David Roediger--author of The Wages of Whiteness and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness--comes from Rush Limbaugh's neck of the woods in downstate Illinois river country, but looks at his skin color quite differently.
In his 2002 book Colored White, the 52-year-old historian from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, notes that he hails from "that part of the Mississippi River which divides Missouri from Illinois ... the lone portion of the Mississippi to divide slavery from freedom."
"Geniuses such as Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, Scott Joplin, Katherine Dunham, Redd Foxx, Tina Turner, Quincy Troupe, Josephine Baker, Maya Angelou, Ntozake Shange and Mark Twain have drawn on experiences along the river to chart, move, explode and ignore the color line," Roediger writes. And then there's Rush Limbaugh from Cape Girardeau: "He is my age and, as I grew up in cities north and south of the Cape, his type was all too familiar to me." Whenever he heard the radio pundit and television personality lauded as a media "genius," writes Roediger, he recoiled. He says that such praise overlooks "how thoroughly [Limbaugh's] 'genius' rests on an utterly unreflective and banal performance of whiteness."
Transcending the commonplace "it takes one to know one," Roediger has spent his career digging into the history of whiteness as an American cultural and political identity in opposition to blackness. His new book, Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White, unearths loaded phrases--from the 1820s epithet "red n-words" for Native Americans, to Hyde Park's "racial frontier" marked by anti-black redlining in the 1920s--with a deconstructionist agenda.
"Whiteness is, among much else, a bad idea," he writes. Surveying labor history--with scabs branded "white Sambos" and blacks called "smoked Irishmen"--Roediger imagines a post-racial political culture. "The whiteness of white workers, far from being natural and unchangeable, is highly conflicted, burdensome, and even inhuman," he continues. "The idea that it is desirable or unavoidable to be white must be exploded."
Working Toward Whiteness asks what happens when we think of assimilation as "whitening as well as Americanizing." Government agencies and labor unions classified certain Americans as "new immigrants" and later as "white ethnics"--always to the detriment of African-Americans, he finds. As a cultural history of slurs, and metaphors, the book reports that advocates of a 10-hour workday in the 1830s called themselves 'white n-words,' though not in solidarity with real slaves." One Congressional immigration hearing in 1912 included testimony calling Italians "full-blooded Caucasians" while the American Federation of Labor called them "white coolies."
"Teaching Americanism, the labor movement also taught whiteness," writes Roediger, who counters that legacy by giving workshops at union summer schools. Historically, gatekeepers expanded the rubric of "white" to include more and more off-the-boat Europeans--"our temporary Negroes" as one social scientist put it in 1937--whose primary qualification was possessing a skin color lighter than America's descendants of African slaves.
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