A new collection of essays, most of them short, activist pieces, culled from the last 20 years of Roediger’s work, and touching on most of his familiar themes of history, culture, whiteness, art, politics, and change. “David Roediger is renowned for his brilliant writings on whiteness, but few readers acknowledge what lat at the root of his work: his abiding hatred of all forms of oppression and exploitation...Roediger has put together a powerful collection of rants and chants against miserabilism, and a surrealist road map to liberated futures.” [Robin D G Kelley] “This wonderful collection of essays is not only a powerful indictment of late capitalism - the system that ‘dulls and narrows human desire’ - but also a fascinating survey of resistance voices, from the IWW to the Surrealists, from the ‘Chicago Idea’ Anarchists to Black Liberation. David Roediger persuasively shows that rebel poetry, free imagination, workers’ direct action and Black freedom struggles are all part of the same great movement against the established order and its (miserable) ideology of ‘whiteness.’” [Michael Lowy]

History Against Misery

History

Roediger, David

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Charles H. Kerr

The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right

<div class="textLayer">The Sinking Middle Class challenges the "save the middle class" rhetoric that dominates our political imagination. The slogan misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths holding that the US is a providentially middle class nation. Implicitly white, the middle class becomes viewed as unheard amidst supposed concerns for racial justice and for the poor. Roediger shows how little the US has been a middle class nation. The term seldom appeared in US writing before 1900. Many white Americans were self-employed, but this social experience separated them from the contemporary middle class of today, overwhelmingly employed and surveilled. Today's highly unequal US hardly qualifies as sustaining the middle class. The idea of the US as a middle class place required nurturing. Those doing that ideological work--from the business press, to pollsters, to intellectuals celebrating the results of free enterprise--gained little traction until the Depression and Cold War expanded the middle class brand. Much later, the book's sections on liberal strategist Stanley Greenberg detail, "saving the middle class" entered presidential politics. Both parties soon defined the middle class to include over 90% of the population, precluding intelligent attention to the poor and the very rich. Resurrecting radical historical critiques of the middle class, Roediger argues that middle class identities have so long been shaped by debt, anxiety about falling, and having to sell one's personality at work that misery defines a middle class existence as much as fulfillment.</div>

Business & Money

Economics

Haymarket Books

<div class="textLayer">The Sinking Middle Class&nbsp;challenges the "save the middle class" rhetoric that dominates our political imagination. The slogan misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths holding that the US is a providentially middle class nation. Implicitly white, the middle class becomes viewed as unheard amidst supposed concerns for racial justice and for the poor. Roediger shows how little the US has been a middle class nation. The term seldom appeared in US writing before 1900. Many white Americans were self-employed, but this social experience separated them from the contemporary middle class of today, overwhelmingly employed and surveilled. Today's highly unequal US hardly qualifies as sustaining the middle class. The idea of the US as a middle class place required nurturing. Those doing that ideological work--from the business press, to pollsters, to intellectuals celebrating the results of free enterprise--gained little traction until the Depression and Cold War expanded the middle class brand. Much later, the book's sections on liberal strategist Stanley Greenberg detail, "saving the middle class" entered presidential politics. Both parties soon defined the middle class to include over 90% of the population, precluding intelligent attention to the poor and the very rich. Resurrecting radical historical critiques of the middle class, Roediger argues that middle class identities have so long been shaped by debt, anxiety about falling, and having to sell one's personality at work that misery defines a middle class existence as much as fulfillment. </div>

Founder of whiteness studies surveys the race/class relationship David Roediger’s influential work on working people who have come to identify as white has so illuminated questions of identity that its grounding in Marxism has sometimes been missed. This new volume implicitly and explicitly reminds us that his ideas, and the best studies of whiteness generally, come from within the Marxist tradition. In his historical studies of the intersections of race, settler colonialism, and slavery, in his major chapter (with Elizabeth Esch) on race and the management of labor, in his detailing of the origins of critical studies of whiteness within Marxism, and in his reflections on the history of solidarity, Roediger argues that racial divisions not only tell us about the history of capitalism but also shed light on the logic of capital.

Class, Race, and Marxism

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Verso

Over the past 20 years, the cultural and scholarly discourse around race has exploded to include the study of whiteness and white privilege, representing a radical shift in the way we think and talk about race in the United States. Since the advent of the modern civil rights movement, people of color have usually been responsible for leading the debate and discussion about race and racism, forced to evaluate the status of their race in relation to the prejudice they experience every day--while most white people, even the most liberal, are usually oblivious to the psychological and political weight of their own color. The study of whiteness asks all Americans--and especially white people--to take stock of the political, psychological, economic and cultural implication of white skin, white entitlement and white privilege. White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art, the first exhibition and book devoted to the subject, gives voice to 11 artists who explicitly address the issue of whiteness: Max Becher and Andrea Robbin, Nayland Blake, Nancy Burson, Wendy Ewald and Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Barbara Kruger, Nikki S. Lee, Cindy Sherman and Gary Simmons. David R. Roediger, Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Minnesota, contributes an essay on whiteness in the culture at large, and Patricia J. Williams, Professor of Law at Columbia University, writes about the social and legal implications of whiteness. Curator Maurice Berger, author of White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness, provides an introductory text on whiteness and art as well as individual artist essays.

White: Whiteness And Race In Contemporary Art (Issues in Cultural Theory)

Arts & Photography

Williams, Patricia

History & Criticism

Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC

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