Ivorine Fung
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Book Review: 'The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class' by David Roediger
In the year 2019, race remains an enigma often explored, but never resolved; its concept so intricate, that to thoroughly unpack almost seems outside the realms of realism. Race and racism are often limited to a perspective which analyzes their effects on their victims while ignoring their impact on their perpetrators. David Roediger’s 1991 The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class inspects the effects of racism on those who executed its ideals during the industrial age in America. Roediger offers a heavily dense, and informative synthesis of the cultural, linguistic and psychological ramifications of 19th century American labor. The Wages of Whiteness brims with various multi-layered arguments-- perhaps, the most distinct asserts that whiteness is a forged identity. White Americans living in the “free North,” Roediger implies, used whiteness as a form of agency. The prevailing motif argues that rather than an innate, default form of being, whiteness was intentionally constructed and purposely employed. The instrumentality and evolution of whiteness depicted through the lens of the industrial North reveals the perplexing nature of race, and racism in antebellum America.
By Ivorine Fung4 years ago in The Swamp