The Wages Of Whiteness

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Term Paper Title	The Wages Of Whiteness
# of Words	1021
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.08

The Wages of Whiteness
In The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class by David Roediger, we are able to examine the antebellum era with emphasis on class formation and the fluidity of racial boundaries in popular culture.  According to Roediger, mobbing, blackface and minstrelsy are key elements in the formation of the white-working class.
During the antebellum time period, Blacks were victimized by the white mobs.  The African – American community as a whole endured tremendous social injustice.  The mobs wanted Blacks to be disassociated from the citizens of America.  Roediger used the term anti-citizen to express this point, exhibiting that the white male working class intentions of segregating blacks from the dominant white society.  Mobbing inflamed race riots that significantly hurt the black community.   The white workers involved in mobbing encouraged the riots with claims of “protecting their women, from amalgamation with blacks” (page 108).  The quote expresses in a basic sense; whites were not to mix with blacks.  Associating with Blacks was considered inappropriate, and the whites had to protect themselves from Blacks.  Clearly, we can acknowledge of hatred towards Blacks. In Columbia, Pennsylvania 1834, skilled workers went on riots hysterically fueled by the threat of inter-racial sex.  Again, we see that society did not want Blacks to mix with white.  This was more emphasized with white women mixing with black men, because the white working class did not want the physical blending of black and white people. Mobs were against black causes.  “As David Grimsted has shown, the tendency to riot against asylums for the Black orphans carried the singling out of the defenseless for attack to a chilling extreme” (page 109).  From this quote, the white workers who mobbed were opposed to giving aid to the innocent orphans.  Thus, so far we have seen that we have a white working class who are using all sorts of riots in order to segregate themselves from blacks.  We can conclude that the majority of white workers were very concerned with the keeping a boundary between black and white.
     Blackface, a fragment of the antebellum era was characterized with whites that color their face black.  It’s certainly valid to state that the period of antebellum America was racially charged and expressed through blackface.  According to Roediger, the blacking up of the white working class was not simply traditional, joyous or decorative.  I...

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