Hate and Herrenvolk Republicanism

This is an interesting--and unavoidably, I think, problematic--text that has already made for some thought-provoking discussion. Here are my two cents for what they're worth: .01: What Roediger makes clear is the eagerness with which poor white men in the early 19th century participated in--and perpetuated--racial hatred in order to gather cultural capital that would, they hoped, yield political and economic capital. And instead of focusing only on African American populations, Roediger includes women, Native Americans, the Irish, and upper echelons of white society in his discussion of the objects of hostility. Thus he illustrates the "fear and longing" (and subsequent loathing) that circumscribed white men of the lower classes within an economic and social system that was becoming outmoded. But Roediger never puts it exactly in these terms, perhaps because some of the groups at which they directed their anger supplied additional members (the Irish anti-abolitionists, for example) and strengthened their cause and their numbers. Each chapter seems to dig a bit deeper into the objects and performance of their hate, even as Roediger leads the reader through the chronology. At the end, I felt that I better understood the mechanisms by which such hate was deliberately and systematically embedded into working class white culture. .02: Roediger amasses an army of sources(sometimes I wondered whether a footnote might have been less distracting than the litany of names in some paragraphs) to support his own Marxist interpretation that the origins of white supremacy lie within the devaluing of poor white labor. His careful linguistic analysis of how this happens, however, seems (ironically) compromised by his own occasional lack of sensitivity. At times, his phrasing (such as his description of the Christmas maskings in Philadelphia as both "tragic" and "fascinating") seems to counter his arguments, or at least the spirit with which he purports to engage in his research. In the same vein, I question why, with all of his talk of sentimentality, lack of empathy, and psychology, he doesn't focus more on what he seems to circumvent: the absence of compassion in herrenvolk republicanism. In addition to concerns of power, this seemed to be a driving force behind the differences between those who bought into white supremacy and those who could have but didn't. My own cynicism aside, I do wonder what an examination of this might yield.