David Roediger

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David R. Roediger
BornJuly 13, 1952 (1952-07-13) (age 71)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

David R. Roediger (born July 13, 1952) is the Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at the

American radicalism. He writes from a Marxist
theoretical framework.

Early life and education

Roediger was born on July 13, 1952, in Columbia, Illinois. He attended local public schools through high school. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in education from Northern Illinois University in 1975. He went on to do graduate study and earned a PhD in history from Northwestern University in 1980, where he wrote a dissertation under the direction of George M. Fredrickson.

Academic career

He was assistant editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University from 1979 to 1980.

After receiving his doctorate, Roediger was a lecturer and assistant professor of history at Northwestern University from 1980 to 1985. He served as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri in 1985, rising to full professor in 1992. He moved to the University of Minnesota in 1995, and was chair of the university's American Studies Program from 1996 to 2000.

In 2000, he was appointed professor of history at the

The University of Kansas.[2] Roediger is a member of the board of directors of the Charles H Kerr Company Publishers
, a position he has held since 1992.

Research

Roediger's research interests primarily concern race and class in the United States, although he has also written on radicalism in American history and politics.

In 1989, Roediger and historian

colonial times
. The authors argued that debate over the length of the work-day or work-week has been the central issue of the American labor movement during periods of high growth.

The Wages of Whiteness

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

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), this work is often cited as the starting point of contemporary whiteness studies.[citation needed
]

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 "

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.[citation needed
]

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? (

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.[citation needed
]

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.[citation needed]

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.

Recent work

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

Awards

Bibliography

As sole author

Co-authored works

Works edited

References

  1. ^ Roediger, David. "CV" (PDF). history.ku.edu. Retrieved 6 February 2018.
  2. The University of Kansas
    . Retrieved August 31, 2020.
  3. ^ Theodore W. Allen, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3004507 "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race" Archived 2011-04-06 at the Wayback Machine (Hoboken: Hoboken Education Project, 1975), republished in 2006 with an Introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry at Center for the Study of Working Class Life, SUNY, Stony Brook.
  4. ^ Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (Verso Books, 1994, 2012).
  5. ISBN 978-1-84467-770-2
    ).
  6. JSTOR 3004507
    . Also from Allen: “the opposition to slavery which emanated from the Northwest and the eastern wage-earners was caused by their recognition of a fundamental antagonism of interest between the slavery system and free labor rather than by their humanitarism. As a matter of fact the northern wage-earners were as hostile to Negro freemen as to the slaves. The mobbing of Negroes was quite a common occurrence in the northern and middlewestern cities during the pre-civil war period." [here, Allen cites LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, Part I, Ch. 20 and Part II, Ch. 5. Also THE NEW YORK RIOTS]" (472).
  7. ^ Theodore W. Allen, "On Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness" (Revised Edition)" Archived 2014-07-31 at the Wayback Machine (Cultural Logic, 2001).

External links
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