David Roediger

Roediger's book, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, was published in 1991. Along with Alexander Saxton's Rise and Fall of the White Republic (1990) and Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), this work is often cited as the starting point of contemporary whiteness studies.

Theodore W. Allen's “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race" (1975),[3] a pamphlet that later was expanded into his seminal two-volume work The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (1994, 2012) and[4] The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 2: "The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America" (1997, 2012);[5] has also been influential in this field. The argument was also in some regards anticipated by Abram Lincoln Harris' radical scholarship in the 1920s.[6] Allen later wrote of Roediger's work:

"...because of its almost universal acceptance for use in colleges and universities, has served as the single most effective instrument in the socially necessary consciousness-raising function of objectifying 'whiteness,' and in popularizing the 'race-as-a-social-construct' thesis. As one who has been the beneficiary of kind supportive comments from him for my own efforts in this field of historical investigation, I undertake this critical essay with no other purpose than furthering our common aim of the disestablishment of white identity, and the overthrow of white supremacism in general."[7]

In the work, Roediger argued that "whiteness" is a historical phenomenon in the United States, as many different ethnicities now considered "white" were not initially perceived as such here. The Irish, for example, as Roman Catholics and from rural areas, were not considered "white" – meaning accepted as members of the Anglo-American Protestant majority society – until they began to distinguish themselves from black slaves and freedmen; from the New York Draft Riots of 1863, to riots in Philadelphia against black voting, and the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, ethnic Irish were prominent in violent confrontations against black Americans, with whom they competed for jobs, physical territory and political power. Roediger believes their struggle reflects the emergence of the modern theory of color consciousness, through which notions of "nations" and "races" were increasingly linked to color as the primary category of human difference. Roediger claims that the social construction of the concept of a white race in the United States was a conscious effort by slave owners to gain distance from those they enslaved, who were generally non-European and non-Christian. In addition, white working peoples gained distance from their Southern proletarian complements, the slaves. By the 18th century, he says, "white" had become well-established as a racial term in the United States; by the end of the 19th, it had become an all-encompassing one.

Weaving together economic theory, psychology, and the histories of immigration, industrialization, class formation and slavery, Roediger in this work addressed what has become a common question in labor history, specifically, and American political culture more generally: why, historically, have working class blacks and whites not found common cause in their shared suffering at the bottom of the social ladder? (W. E. B. Du Bois also posed this question in his seminal work, Black Reconstruction (1935), as he saw a failure of labor in creating connections across racial lines.) In the 19th-century context where the small-scale, autonomous craftsmen were being replaced, slowly but inexorably, by the factory system – with great consequences for the "liberty" of ordinary Americans, Roediger suggested that for workers to embrace "whiteness" and a caricatured representation of black slaves provided them with a meaningful symbolic "wage," replacing the status values of independence and craft skill for workers.

This idea that "whiteness" holds enormous value for the working class has influenced a generation of scholars including, most recently, cultural critic Thomas Frank. Most immediately, it was considered by scholars to have contributed to what analysts had observed to be the splitting of the civil rights consensus of the national Democratic Party and the shift among many of the white working class to vote for Republican Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, pushing him to victory.

Wages of Whiteness won the Merle Curti Award in 1992 from the Organization of American Historians, for the best work of social history in 1991.

Roediger is researching the interrelation between labor management and the formation of racial identities in the U.S.

• 1992, the Merle Curti Award for his book, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, by the Organization of American Historians.
• 1999, the Carlton C. Qualey Memorial Award for his article "Inbetween Peoples," co-authored with James Barrett. The award is given by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society for the best article in the Journal of American Ethnic History.

• The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History. New York: OR Books. 2020.
• Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All. New York: Verso. 2014.
• How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon. New York: Verso. 2008.
• History Against Misery. Chicago, Illinois: Charles H. Kerr Company. 2006. ISBN 0-88286-305-3.
• Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White. The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic Books. 2005.
• Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 2002. ISBN 0-520-24070-7.
• Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Class and Politics. London, UK and New York: Verso Books. 1994. ISBN 0-86091-658-8.
• The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. ed. London, UK and New York: Verso Books. 1999. ISBN 1-85984-240-2.

• with Elizabeth Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and The Management of Labor in U.S. History. Oxford: Oxford University P, 2012. ISBN 9780199739752
• with Philip S. Foner, Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day. Greenwood, Colo.: Greenwood Press, 1989. ISBN 0-313-26062-1
• with Tyler Stallings, Amelia Jones, Amelia, and Ken Gonzales-Day, Whiteness: A Wayward Construction. Laguna Beach, Calif.: Laguna Art Museum, 2003. ISBN 0-911291-31-8

• with Martin Blatt, The Meaning of Slavery in the North. New York: Garland, 1998. ISBN 0-8153-3758-2
• with Ronald C. Kent, Sara Markham, and Herbert Shapiro, Culture, Gender, Race, and U.S. Labor History. Greenwood, Colo.: Greenwood Press, 1993. ISBN 0-313-28828-3
• Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White. Paperback edn New York: Schocken Books, 1999. ISBN 0-8052-1114-4
• Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson, By Fred Thompson. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1993. ISBN 0-88286-220-0
• John Brown, By W.E.B. DuBois. New York: Random House, 2001. ISBN 0-679-78353-9
• Labor Struggles in the Deep South, By Covington Hall. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1999. ISBN 0-88286-244-8
• with Rosemont, Franklin, Haymarket Scrapbook. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1986. ISBN 0-88286-147-6
• with Archie Green, Franklin Rosemont, and Salvatore Salerno. The Big Red Songbook. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 2007. ISBN 0-88286-277-4
• The Best American History Essays 2008. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. ISBN 0-230-60591-5
• with Martin Smith, Listening to Revolt: Selected Writings of George Rawick. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 2010. ISBN 0-88286-318-5
• with Jeremy Krikler and Wulf D. Hund, Wages of Whiteness & Racist Symbolic Capital, Berlin: Lit, 2010. ISBN 978-3-643-10949-1