Dubois and the Lost Tradition
In 1935, Du Bois felt the ravages of racism among the white workers of the South during the Reconstruction period, lamenting: "By 1876, the country's emotional and intellectual regression made it difficult to imagine that ten years ago, most people believed that all men were equal." More than fifty years later, David Rodiger is trying to build on this to refresh people's understanding of American history. In his 1991 book White Wages, he pointed out that the source of retrogression can even be traced back to the 19th century in the United States, where white workers with independence, equality, and self-employment as the ideal began to emphasize their "non-slave" and "non-black" white identities in order to alleviate the real anxiety that they had to attach to wage labor and obey the discipline of capitalist labor. By addressing the problem of white indentured slavery left over from the Revolution and enshrined universal suffrage for white men in state constitutions, they succeeded in equating "whites" with "free men" and constructing "blacks" as "other" who were "unfree." The sense of privilege and security that comes with being white gives these workers who are anxious about their involvement in the capitalist employment system a great psychological comfort, because they know that even if they lose everything, they will never lose their white identity. And the "invention" of the white identity inevitably led to a regression of revolutionary ideals—the universally republican doctrine that had inspired countless people to fight for it degenerated into a "herrenvolk republicanism" that divided internal boundaries by race.
White Wages: Race and the Formation of the American Working Class, by David R. Rodiger, translated by Guo Fei and Li Yue, Shanghai People's Publishing House-Century Wenjing, August 2022, 320 pages, 65.00 yuan
In the introduction to the first chapter, the preface to the third edition, and between the lines of the text, Rodiger repeatedly expressed his admiration for Du Bois. Rodiger's central idea—that white identity provides psychological compensation for white workers who are exploited by class—derives directly from Du Bois's famous book, The Rebuilding of the Negro. The lower limit of Rodiger's expedition is 1865, which coincides with The Reconstruction of the Negro and also has a clear homage. As early as the first half of the 20th century, some African-American scholars, represented by Du Bois, proposed that the racial problem in the United States was not a "black problem", but a problem between whites. While "social construction" was far from a hot systemic concept at the time, scholars have actually hinted at the constructiveness of race in their exposition of the origins of white identity and what it means for American workers. For too long, however, the wisdom and insight of African-American scholars has not been given the attention it deserves. Whenever he talks about this loss of tradition, Rodiger takes aim at labor history.
Save race from class research
In Rodiger's view, the biggest problem in American labor history is the dogmatic pursuit of Marxist theory, which simply reduces the question of race to a class problem. Unwilling to see the capitalists' divide-and-rule tactics as the culprits of racism and opposed to treating workers as innocent deceivers, Rodiger emphasized the white workers' own initiative in constructing racial identities and sought to reveal the dark side of American labor history. He was also particularly disgusted by blaming the racism of white workers simply on economic factors, and instead insisted that in the minds of white workers, cultural and psychological needs such as republicanism and masculinity were more important than job opportunities and wage levels. From this perspective, Professor Wang's comment is aptly appropriate – "The influence of 'White Wages' is almost comparable to that of leading scholars such as E.P. Thompson, Herbert Goodman and David Montgomery. In the 1960s and 1980s, these three scholars brought a bottom-up perspective and a path of cultural analysis into the study of labor history, but failed to overcome the "racial blind spots" in class studies. Rodig's contribution was that he not only saved race from the traditional class framework, but also saw race as a key element in shaping class relations—and it was through the psychological comfort of constructing racial identity that white workers finally accepted their class status.
Swing your knife at the weaker
In addition to its important influence in the study of labor history, this book is also one of the important masterpieces of white identity research that emerged in the late 1980s. The study of white identity began as a theory of literary criticism and was then widely used in history, law, philosophy, sociology, education, anthropology, film studies, and almost every field of humanities and social sciences. The theoretical basis is to see race as a socially constructed concept, rather than as a biological fact. The theory focuses on examining the mechanisms by which white people's racial identities are constructed, and the core question of the researchers' focus is not on how whites perceive other minorities, but on how whites perceive themselves. It can be said that the study of white identity is a deeper reflection than the study of racism, and it is an unforgiving crusade and relentless exposure of the "ugliness" of white people. And this is precisely the strong backlash in academia caused by the rightward shift in American politics and public opinion in the 1980s. In the afterword to the second edition of White Wages, Rodiger clarified the origin of the book: out of disappointment and anger at the large numbers of white workers who voted for Reaganism in the 1980s. If the appeal to white identity in the early 19th century successfully helped American workers alleviate their fears of capitalist dependency and labor discipline, does this mean that whenever workers are in trouble, white supremacy is used as a way out of the crisis? Rodiger reveals the dark psychology of American white workers "swinging knives at the weaker", making every reader think and shudder.
Linguistics and Psychology: Tracing White Identity in Popular Culture
The White Man's Salary and Alexander Sucton's The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (1990), and Noel Ignatieff's How Did the Irish Become White? (How the Irish Became White, 1995), often listed by later scholars as one of the three masterpieces of the early 1990s historians on white identity. The latter two take a more conventional research path, exploring the "invention" of white identity from the changes in social structure and the alliance and interaction of various political forces. In contrast, Rodiger's research perspective and approach can be described as quite unique. He deliberately set aside elite rhetoric, high-level politics, and most official, institutional actions, and chose mass culture as a research object in a different way. In order to trace the clues of white identity from the myriad and obscure mass culture, he made extensive use of linguistics and psychological analysis methods that were refreshing.
