Literacy Essay
In The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class by David Roediger, we are able to examine the antebellum era with emphasis on class formation and the fluidity of racial boundaries in popular culture. According to Roediger, mobbing, blackface and minstrelsy are key elements in the formation of the white-working class.During the antebellum time period, Blacks were victimized by the white mobs. The African - American community as a whole endured tremendous social injustice. The mobs wanted Blacks to be disassociated from the citizens of America. Roediger used the term anti-citizen to express this point, exhibiting that the white male working class intentions of segregating blacks from the dominant white society. Mobbing inflamed race riots that significantly hurt the black community. The white workers involved in mobbing encouraged the riots with claims of "protecting their women, from amalgamation with blacks" (page 108). The quote expresses in a basic sense; whites were not to mix with blacks. Associating with Blacks was considered inappropriate, and the whites had to protect themselves from Blacks. Clearly, we can acknowledge of hatred towards Blacks. In Columbia, Pe
According to Roediger, "the simple physical disguise and elaborate cultural disguise of blacking up served to emphasize that those on the stage were really white and that whiteness really mattered." Minstrelsy was used to show the superior sense of identity as being white by using negative portrayal of blacks. The blackfaced white was a way of measuring themselves against the blacks that they defined as worthless and ineffectual. The formation of the white working class according to Roediger was a result of the key elements: mobbing, blackface and minstrelsy. The working white class of the antebellum period co-existed with Blacks. As a result it was inevitable that their cultures clashed. The whites that used mobbing, blackface and minstrelsy wanted to show that they were the dominant race. Most of the white workers during the antebellum period committed racial injustice because they did not want to be on the same economic and social levels as Blacks. As a resulted they protested against Blacks. This was probably the main reason for the formation of a white working class, a set of whites that were doing the same jobs as Blacks and they resented the fact that they were on the same level as Blacks. Thus, its certainly possible for a creation of a white working class as a result of a societal fabrication of people with similar characteristics to go against Blacks who were considered contrary to the social norms at the time. nnsylvania 1834, skilled workers went on riots hysterically fueled by the threat of inter-racial sex. Again, we see that society did n
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Approximate Word count = 1064
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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