DOCSLIB.ORG

David Roediger Wages of Whiteness

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
David Roediger Wages of Whiteness David roediger wages of whiteness Continue Title: White Wages: Race and Making of the American Working Class Author: David Roediger Year: 1991 Category: White Studies, Labor, Class, Antebellum, Wage Place: Industrial North (mostly) Time Period: 1800-1865 Argument Summary by David Roediger Borrows W.E.B. Du Bois Conception of White Wages from Black Reconstruction to argue that between 1800 and 1865 a working class consciousness developed that rested on race foundations (not just type). Roediger works in a certain strand of Marxism (similar to E.P. Thompson) that emphasizes consciousness and identity rather than a more materialistic notion of where historical actors fit into production modes. Roediger provides an agency for white workers, demonstrating how they actively shaped themselves not only as working class, but white and not slaves. Before the revolution, this link between race and the independence of workers was largely absent. It was only with the onset of republicanism and its emphasis on independence that white workers began to position themselves against black slaves. This was mainly due to the use of language, as whites tried to distance themselves from any comparisons with slaves. Hireling became separated from the slave, just as the boss grew up as a replacement for the word master, and Freeman is growing in popularity as a particularly resonant personality who specifically excluded free blacks. Similarly, white workers in the 1830s and 1840s are moving away from wage slavery to talk about white slavery as a way to distinguish themselves from blacks and often indirectly support the slave system - though this shifts to the 1850s toward the more anti-slavery opposition language of free labor. Roediger is changing the idea of herrrenal democracy to herrrenal republicanism in describing how blacks are not only considered noncitizens, but also actively anti-citizens, and a danger to republicanism. Roediger also argues that during this process whites faced wrenching changes to industrialize societies imposing a new form of capitalist work-discipline (borrowed from Herbert Gutman). As a way to cope with these changes, whites present blacks as a symbol of their own pre-industrial and hedonistic past that they both despised and wanted. This went hand in hand with the growing popularity of minstrels shows that allowed whites to emphasize their whiteness while allowing them to temporarily flee to their own pre-industrial past. Finally, Roediger charts how the Irish faced huge discrimination on immigration, but instead as a result of solidarity with blacks, led to their aggressive use of black springboard to assert their own whiteness. This crystallized because of their participation in the Democratic Party, helped to paper over ethnic differences among white northerners in the more universal whiteness. Key Topics and Concepts - Central Part of LANGUAGE for the Study of Whiteness - Whiteness gives benefits to white workers as appeasement for their exploitation as U.S. Workers History of Qualifying Exams: The book Summary of Cameron Blevines is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis and a new work story, first presented by E. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger's well-known book presents a truly study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, in his view, could not be explained simply by referring to economic benefits; on the contrary, racism among the white working class is reinforced by complex psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes and thus help to shape the identity of white working people, the opposite of blacks. In the new foreword, Roediger reflects on the reception, influence, and critical response to white pay, while Kathleen Clever's astute introduction welcomes the importance of the work that has become a classic. Finally, an American labor historian understands that white workers have a racial identity that matters as race matters to workers who are not white. - Nell Irwin Artist, Princeton University Exciting book Roediger makes us understand what it means to see ourselves as white in a new way. An extremely important and insightful book. -Lawrence Glickman, The Nation New Edition London and New York: Verso Books, 2007. Revised edition of London and New York: Verso Books, 1999. London and New York: Verso Books, 1991. ISBN-10: 1844671453 ISBN-13: 978-1844671458 This article includes a list of general references, but it remains largely unverified because it does not have enough relevant link. Please help improve this article by entering more accurate quotes. (February 2013) (Learn how and when to delete this template message) David R. RoedigerBornJuly 13, 1952 (1952-07-13) (age 68)Columbia, Illinois, U.S. NationalityAmerican materNorthern Universitynorthest University (PhD)OccupationHistorianOrganisation University of Illinois in Urbana- Champaign David R. Roediger (born July 13, 1952) is a Foundation Emeritus Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas, where he has been since the fall of 