The linguistic approach is embodied mainly in a section of the book's chapters III, IV and V. Rodiger combed through the changes in the meaning and preference of words such as hireling, master, boss, white slavery, coon, buck, Mose, etc., especially in the third and fourth chapters of the careful analysis of the boss replacing master, help, or hireling instead of servant, and the process of white slavery metaphors from emergence to disappearance. It convincingly presents the white worker's sensitive resistance to attachment and the gradual emphasis on white identity. Personally, the most enlightening part is the section that elaborates on white slavery. In the course of my research on early industrialization and labor in the United States, I noticed that in the first half of the nineteenth century, workers criticized the capitalist employment system with three metaphors: white slavery, slavery of wages, and wage slavery, but I did not carefully analyze the nuances; While I know that workers eventually abandon criticism and become celebraters and defenders of capitalism, they ignore the role of white identity in it and fail to realize the racial connotations of the "free labor" ideology. Rodiger, on the other hand, is like a clever detective, especially adept at grasping evidence in the subtleties that have been overlooked. He tells the reader why white workers were more likely to use white slavery in the first place in three metaphors? Because white slavery's appeal to racial identity compared to the other two obscures class identity and helps to mobilize more people to join the ranks of critics of capitalism,[1] but on the other hand, it also contains a stronger pro-black slave color. Why did the white slave metaphor later become unpopular and gradually replaced by "free labor"? For the former compares white workers to black slaves, while the latter corresponds white workers to freedom, pandering to the values of "ruling national republicanism." Rodiger repeatedly reiterated that the core aspirations of American workers are the pursuit of white identity. Once this basic premise is accepted, many important political issues of the first half of the nineteenth century, such as the complex relationship between the labor movement and the abolitionist movement, and the composition and change of the political base of the Democratic and Republican parties, are worth rethinking.
In chapters V, Six, and Chapter, Rodiger uses the psychological concept of "projection" to analyze the black-faced performances and street violence against blacks that were all the rage among white workers, especially those of Irish descent. Rodiger points out that black-faced shows are so popular that white workers project their anxiety in the industrial age onto blacks. Caucasian workers have to accept in real life the identities and habits of the industrial age—urban, decent, but at the same time dependent and highly repressive. So they saw the Negro as the embodiment of the rustic, vulgar, but at the same time casual, free pre-industrial age. Under the black mask, white workers can briefly transform into "blacks", reliving the past of the pre-industrial era for a moment, while at the same time quickly and safely shuttling back and continuing to declare their white identity. But this "projection" effect also means that what blacks do in public must conform to the image of the white workers as constructed by the black people and represent the characteristics of the pre-industrial era, and must serve to alleviate the anxiety of the white workers, who are bound to become angry. This was the main reason why white workers at that time frequently turned against blacks.
The replacement of a highly abstract psychoanalysis with a concrete, detailed historical argument is one point that many historians have criticized. Historians are understandably unfamiliar and uncomfortable with a great deal of psychoanalysis. But I think this kind of psychoanalysis has its own value for the study of history, and it reminds historians to value human complexity, diversity, and uncertainty. Caucasian workers cannot simply be relegated to the camp of "traditionalists" or "progressives", nor can they be summed up in general terms such as "nostalgia" and "resistance" to summarize their feelings for the pre-industrial and industrial eras. White workers live in the tug of old and new cultures, carrying the burden of providing for their families, who despise and miss the old era, who are both disgusted and infatuated, who are both afraid and eager for the new era, who are both hopeful and prejudiced. So, they tend to change camps frequently. Rodiger figuratively exemplified, "If a worker has a drink with a co-worker at work on Monday, he may feel both unscrupulous in his conscience because he drank at work and guilty for rejecting his co-worker on Tuesday." (p. 159) Respect for human complexity is key to understanding the effects of "projection" and should be the cornerstone of all humanities disciplines, including history.
In 1941, in Erie, Pennsylvania, workers were erecting prefabricated timber-framed architectural frames for the Franklin Terrace Defense Housing Project.
White Identity: A Unique American Phenomenon?
"White Payroll" caused a strong response after its publication. There has been a great deal of commentary on it in the academic community, including criticism such as focusing too much on the appearance of white identity and ignoring non-white experiences and concepts; Too much emphasis on white identity ignores other forms of oppression and exploitation, and so on. I believe that these problems, while present, do not affect the scholarly value of the book. To evaluate the level of an academic work, it is not to see whether it is comprehensive and has everything, but to see whether it can challenge stereotypes at a certain point. One-sided profundity is often the first step to break through the existing knowledge framework. From this point of view, the book is undoubtedly a success.
What I really think is questionable is whether Rodiger's strong sense of reality and stark political stance led him to overstate the role of white workers in "inventing" racism. Rodigher's motivation for writing the book was to expose the "ugliness" of the workers. To this end, he has not hesitated to cut off the long history of racism in Europe for centuries, viewing racial identity as a unique American phenomenon "invented" by white workers that did not appear until the 19th century. Rodiger is well aware of the outstanding achievements of scholars such as Winthrop Jordan and David Brion Davis in tracing the roots of American racism. In the second chapter, he spends a great deal of time responding, trying to use the example of the common actions of the lower classes of people of different races in Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, and other places to prove that "in 1607-1800, the lower white people did not seem to have a racial consciousness, and perhaps they never foolishly accepted the white supremacist attitude that Jordan described in society." (p. 57)) However, Rodiger's self-justification seems somewhat reluctant compared to Jordan's 600-plus page magnum opus, White Above Black, Davis's "Problem Series" on slavery, and countless other treatises on racist historiography. In addition, a complete focus on white workers is too biased to avoid talking about what other social classes (such as slave owners, white political and social elites, etc.) do in "inventing" white identity. In any sense, white workers are only one of many forces involved in the creation of white supremacy. Racism is still raging in the United States, and it is not just white workers who need to be crusaded.