How Race Survived US History: David R Roediger: Review

How Race Survived US History – From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon

With the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the US, the publication of David Roediger’s latest work in the autumn of last year could hardly have been more timely. Roediger, whose reputation rests in no small measure on a previous Verso book, The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class (1991), is an academic historian of race and class in the US, currently based at the University of Illinois.

Whereas Roediger’s seminal work focused on the crystallisation of a profoundly racist ideology within the organisations of white working class in the 19th century, and even made use of psychoanalytic arguments to bolster his case, with his latest book he has painted on a much broader canvas, seeking to encapsulate some 400 years of American history into little more than 250 pages.

Roediger has eschewed footnotes in favour of a more popular, accessible approach, albeit a densely argued, erudite and idiosyncratic one, as illustrated by his use of a lesser known Herman Melville short story and his novel, The Confidence Man, to illustrate the complexities of “race management”.

Quoting passages from Melville, Roediger rightly argues that the discourse surrounding racial relations cannot be reduced to the domestic argument between the north and south around chattel slavery, but was – even in the mid-19th century – inextricably linked to “a context of trade, maritime labor, western expansion and the hubris required for empire.” (pp88-9)

For Roediger, nationally specific features of capitalist development and class formation in the US have a distinctly powerful and disproportionate relationship with race.

Heavily influenced by the writings of the African-American activist and intellectual, WEB Dubois, Roediger declares an affinity with “classical Marxism”, suggesting that Marx had a more profound understanding of the integration of the pre-Civil War, slave-holding south into the US, and ultimately world economy than many latter-day liberal and radical commentators.

On the other hand, Marxism for Roediger becomes both “indispensable and inadequate in addressing the history of the US and of the embodied labor that built it”. Citing the work of Lisa Lowe, author of Immigrant Acts, he maintains that “in the world’s most developed capitalist nation the connection of race and exploitation was not restricted to this early period [of primitive accumulation], but was continued and ramified, driving the accumulation of capital and shaping the nature of government.” (p67)

In a subsequent chapter he goes on to document how Taylorism and other variations on supposedly “scientific management” were anything but colour blind and how, in fact, its proponents often pursued absurd attempts to quantify supposedly ethnic/racial differences in labour productivity. In short, “capital and management helped to reproduce racial differences over long stretches of US history and to divide workers in ways that compromised labor’s efforts to address either race or class inequalities.” (p98)

Roediger explores depressingly familiar but still shocking territory, detailing the repeated and systematic efforts in wide swathes of the media to depict successive waves of migrant workers from Irish Catholics through Italians and East Europeans as somehow less than “white”, along with the whipping up of violent racism against Chinese migrants, who were excluded from the ranks of an emerging organised working class in the 1870s and 80s.

He does not suggest that nothing important has changed and points out that civil rights and other struggles within the framework of a bourgeois democracy have achieved real progress.

But his vision of the present and future remains stark. He writes of the fragility of “even formal, legal equality” in the light of the ultimate failures of the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s, suggesting that the organisational retreats and ideological disorientation of the intervening years left the door ajar “for the development of new forms of state-centred race-making processes around incarceration and deportation.”

He sees some grounds for optimism in aspects of the “Obama phenomenon”, perceiving in it evidence of a new “fluidity” in the construction of racial identities that have emerged in recent decades. At the same time, however, he points to deep structural inequality, with an undeniably racial dimension that not only persists but also, in some aspects, worsens. Here Roediger has no expectations of Obama offering any meaningful solutions. Similarly, demographic change on its own will not cause race to magically disappear but instead, contends Roediger, is likely to result in new “mutations”.

Do not come to Roediger looking for real answers to the challenges he documents with intellectual rigour and an undeniable anti-racist passion. In the closing paragraphs, he speaks of “new alliances, especially of African-Americans with immigrants, and of feminist and working class organisations with anti-racist forces, in movements not only to be represented within a highly unequal order, but also to transform that order” (pp229-30).

How this will come about, what agencies are necessary to achieve it, we are not told. But his lack of strategic answers only slightly detracts from what has gone before – a powerful polemic that highlights the enduring power of “white supremacy” as both ideology and practice, permeating US history and still shaping contemporary realities.

Mon 01, June 2009 @ 23:07