a social meaning as well as it has been used to rank groups according to social class, and American society has long used race as a division. As Roediger notes, one of these divisions has been evident in how we think about labor and work. Blacks were brought to this country in the first place as slave labor and so were immediately placed into competition with the lower-paid white worker. Whites have used the idea of race to develop a social stratification that often includes ethnicity as well, so that workers from different parts of the world have at different times held the bottom rung on the labor ladder. Race has been a long-time determinant of this lower status, though, and today blacks are still seen as being more likely to live in poverty, more likely to work on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, more likely to be undereducated, and so on.
Roediger discusses the issue of the black worker in terms of the development of the concept of the white worker, a concept he says was developed consciously by whites who compared themselves to blacks. he says this process started in the seventeenth century and cites Jordan to the effect that the British had an animus toward things dark and so had a racism that was imparted to the American colonies, which then imported blacks as slaves. Roediger notes how in some areas there was a protest against the use of slaves because doing so undercut the ability of white workers to work (Roediger 26). In the early colonies, many whites came to the colonies as indentured servants, a term that differentiated them from slaves while pacing them in a similar relationship to their "employers":
Indentured servitude, along with apprenticeship, imprisonment for debt, tenant farming, hiring out of convicts and impressment of sailors, gave o...