Though they did not own the blacks, they worked to hold them down so that they themselves could be made to feel superior. Roediger may want to call such behavior prepolitical, apparently in the belief that only when class distinctions enter does the relationship become political. However, class and race here seem closely mixed as means of control. While it may be understandable that industrialized workers wanted to find means of escape from and control over the alienationof their situation, by appropriating false means of self-justification, they made it difficult to accept their reasoning. Had the workers, instead of turning to racism for self-justification, turned to religion, one wonders whether Roediger would...
The book presents a provocative argument and a structure that supports the purpose of the argument. However, this reader found the reasoning unpersuasive in the end. The wages of whiteness, much like the wages of sin that is their namesake, promote only loss of self and salvation in the final analysis.
The wages of whiteness spread to include the social systems that would subjugate blacks, such as the police department, the local government, and even fiscal segments of society. He maintains the wages of whiteness actually helped contribute to capitalism and the class system in our own society, and so, they ultimately led to more feelings of racism and hatred, as well. The author asserts this early in the book,
Each brings the evidence to light by utilizing a different set of sources, one slightly more personal and narrative than the other but both clearly expressive of the expansion of the ideals of America as a "white" masculine society of working class people that needed and obtained voice through ideals that attempted, at least to some degree to skirt the issue of race. Race was represented in both works
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