White people's wages

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

In the United States, the core meaning of civil rights and the word "race" often convey concerns about Black people, and it is unusual to associate them with white social structures. Traditionally, white Americans do not associate themselves with the word "race," so racism is often considered an issue of "the other." Nobel laureate Toni Morrison recognized this phenomenon, pointing out that because academic research has focused on racism, its inherent impact on white people has been overlooked. This book is one of the few works that addresses this research blind spot. By analyzing the significance of racism in the formation of the white working class in the 19th century, author Roediger introduces a welcome new academic research that questions white identity.
Labor historian Robert Roediger incorporates popular culture, language, and politics into his neo-Marxist analytical framework. Rather than focusing on the material benefits of white privilege, he examines the role of workers' organizations in constructing the meaning of whiteness, specifically illustrating how racial superiority shapes workers' perceptions. Roediger argues that in the mid-19th century, low-skilled, emerging industrial workers sought to distinguish themselves from blacks in order to gain a certain degree of social legitimacy.
This book re-examines race from the perspective of being white and social implications, reminding readers that social divisions about race are based on a certain social status, but this social status is not neutral or objective, but a dynamic social construction process.
Scholars recommend:
This book breaks through the traditional class framework in its research perspective and introduces ethnic categories to analyze the historical formation of the American working class. It can be said to be an excellent demonstration of the evolutionary trend of the academic definition of labor "from abstract to concrete" since the end of the last century. - Professor Shen Yuan Roediger of the Department of Sociology at Tsinghua University successfully answered the important academic question of why American workers have long failed to achieve cross-racial class solidarity to jointly fight capitalism. The influence of "White Man's Wages" is almost comparable to the shock that leading scholars such as EP Thompson, Herbert Gutmann and David Montgomery brought to American labor history. For scholars studying American labor history and social history, this is definitely a must-read classic. - Wang Xinyang, Professor of the Department of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

2022-08-01

上海人民出版社

Century Wenjing

320

9787208175457