2014. He was previously an American, Kendrick K. Babcock, a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research interests include building racial identity, class structures, labor studies, and the history of American radicalism. He writes from a Marxist theoretical basis. Early life and education Roediger was born on July 13 Columbia, Illinois. He attended local public schools in high school. He's Him. Bachelor of Science in Education from Northern Illinois University in 1975. He went on to graduate school and earned a doctorate in history from Northwestern University in 1980, where he wrote his thesis under the direction of George M. Fredrickson. Academic career He was assistant editor of Frederick Douglass Documents at Yale University from 1979 to 1980. After receiving his doctorate, Roediger was a lecturer and associate professor of history at Northwestern University from 1980 to 1985. He served as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri in 1985, rising to full professorship in 1992. He moved to the University of Minnesota in 1995, and was chairman of the University's American Studies Program from 1996 to 2000. In 2000, he was appointed Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Roediger also served as director of the Center for Democracy in Multiracial Society at UIUC. Beginning in the fall of 2014, he was Professor emeritus of American studies and history at the University of Kansas. Roediger is a member of the board of directors of Charles H Kerr Company Publishers, a position he has held since 1992. Roediger's research interests primarily concern race and class in the United States, although he has also written about radicalism in American history and politics. In 1989, Roediger and historian Philip Foner co- authored Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day, a book that provides a detailed account of the movement to reduce working hours in the United States. Work as a new soil, combining work history with the study of the culture and nature of work. The book also expanded the history of the eight-hour day movement to colonial times. The authors argued that the debate over working hours or working hours was a central issue of the American labor movement during periods of high growth. In 1991, the book The Wages of White White: Race and the Creation of the American Working Class was published. Along with Alexander Saxton's Rise and Fall (1990) and Toni Morrison's The Game in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination (1992), this work is often cited as a starting point for contemporary studies of whiteness. (quote necessary) Theodore W. Allen's Class Struggle and the Origins of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race (1975), a pamphlet that was later expanded into his seminal two-volume work The Invention of the White Race, Tom. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (1994, 2012) and the Invention of the White Race, Volume 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (1997, 2012); He has also had an impact in this area. The argument was also in some cases expected by Abram Lincoln Harris's Radical Scholarship Allen later wrote about Roediger's work: ... because of its almost universal recognition for use in colleges and universities, served as the only most effective tool in the socially necessary function of raising the consciousness of objectification of whiteness, as well as in popularizing race as a social thesis design. As someone who has been the beneficiary of the kind of supportive comments from him for my own efforts in this area of historical investigation, I undertake this critical essay with no other purpose than furthering our common goal of restoring white identity, and overthrowing white supremacy in general. In his paper, Rudiger argued that whiteness is a historical phenomenon in the United States, as many of the different ethnic groups that are now considered white were not initially perceived as such. The Irish, for example, as Catholics and from rural areas, were not considered white - that is, recognized as members of the Anglo-American Protestant majority of society - until they began to distinguish themselves from black slaves and freemen; From the New York riots of 1863 to the riots in Philadelphia against the black vote and the Chicago racial riot of 1919, ethnic Irishmen were prominent in violent clashes against black Americans, with whom they competed for jobs, physical territory and political power. Roediger believes that their struggle reflects the emergence of a modern theory of color consciousness, through which notions of nation and race are increasingly associated with color as the main category of human difference. Roediger argues that the social construction of the concept of the white race in the United States was a conscious effort by slaveholders to get a distance from those they enslaved, who are usually non-European and non-Christian.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • CRITICAL THEORY and AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism
