Weaknesses include the long and laborious task of reading the work, one which I and many others may find oppressive and overly academic in nature. Perhaps Roediger would have benefited by providing his audience with story telling or other tools the reader could use to actively engage in the activities provided throughout the book. As one continues reading they soon realize Roediger provides his own interpretation and synthesis of psychoanalysis from

' Culture, in Buck's point-of-view, and the construction of race, thus had a greater importance upon the creation of modern Kentucky than a logical evaluation of individual's real interests. This is why both whites and blacks have been worked to the bone. Discrimination against poor whites still abounds in present-day Kentucky in the form of stereotypes. Poor whites are often characterized as supposed 'rednecks' who deserve their economic fate because their

It seems to this reviewer that the practices of the white workers that Roediger describes are not far removed from this. 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

However, the social perceptions that could have gained her an easier entry into low-class work also could have kept her there, and prevented her from entering a management position. Gender in the absence of race seems to be the cutting divide at the Maids, while the individual who is in charge of the franchise is male, and a male voice guides the Hispanic demonstrator on the tape. But in

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

The Problem of White Normativity In a multi-racial world, defining anyone as “black” or “white” makes as much sense as believing that all issues are “black” and “white” and that there are no shades of gray to anything. Almost everyone will certainly agree that from politics to economics to religion to any subject under the sun, there is a great deal of leeway to be given because to rigidly peg something