The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class

Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger’s widely acclaimed book 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 that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks.

David Roediger is widely credited as a founder of Critical Whiteness Studies. He writes as a historian and interdisciplinary scholar of race and labor in the US. Educated in public schools and in social movements, his major books include Wages of Whiteness, Seizing Freedom, and How Race Survived US History.