    CDSMS EDITED BY JEREMIAH MORELOCK CRITICAL THEORY AND AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism edited by Jeremiah Morelock Critical, Digital and Social Media Studies Series Editor: Christian Fuchs The peer-reviewed book series edited by Christian Fuchs publishes books that critically study the role of the internet and digital and social media in society. Titles analyse how power structures, digital capitalism, ideology and social struggles shape and are shaped by digital and social media. They use and develop critical theory discussing the political relevance and implications of studied topics. The series is a theoretical forum for in- ternet and social media research for books using methods and theories that challenge digital positivism; it also seeks to explore digital media ethics grounded in critical social theories and philosophy. Editorial Board Thomas Allmer, Mark Andrejevic, Miriyam Aouragh, Charles Brown, Eran Fisher, Peter Goodwin, Jonathan Hardy, Kylie Jarrett, Anastasia Kavada, Maria Michalis, Stefania Milan, Vincent Mosco, Jack Qiu, Jernej Amon Prodnik, Marisol Sandoval, Se- bastian Sevignani, Pieter Verdegem Published Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet Christian Fuchs https://doi.org/10.16997/book1 Knowledge in the Age of Digital Capitalism: An Introduction to Cognitive Materialism Mariano Zukerfeld https://doi.org/10.16997/book3 Politicizing Digital Space: Theory, the Internet, and Renewing Democracy Trevor Garrison Smith https://doi.org/10.16997/book5 Capital, State, Empire: The New American Way of Digital Warfare Scott Timcke https://doi.org/10.16997/book6 The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism Edited by Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano https://doi.org/10.16997/book11 The Big Data Agenda: Data Ethics and Critical Data Studies Annika Richterich https://doi.org/10.16997/book14 Social Capital Online: Alienation and Accumulation Kane X.
    [Show full text]
  • “Whiteness”: Its Place in the Historiography of Race and Class
    “Whiteness”: Its Place in the Historiography of Race and Class in the United States Paper prepared for conference on The Burden of Race: “Whiteness” and “Blackness” in Modern South Africa University of the Witswatersrand, Johannesburg July 5 – 8, 2001 Peter Rachleff [email protected] Professor of History phone: 651-696-6371 Macalester College fax: 651-696-6498 St. Paul, Minnesota 55105 USA I am delighted to be able to participate in this conference. As an historian of the American working class and a teacher, and as a white American who has been concerned with the role of race in the construction of U.S. society since my childhood, I have wrestled in many ways with the themes being addressed here. While my participation in this conference reflects my hopefulness that I might provide some useful ideas for discussion here, I am especially eager to learn from all of you here, both in terms of your own ideas about race and in terms of your criticisms of my ideas. In the past decade, the articulation of concepts of “whiteness” has prompted a paradigm shift in the study of race in the United States. From my research work to my teaching, it has changed the ways I think about class, gender, and ethnicity, as well as the ways I analyze relationships between white workers and workers of color, not just African Americans but also Mexican Americans and Asian Americans. It has also impacted my analysis of relationships between different groups of color (that is, without white workers present) and among white workers (that is, without workers of color present).
    [Show full text]
  • Comments on Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore by David Roediger, University of Illinois at Urban
    Comments on Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore By David Roediger, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign For the Eighth Annual Conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society Library Company of Philadelphia October 30, 2009 Last summer I spoke at a major labor and working class history conference in Chicago and then commented on a session later in the proceedings. At that session a scholar remarked in presenting that his paper, on free black history in antebellum St. Louis, was the closest thing to any discussion of slavery at the entire large gathering. He was young enough to be surprised, and I’d been around long enough not to be. The gap between what is called working class history and that of racial slavery remains very wide with both the content and the methods of slavery studies making little impact on how labor is studied.1 As some one who has worked in both of these areas I have long lamented this reality and long accepted that it would not change. Seth Rockman’s fine book so forcefully challenges, from its subtitle to its forceful final lines, such artificial separation of free from unfree labor—even as it foregrounds profound racial differences in the experience of oppression--that I’m going to allow myself to hope again for change. In reading the book I ceased marking passages in which I thought oppression of the poor was being too flattened across racial lines because those passages were so unfailingly 1 Noteworthy exceptions include W.
