Thursday, February 7, 2013
Race, Class, and Roediger's Model
After only reading the books first chapter, it's clear that Roediger is trying to unpack several intertwining themes which don't just engage historical topics but current political culture as well. This obviously has to be approached with care, and while I don't have much background in this area, the author is clearly trying to show the deliberate and thoughtful approach he is taking to the material. Am I understanding correctly his assertion he appears to keep hitting home in the beginning of the book about the fallacy of the political argument that class and race are essentially separate spheres? By extension, he appears to be criticizing the assertion made by both ends of the political spectrum that only when race is separated from class issues could social cohesion be possible. I get the impression that he finds this notion not only untrue, but detrimental to understanding the complex issues involved. Am I misreading his argument? I certainly don't want to wrongly perceive his purpose when reading the rest of the monograph.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
While I do not claim to be have this argument locked down, I think that your assessment is correct. I got the impression that he is trying to show the fallacy behind the creation of white and black identities. If you separate race and class it is easier to place one or the other as having more importance for identity, which would be wrong.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI wish that Roediger had extended his theses to current political culture. If he had dared to make his book relevant to the modern world, introduced in his introduction, he might have spent a bit more time tying these different eras together.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading the introduction, epilogue, index and select chapters – I was chagrinned at the lack of information that would have forwarded themes introduced early on. Such as:
studies of racism. How does his argument use the information gleaned from racial studies? What kind of data is it? Does he have more to back up his point-of-view beyond snippets of Marxist and Post-Marxist framing and dialectic prose? How does his copious use of racist dialect effectively forward an argument?
Why introduce information from sociologist Pierre L. van den Berghe about herrenvolk democracy and herrenvolk republicanism and ignore the vast body of information that relates to Asian workers in the United States?
As for snippets of "Marxist and Post-Marxist framing," one thing stuck out for me when reading the first chapter. He says Barbara Field's assertion that class has "objective dimensions," whereas race does not makes me wonder. The argument that race is constructed differently across time by people in the same social class" may be true, but are class distinction as perfectly stratified simply "because people really do own or not own land and workplaces" a reliable argument. Can class distinctions be more ambiguous than tangible economic distinctions, and if so, does that somehow skew his overarching argument?
ReplyDeleteInteresting discussion. As a Marxist, Roediger is inclined to treat culture as epiphenomenal--the product not just of "economic forces" but rather of class relations. But he is not a vulgar Marxist (which is to say, he doesn't treat race and racial ideas as SIMPLY serving class interests). Here's a critical question: why is it that Roediger insists that white identity as white could not come about until the early republic? Recall that Morgan implied that it came about in Virginia in the early eighteenth century. Roediger denies that this is possible. Why?
ReplyDeleteOh--one last thing. It seems to me perfectly defensible to introduce the idea of herrenvolk democracy, as that is the simple answer to his question. If Roediger is right, then there is something fundamentally flawed about herrenvolk democracy. If he does not deal with it, the simple critique would be: this is just herrenvolk democracy. So one of the key questions in assessing this book is: why isn't this just herrenvolk democracy? (We will address this in class)
ReplyDelete