Founder of whiteness studies surveys the race/class relationship Seen as a key figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions of identity. This volume collects his recent and new work implicitly and explicitly challenging such a view. In his historical studies of the intersections of race, settler colonialism, and slavery, in his major essay (with Elizabeth Esch) on race and the management of labour, in his detailing of the origins of critical studies of whiteness within Marxism, and in his reflections on the history of solidarity, Roediger argues that racial division is not only part of the history of capitalism but also of the logic of capital.
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David R. Roediger. Class, Race and Marxism
CLASS, RACE, AND MARXISM
Contents
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION. Thinking through Race and Class in Hard Times
CHAPTER I. The Retreat from Race and Class
CHAPTER 2. Accounting for the Wages of Whiteness:US Marxism and the Critical History of Race
CHAPTER 3. A White Intellectual among ThinkingBlack Intellectuals: George Rawickand the Settings of Genius
CHAPTER 4. Removing Indians, Managing Slaves, andJustifying Slavery: The Case for Intersectionality
CHAPTER 5 “One Symptom of Originality”: Race and theManagement of Labor in US History Coauthored with Elizabeth Esch
CHAPTER 6. Making Solidarity Uneasy: Cautions on aKeyword from Black Lives Matter to the Past
Notes
Index
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David R. Roediger
Introduction: Thinking through Race and Class in Hard Times
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Johnson criticized the “handful of Black Lives Matter protesters” who interrupted Sanders events as forwarding the anti–“social democratic” position. He lamented, “But I’ve grown weary of this position—repeated with startling unanimity by students, activists, academic colleagues, social media commentators, and career pundits, who frequently reject any talk of a universal, broad-based leftist project.” To frame matters thusly threatens to read out of existence the whole strand of fighters like James, Claudia Jones, and Dr. King, all of whom very much believed in universal projects and antiracist demands. The problems of Johnson’s position in this regard were dramatically revealed when Coates announced that he was in fact a Sanders supporter, and declared himself to be delighted that socialism was gaining a popular hearing, despite his reservations on Sanders’s understanding of white supremacy. As he wrote in a specific rejoinder to Johnson, “But I do not believe that if this world [of social democratic reforms that he supports] were realized, the problem of white supremacy would dissipate, any more than I believe that if reparations were realized, the problems of economic inequality would dissipate.”22
Again and again, contemporary debates on race and class involve characterizations like Johnson’s of the supposed state of the existing discourse and policies as hopelessly tilted towards race at the expense of class. We need to bend the stick in one direction, it is said, because everyone else, or perhaps just liberals and neoliberals, so bend it in the other. So many well-positioned writers imagine that an increased emphasis on class can only come by toning down the race and gender talk that it is hard to see how they maintain the stance that they are lonely figures sacrificing to tell the truth. Academic emphases and those of NGOs are said to structure race-first distortions. Injecting a word about class becomes an act of extraordinary freethinking courage, defying a deck stacked against any such mention. No matter how repeatedly such mentions occur they get to count as speaking truth to power—itself perhaps an overrated practice.