    [Show full text]
  • Defining Whiteness: Perspectives on Privilege
    Defning Whiteness: Perspectives on Privilege Anna Lindner Although white people have largely dictated the global narratives of history, philosophy, literature, and beyond, whiteness as a racial category remains vague. How, then, do we defne whiteness and how do those considered white relate to other racial groups? One path to understanding these questions is to provide an overview of whiteness, including its history, as well as Black authors’ interpretations of white identity and its impact on populations of color, critical whiteness studies, case studies, and contemporary scholarship in the feld. Te overview concludes by addressing white privilege and the ways in which whites can support people of color in the pursuit of racial justice. In terms of scholarship, the research presented here is focused primarily on the United States, drawing on research from other countries when applicable. Anna Lindner is pursuing her Master's Degree in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research focuses on historical approaches to critical race and gender studies. You can reach her at [email protected]. gnovis • 43 Volume 18, Issue 2 • Spring 2018 Introduction: What is Whiteness? that we lacked a racial identity, or if that we possess one, it contains no relevance” (2014, Given the global history of colonization 20). Whites are permitted to exist outside of and imperialism of generally lighter peoples racial identity, even though non-whites are over darker, discrimination on the basis constantly assigned racial labels. In other of skin color and other manifestations words, to be white enables one to retain a of prejudice have played a pivotal role in sense of individuality, while barring people shaping the world.
    [Show full text]
  • Toward a Cleaner Whiteness: New Racial Identities
    Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works Faculty Publications Fall 2005 Toward a Cleaner Whiteness: New Racial Identities David Ingram Loyola University Chicago, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/philosophy_facpubs Part of the African American Studies Commons, Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, Child Psychology Commons, Educational Sociology Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, Multicultural Psychology Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, School Psychology Commons, Social Psychology Commons, Social Psychology and Interaction Commons, and the Sociology of Culture Commons Author Manuscript This is a pre-publication author manuscript of the final, published article. Recommended Citation Ingram, David. Toward a Cleaner Whiteness: New Racial Identities. The Philosophical Forum, 36, 3: , 2005. Retrieved from Loyola eCommons, Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1467-9191.2005.00203.x This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. © 2005 Wiley-Blackwell. 1 Toward a Cleaner White(ness): New Racial
    [Show full text]
  • Constituting White Identities. Disclosure Interviews David Roediger Pat Jennings University of Kentucky
    disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory Volume 7 Coloring Article 10 4-15-1998 Constituting White Identities. disClosure interviews David Roediger Pat Jennings University of Kentucky Meredith Redlin University of Kentucky DOI: https://doi.org/10.13023/DISCLOSURE.07.10 Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure Part of the American Studies Commons, and the History Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Jennings, Pat and Redlin, Meredith (1998) "Constituting White Identities. disClosure interviews David Roediger," disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory: Vol. 7 , Article 10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.13023/DISCLOSURE.07.10 Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure/vol7/iss1/10 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Social Theory at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Pat Jennings and Meredith Redlin Constituting White Identities disClosure interviews David Roediger David Roediger is among those pathbreaking scholars breathing 1 fresh life into labor history. In contrast to approaches that treat race as additive to class, as a function of class, and/ or as simply a divisive strategy in social relations of labor, Roediger attempts to situate class and race as relational-as mutually determining social constructions. The understanding that racialization- the process of "othering"-is key to the formation of national identity and labor republicanism, is at the crux of Roediger's well known works, The Wages of Whiteness and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness.2 Through his analyses of race and class as mutually influencing and interpenetrating processes, Roediger enriches the body of work on whiteness that is emerging from, and crossing the boundaries of, multiple disciplinary sites.
