OK, first a disclaimer: I might be way off base here. Roediger's work argued that "whiteness" as an identity created by white wage workers to separate themselves from Black Americans. OK, the section about the Irish immigrants was solid...however, I was left wondering how the Irish immigrants' section mentioned nativism just twice. I was expecting to see Roediger directly (or indirectly) challenge John Higham's nativist argument in this section. Alas, I found nothing of the sort. I did not see anything else in the rest of the text either. I also did not see Higham in the endnotes but did see several mentions of Oscar Handlin. I was a bit disappointed by this omission of Higham.
John Higham argued in Strangers in the Land that native-born Americans held negative perspectives of immigrants and Catholics.Many Irish who arrived during the early 19th century fit this bill. Higham's timeline begins in the 1860s and ended in the 1920s. Roediger did not provide an explicit timeline but I wonder if Higham would believe that whiteness equaled nativist. However, nativist sometimes did not equal whiteness.
Is whiteness merely an identity created by the white wage workers and nativism an ideology created by white Protestant Americans to create distinctions between themselves and the incoming immigrants (especially Irish)?
solid criticism. Higham's understanding of race was very different from Roediger's, and that is where we likely start--what is it that truly creates racial identity for Roediger? (key--class relations)
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