Poverty Wages

How do we understand the historical reluctance of average whites, to ally themselves with nonwhites and fight against racism that ultimately drives down their own wages and living standards too? It's not a new question, but there may be new answers.
Poverty Wages
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

For Marxists , antiracism is central to any political project aimed at transforming U.S. society. This perspective is premised on three things. The first is that racism is morally repugnant and destroys and devastates those who are victimized by it. Second, if socialists do not take seriously the fight against racism, they cannot possibly convince Black workers that they should be socialists. Finally, socialist revolution is only possible through the efforts of a multiracial working class whose unity is based on white workers being convinced that they must become the best fighters against racism.
For many progressives, this last sentence—on the possibility of white workers fighting racism—is utopian. It is widely accepted today by radicals, liberals, and left-wing academics that not only do white workers materially benefit from racism, but all whites are united in defense of "whiteness."

For the second time since its initial publication in 1991, historian David Roediger has published a new edition of The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. This newest edition includes both a new preface by the author and an introduction by former Black Panther and current Yale law professor, Kathleen Cleaver. While the political concept of "white skin privilege" is not Roediger's, his book was instrumental in its attempt to establish a theoretical foundation for what has now morphed into "whiteness studies."

For Roediger, and for a veritable cottage industry of "whiteness" theoreticians and academics, "whiteness" consists of the sum total of perks, privileges, and advantages that come with white skin in a racist society. Moreover, whiteness, and its requisite benefits, are the foundational basis of white identity and white unity against nonwhites. The Wages of Whiteness thus posits itself as a revisionist history. Roediger views his history as a revision to a "crude" Marxism that he says has historically "privileged class over race" by describing racism as a means by which the ruling class divides the working class. Roediger, who credits Marxism as furnishing his "intellectual tools," writes,


The main body of writing by white Marxists in the United States has both "naturalized" whiteness and oversimplified race.… The point that race is created wholly ideologically and historically, while class is not wholly so created, has often been boiled down to the notion that class (or "the economic") is more real, more fundamental, more basic or more important than race.… rosy view of a literal correspondence between racism and "social necessity" and of the possibility of an unambiguous revolutionary solution to racism is largely gone. But the idea that class should be politically privileged has not, as witnessed by the outpouring by recent left and left-liberal arguments that the Black freedom movement must now couch its appeals in terms of class rather than race. There are three central problems with Roediger's analysis, the first being his specious historical recollections. Roediger's analysis begins in colonial America, but he cherry-picks his way through the history in order to substantiate his thesis that white workers were complicit in the construction of white supremacy. For example, there is no explanation of watershed events like Bacon's Rebellion, where Black and white freedmen burned down the capitol of Virginia and threatened the stability of the entire colonial regime. Bacon's Rebellion is generally cited as a turning point in the social construction of race in America.

Moreover, Roediger ignores the unique composition of the American working class and its consequent impact on the development of class consciousness and solidarity. The American working class developed from waves of millions of immigrants from all over the world who sometimes came with nationalist hostilities against other workers with whom their native rulers may have been in rivalry. Where that hostility was not present, new hostilities were provoked by employers who stood to gain by having a fractured, racially and ethnically tense workplace.

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