    [Show full text]
  • Race and the Working-Class Past in the United States: Multiple Identities and the Future of Labor History
    Race and the Working-Class Past in the United States: Multiple Identities and the Future of Labor History DAVID ROEDIGER In concluding his 1935 masterpiece, Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. DuBois observed: The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It [post-Civil War Reconstruction in the U.S.] was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labour movement [ • •. V Since DuBois wrote those lines historians have made substantial strides toward portraying the drama of African-American labor history, but have only begun to appreciate how a consideration of race might change the way the broader drama of labor in the U.S. past it itself plotted. This article argues that we may now at last be on the verge of a redramatization of U.S. labor history which moves race from the margins to the center of the story and which fully historicizes and problematizes the racial con- sciousness of white workers, as DuBois does from the earliest pages of Black Reconstruction. However, in advancing this hopeful argument, I would stress that the grounds for hope have been present before, but not fully realized.
    [Show full text]
  • Forthcoming from Oxford
    FORTHCOMING FROM OXFORD Save n 1907, pioneering labor historian and economist John Commons argued that U.S. management had shown just one "symptom 20%! I of originality," namely "playing one race against the other." In this eye-opening book, David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch offer a radically new way of understanding the history of management in the United States, placing race, migration, and empire at the center of what has sometimes been narrowly seen as a search for efficiency and economy. Ranging from the antebellum period to the coming of the Great Depression, the book examines the extensive literature slave masters produced on how to manage and "develop" slaves; explores what was perhaps the greatest managerial feat in U.S. history, the building of the transcontinental railroad, which pitted Chinese and Irish work gangs against each other; and concludes by looking at how these strategies survive today in the management of hard, low-paying, dangerous jobs in agriculture, military support, and meatpacking. Roediger and Esch convey what slaves, immigrants, and all working people were up against as the objects of managerial control. Managers explicitly ranked racial groups, both in terms of which labor they were best suited for and their relative value compared to others. The authors show how whites relied on such alleged racial knowledge to manage and believed that the "lesser races" could only benefit from their tutelage. These views wove together managerial strategies and white supremacy not only ideologically but practically, every day at workplaces. Even in factories governed by scientific management, the impulse to play races against each other, and to slot workers into jobs categorized by race, constituted powerful management tools used to enforce discipline, lower wages, keep workers on dangerous jobs, and undermine solidarity.
    [Show full text]
  • Events Author David Roediger Discusses How
    Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity 433 Mendenhall Laboratory 125 South Oval Mall Columbus, OH 43210 Phone (614) 688-5429 Fax (614) 688-5592 Events Author David Roediger Discusses How Race Survived U.S. History “How can you have Emancipation Proclamations and then have Jim Crow?” asked author David Roediger in an address to an OSU audience Feburary 25. Roediger, author of How Race Survived U.S. History, was on campus for a Kirwan Institute lecture at the Frank Hale Jr. Black Culture Center which was co- sponsored by the Office of Minority Affairs and the Department of African American and African Studies. Roediger, Kendrick C. Babock Professor of History at the University of Illinois and a leading historian of race and labor, said that racism is probably not more than 250 years old. He describes how his latest book explores key points in history where society faced “some factor that ought to have done race in,” but instead, a racial divide persisted. Various chapters discuss how race came to be in the British and North American Colonies, how race survived capitalism and free labor, and how race survived New Deal and Civil Rights legislation. Roediger gave examples showing even Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were sometimes sympathetic to slavery. “Slavery expanded because of what Jefferson did with the Louisiana Purchase. It enormously involved the expansion of slavery. At the time of the Civil War, there were four million enslaved people in the United States.” While Abraham Lincoln was viewed as “the Great Emancipator,” he actually took on a case in his private law practice to represent a slave owner trying to recover his slaves, who had been given safe harbor.
