Understanding Racism Today: an Interview with David Roediger By Political Affairs
Editor’s Note: David Roediger teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the author of several books including, Working Toward Whiteness, Toward the Abolition of Whiteness and The Wages of Whiteness.
PA: In your new book, Working Toward Whiteness, you use the term “racialization” to describe the experiences of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Can you explain this?
DR: I think the big advantage we have now in scholarship on race in the last several decades is that we get to start from the fact that it’s a biological fiction. So a term like racialization is just meant to say that race is not biological and is made in society. It describes the processes in which race made, both by how groups of workers are slotted into jobs economically and are brought to nations under certain economic circumstances but also in the way that they’re treated in terms of citizenship rights by the state. Mainly those two processes determine how workers get put into a certain category. For my book, Eastern and Southern European immigrants were in an “in-between” position in both of those matters. They were slotted at the bottom of the economy, but not at the very bottom. By virtue of their whiteness in some contexts, they had civil rights and voting rights. But the state was constantly calling them into question through immigration restriction campaigns and saying, “You don’t really belong here. We can’t have a nation based on your citizenship, although we can have one based on your labor.” “Racialization” is that process through which ...
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/3067/1/159/
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