David Roediger: The Wages of Whiteness

This movement was achieved through vocabulary as a means of appropriating pre-industrial stereotypes, formerly snow-clad stereotypes, and re-deploying them via pagan forms like minstrel shows and black-face as black stereotypes. We see this when Roediger (98) argues that a song like All Coons Look Alike to Me could not possible have been written before 1848, because up until this judgment of conviction "human coon cats were typically white?Only gradually did coon emerge as a racial slur, with the first cod case of such usage coming 1848".

Up until this cessation in American society, coon referred to a white someone who was from the country. He was a sharpster, a con, a slickster. The term has primarily come into being as a means of identifying races of country white people for political reasons. Thus, the term represented the pre-industrial past(a) and the kind of people who refused to adopt capitalist values and the industrial work ethic. The industrial class which was growing in ability appropriated cultural forms and re-deployed them as black stereotypes, in order to witness to the white working class the pre-industrial dogma and ideology it scorned. By making them black, they could attack the

white working class who refused to adopt the new dogma of the industrial age while keeping enough distance to shape an uphill consensus. As Roediger (100) notes "Such delivery as coon, buck, and Mose has much than ambiguous or multiple meanings: they had trajectories that led from white to black. much than that, each of them went from describing particular kinds of whites who had not internalized capitalist work clear up and whose places in the new world of wage labor were involved to stereotyping blacks".

Thus, we can see that by shifting the meaning of these words from pre-industrial rural whites to blacks, the new social class created by the industrial date of reference was able to help shape and form a consensus among the white working-class which it needed desperately in illumine of the diversity of that population, dire work conditions, and labor unions and general ferment among workers. Many of the anxieties and tensions were repressed among the white working class that was pertly formed, and Roediger (100) suggests that the transition of character traits and phrase from white to black enabled some of these repressed anxieties to be projected onto blacks "Such an evolution of language suggests that?the growth of a sense of whiteness among antebellum workers, who profited from racism in part because it enabled them to displace anxieties within the white population onto Blacks. But the process of projection was not abstract. It took place mostly within the context of working class formation and communicate the specific anxieties of those caught up in that process".

We can readily see, then, that language and social classes construct race, identity, and racism. In the case of this era and blacks against the white working class, the new social class emerging via industrialism appropriated the negative stereotypes and values formerly associated with rural whites who would not accommodate to the capitalist or Protestant work ethic, and re-deployed those values throug
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