American History

The author claims that the social construction of the concept of white race was a conscious effort to mentally differentiate slave owners and the slaves. Also, the author tackles the relationship between the improvements of Americas working classes and the social build up of unfairness behaviors or racism. He pointed out that the chronological order of the historical background of history of racism, together with the working classes within the United States, was basically based on ethnicity.

Chapter one of the book sets the conceptual approach and gives out important questions of the significant concept of Marxist labor historians that have been ignored or misconceived. Thus he said in on part of the, The main body of writing by white Marxist in the United States has both naturalized whiteness and over simplified race. These weaknesses and the fact that they largely reproduce the weakness of both American liberalism and neo conservatism where raced is concerned, have limited the influence of the very real Marxist contribution to the study of race (Roediger, 1991, p 6). He classifies Marxism into two categories, namely the traditional Marxist who emphasis on class and the neo-Marxist who subscribe the views of Herbert Gutman of United States and P. Thompson of Great Britain. These historians according to him take the self-motivated society of history. At the last part of the book he mentioned took a task by correcting the error that white supremacism was in part a conception of the European-American workers during the early 19th century.

In Chapter two he refers the Anglo-American period as The Prehistoric of the White Worker Settler Colonialism, Race and Republicanism before 1800. He introduces the identity of what he called the language of class whereas the European-American artisans reacted to the hazard of extinction by the capitalist endeavor by an appeal to the white-only republicanism. Thus he narrates, None of these is to argue that working people in the 17th and 18th century were not aware of race or they are unwilling to use white supremacy when it could work on their advantage. Racial attitudes did behave promiscuously and coexist with their opposites, (Roediger, 1991, p 25).

Chapter three of the book tackles about the growing industrialization to the improvement and development of white culture and the emergence of whiteness in the society. This chapter he mentions as Neither a Servant nor a Master am I to build an economy and society without masters and servants. Unskilled European Workers according to him were resentful of the routine discipline if industrial employment and consoled themselves with the social difference of being free citizens. He further reiterates that special attention is given to laboring class to combined political and economic motives with an unthinking decision which they projected onto their image as African-American. Thus he further explains, The existence of slavery (and increasingly of open northern campaigns to degrade the free blacks) gave working Americans both a wretched touchtone against which to measure their fears of unfreedom and a friendly remainder that they were by comparison not so badly off. (Roediger, 1991, p 49).

Part four of the book argues about that in the period of the Civil War and Post-Emancipation, there was an amount of moderation of white workers to compare Blackness of a person to with servility. (Roediger, 1991, p 174). However, in the end of the process he mentioned that European-Americans were still governed by fears of equality and Sexual amalgamation. The Black workers because of their color had too much to give to the development of labor movement and they struggle for the eight-hour labor in particular, but this gift was rejected by white labor.