From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Author and history professor Roediger (The Wages of Whiteness) takes a provocative look at how white elites in the U.S. have managed race for their own political and economic gain, in the process making it one of the defining features of American life. Only a few decades after Europeans' arrival in America, emerging class tensions were leading indentured servants-white and black-to disaffection and, sometimes, rebellion. By enslaving blacks, and giving poor whites dominating roles as overseers or slave catchers, elite whites quashed the emerging fraternity and gave birth to white supremacy. Since, successive generations-from slave holders to factory managers-have manipulated laborers to keep African Americans at the bottom of the heap, while new waves of immigrants secured the benefits of white privilege by distancing themselves from people of color and assimilating. Taking his history through the Clinton era ("How Race Survived Modern Liberalism"), Roediger includes an afterword on "the Obama Phenomenon," finding yet more questions in the African-American senator's triumphant presidential campaign. This rousing, thought-provoking history illuminates the enveloping 400-year-old history of race in America, and the issues he raises are as relevant as ever.
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Review
In a trenchant, broad-ranging analysis, the leading US historian of racism, David Roediger, demonstrates white supremacy’s incredible staying power against major societal forces that should long ago have dismantled it. Not capitalism, not emancipation, not labor movements, not mass immigration, not the civil rights movement, not colorblind liberalism, and not the Barack Obama presidential campaign—not one of these forces separately, and not all of them together—have been able to destroy the deep structures of white racism in the United States. (Joe R. Feagin )
David Roediger’s bold and brilliant book presents an extraordinary new framework for understanding the persistence of racism in the history of the United States. This book is a wake-up call and a warning, an appeal for understanding and action. It offers a clear and convincing demonstration that white supremacy is not merely a relic of the past but rather a perpetually renewed and infinitely renewable resource for inequality and injustice in the present. (George Lipsitz )
A staggering re-interpretation of the whole course of American history in which the skeletons in the closet walk again. From genocide and massacre to lynching to the coded tongue of liberalism, the bankruptcy of white supremacy is found in the racialized structures maintained by the enclosures of incarceration and the foreclosures of impignoration. Read it, Obama, and weep! (Peter Linebaugh )
Sometime in the US of the past quarter-century, calling policies and the people who dream them up racist became a worse offense than for them to be racist. This inversion, always dressed in self-righteous indignation, is actually part of the social evolution of white supremacy. David Roediger’s new book details in sharp and readable prose how race survived US history. It is a must-read for all who strive to understand—and abolish—what underlies the strangely strident rhetoric enveloping everything from presidential contests to prison expansion. (Ruth Wilson Gilmore )
