Class, Race and Marxism. David R. Roediger
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occupied high profiles as figures whose books have circulated fairly widely among young activists and whose desire to further the “abolition of whiteness” has been repeatedly stated. The right-wing journalist David Horowitz’s hysterical attacks on “whiteness studies” have most insistently played on the theme that such work is not scholarship at all, but indoctrination and propaganda. Horowitz once extravagantly and implausibly tried to locate critical studies of whiteness “in the theoretical writings and politics of mass murderers like Lenin and Mao, and totalitarian dictators like Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.”4
Eric Arnesen’s three ever-shriller essays on the subject warn similarly against “whiteness studies.” They score red-baiting points—arguing that radical politics drives the manipulated conclusions of writings on whiteness—saving the greatest contempt for my work and especially Ignatiev’s as species of “sectarian moralism.” Regarding Ignatiev, Arnesen would seem to prefer a purge to debate, writing, “that his [Ignatiev’s] political cult-like sensibility should find a respectable place in university history departments is a testament to the academy’s perhaps overly generous and ecumenical culture (at least toward matters considered progressive) …” On this view, Ignatiev’s political activism imparted an indelible mark of “left splinter-sectarianism” to his historical accounts. My own sin is to advance “outlandish” antiracist politics as part of academic writing—to go beyond the “discursive barricades” and to advocate an “ ‘assault on white supremacy’ in the real world.”5
All of this said, I would no longer fully demur from Painter’s dating of a new early-1990s beginning for the critical studies of whiteness, as long as it is clear that we are considering the field’s specific emergence within the discipline of US history and acknowledge that if Ignatiev and I stood as faces most identified with the boldness and revolutionary commitments of that beginning, we were far from alone in it, or even at its intellectual head. To include a fuller roster of those white writers of the history of whiteness from the 1990s as founders of a new phase in the evolution of this inquiry would thus both add accuracy and lessen the vulnerability of the field to attack, though other important figures equally pursued activist projects and held left commitments intellectually. In particular, Alexander Saxton and Theodore Allen were there at the beginning and with weightier early books than mine and Ignatiev’s. Soon Venus Green, Michael Rogin, George Lipsitz, Bruce Nelson, and Karen Brodkin would be publishing important studies.6 Ignatiev and I mainly contributed the most memorable soundbites—the idea of whiteness as a “wage” and the insistence that some immigrants “become white,” though even there the phrasings are, as we shall see, very much in the debt of older works by the African-American socialist writers W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. The presence of this larger group of heterodox, overwhelmingly Marxist, radical historians of whiteness in the 1990s ensured that the slight books Ignatiev and I wrote could not be entirely marginalized and indeed soon received intense discussion across disciplines.
This essay then attempts to situate the 1990s origins of a new, distinctly history-based body of critical studies of US whiteness among a circle of writers with common and disparate left experiences and Marxist ideas, dating back at least to the 1960s and in some cases to the 1930s. The authors of these studies often shared mentors, inspirations, and publishing venues. We knew each other by the twos, threes, and fours, although we never functioned as a group and in fact would have bridled at the idea that a field of “whiteness studies” should exist outside of radical history and ethnic studies. The chapter attempts, then, to describe a milieu, and to recall some of its formation, suggesting the key role of a Marxism grounded in labor activism and in the ideas of C.L.R. James, Baldwin, George Rawick, and above all Du Bois. Even the embrace by some of us of psychoanalysis as a way to shape inquiries emerged from within the left. The achievement of Marxists in recasting study of race through critical histories of whiteness deserves emphasis because the successes of historical materialism in the US have been rare enough over the last two decades. The field’s emergence as an historical materialist project, and partly in the specific context of the Black freedom movement, also warrants elaboration because there is some tendency among academic critics to imagine that the critical study of whiteness issues from postmodernism, Freud, and identity politics, even in opposition to Marxism. At its most sloppy, or desirous of scoring supposed points for one kind of Marxism over another, such criticism descended to branding critical whiteness studies as a “critique of historical materialism” or as an expression of “the anti-materialism so fashionable at present” or even (in a critique of Allen of all writers) as “extreme philosophical idealism.”7 Such critiques have typically credited Arnesen’s frankly empiricist and non-Marxist stance early in a review essay and then have later pronounced on which books under consideration are sufficiently materialist and which are not. (It might be said, in mitigation, that Arensen in the space of a few lines was capable of criticizing whiteness scholars for not making a “cleaner” break from Marxism, and then to brand them as “pseudo-Marxists,” implying perhaps that he held some unstated commitment to a fully unspecified “real” Marxism. He likewise could deride psychoanalysis and simultaneously claim a perch from which to judge others as practicing “pseudopsychoanalysis.” There was ample room for confusion.8) In some cases, there crops up among scholars who have scarcely acknowledged the existence of Marxism in their long careers a sudden interest in defending Marxism against “whiteness studies,” one which comes to be directed against those who have long written as Marxists.9
Weighty books of history are often responsive to the dangers of the moments in which they appear, but they cannot be called into being in those moments. Much, and not so much, should therefore be made of the fact that the first major studies of working-class white identity and practice were written in reaction to the 1980s regimes of Ronald Reagan and published in or just after the term of George Herbert Walker Bush in the 1990s. These presidencies locate the then-new studies not only in reactionary times, but also in periods in which substantial numbers of white workers, even union members, voted for reaction. For writers, and readers, of critical histories of whiteness, the moment elicited a passionate interest in working-class conservatism and its relationship to race. Thinking and voting as whites, rather than as workers, made the white worker a problem in the present and opened possibilities of making the emergence of the white workers an historical problem as well.
However, the longer trajectories of figures like Saxton and Allen suggest more varied inspirations. Appearing in 1990, Saxton’s The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America predated all of the other books under consideration here. Rise and Fall was Saxton’s fifth book, following three proletarian novels from the 1940s and 50s, and the brilliant The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. Coming to the Communist movement in the 1930s, after education at Harvard and University of Chicago, Saxton became an organizer in the railroad and construction industries and served as a paid publicist for the Committee on Maritime Unity, a left effort to unite workers in unions with very different practices where race was concerned. He entered graduate school in history at University of California midlife after losing the opportunity to market fiction, and for a time his requests for a passport, amid early Cold War repression.10
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