    [Show full text]
  • Social Death
    6RFLDO'HDWK Lisa Marie Cacho 3XEOLVKHGE\1<83UHVV For additional information about this book http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780814723777 Access provided by Indiana University Libraries (18 Sep 2014 09:55 GMT) Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Violence of Value 1 1. White Entitlement and Other People’s Crimes 35 2. Beyond Ethical Obligation 61 3. Grafting Terror onto Illegality 97 4. Immigrant Rights versus Civil Rights 115 Conclusion: Racialized Hauntings of the Devalued Dead 147 Notes 169 Index 213 About the Author 224 >> vii This page intentionally left blank 6RFLDO'HDWK Lisa Marie Cacho 3XEOLVKHGE\1<83UHVV For additional information about this book http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780814723777 Access provided by Indiana University Libraries (18 Sep 2014 09:55 GMT) Acknowledgments This has been a difficult book for me to write, and because it was, I had to rely on many people during all its stages. While I claim all its flaws and short- comings, the people I acknowledge in these pages helped me conceptualize and clarify all its best and most interesting parts. First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge Liz Gonzalez, my first-rate research assistant; I would not have been able to come close to deadlines without her. I extend my ap- preciation to her with deep sincerity. Kevin Dolan’s early edits provided me with expert help in clarifying my arguments and making the book clearer overall. His assistance, too, was invaluable. Eric Zinner, the best editor ever, has been more than supportive of this project. I am so grateful for all his help, his patience, and his persistence.
    [Show full text]
  • A Response to James Barrett, David Brody, Barbara Fields, Eric Foner, Victoria Hattam, and Adolph Reed
    Assessing Whiteness Scholarship: A Response to James Barrett, David Brody, Barbara Fields, Eric Foner, Victoria Hattam, and Adolph Reed Eric Arnesen University of Illinois at Chicago The valuable and thoughtful responses to my essay, “Whiteness and the Histo- rians’ Imagination,” illustrate the existence of a wide range of opinions on the emergence, claims, and methodologies of the whiteness genre in US and US la- bor history. Like Eric Foner, it is my hope that this scholarly controversy will mark the beginning of a much longer discussion that will draw in many more par- ticipants from history, American Studies, political science, and other disciplines. This is a debate that I believe is long overdue. While David Brody is certainly correct to note that readers have not been so “dazzled” that they could not be critical of whiteness scholarship, serious historiographical assessments of the genre’s strengths and weaknesses have been scarce. This scholarly controversy, which aims at providing such an assessment, will not and should not be the final word on the subject. In this response, I welcome the opportunity to address a fraction of the many important issues raised by James Barrett, David Brody, Barbara Fields, Eric Foner, Victoria Hattam, and Adolph Reed. My purpose in “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination” was not to run what Brody calls the “latest instance of charismatic history to ground.” As I note in my essay, I believe that racial identity is “too important a subject to receive nothing less than the most rigorous treatment
    [Show full text]
  • David Roediger University of Kansas [email protected]
    INAUGURAL ISSUE Keeping On David Roediger University of Kansas [email protected] The argument here will be two-fold. First is that we are in a moment in which calibrating pessimism and optimism — and therefore of balancing the pull of repeating older arguments versus a pressure to make leaps — has become notoriously difficult. However, and secondly, with regard to the particulars of continuing to spread (especially Indigenous Australian) critical race theory and whiteness studies ideas the case for doing so seems overwhelming and even quickened by the so-called “dark times” that the editorial prompt evokes. Antonio Gramsci’s famous dicta urging maintaining of “optimism of the will” while practicing “pessimism of the intellect” help us in today’s universities only so far. He spoke, in his own dire conditions, as a revolutionary and he speaks to us as revolutionaries, as knowledge producers but not as producers of academic knowledge. I hear Gramsci’s wisdom reprised often in emails and on blogs, especially from radical scholars about my advancing age. As Trump wins, as xeno-variants of Brexit dominate British politics, as Australia shames itself in brutalizing both newcomers and its First Nations, as South Africa weeps, as left and “pink” experiments in Latin America are punished, and as the planet broils, the impulse to affirm that the struggle continues along more or less the same lines has its reassuring appeals. Still I’m not sure sometimes if the goal of optimistic posts is to buoy the spirits of young people or the writers themselves. So, it refreshing to read the prompt’s implicit endorsement of pessimism as a perfectly legitimate response to our moments of danger.
    [Show full text]