Wages of Whiteness & Racist Symbolic Capital (ed. Wulf D. Hund, Jeremy Krikler, David Roediger) (original) (raw)
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W.E.B. Du Bois states that psychological wages of Whiteness (1935) are unearned wages granted to White people of any class; including access to spaces and opportunities reserved solely for their use, enjoyment and ownership. This article discusses how White rage is a deadly expression of anger toward BIPOC 1 who are a perceived threat against the systemic maintenance of psychological wages of Whiteness. Therefore, psychological rages of Whiteness are central and formative throughout US history, while driving policies and practices framed as American 2 "progress." We believe that psychological rages of Whiteness are contempt for minoritized peoples who represent a perceived threat in denying White people something of value that only in-group members, those identified as White, are entitled to possess. This article provides historical and contemporary examples of psychological rages of Whiteness and concludes with a discussion of the influence of Whiteness on US White American identity.
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American Political Science Review, 1978
White ethnicity seems to have caught on as a subject of serious writing Richard Krickus's Pursuing the American Dream-like Michael Novak'i The Rise of Unmeltable Ethnics, and Irving Howe's World of Our Eathers reflects the growing attention of sociologists and historians toward the immigrant experience of those millions of Americans neither WASP nor blacl who have occupied so uneasy a place in the liberal perspective. Indeed, th« genesis for the Krickus book was the ignorance about working-class Americans, specifically those of southern and eastern European descent, which he encountered among the presumably enlightened Washington bureaucracy ol the Johnson Administration. Himself descended from the second wave ol European immigration-after the Irish and Germans, and after 1880-Krickus attempts to correct the view prevalent in liberal circles since the midsixties that working-class Americans represent at best Archie Bunkers-simple-minded if harmless in their support ofthe war and their opposition to reform-and at worst northern, hardhatted versions of rednecks. Krickus argues that a myopic folly led such liberals, notably those responsible for the McGovern campaign, to calculate that, like the rednecks, working-class ethnics were no longer essential to Democratic presidential aspirations. He scarcely hides his scorn for the "Cosmopolitan-Left" who felt that their party could and should at last purge itself of the embarrassing ethnic remnant of an older, dirtier, but now happily expendable politics. Krickus pretty evenly divides his attention between the unfairness of the way white ethnics have been viewed and treated, and the mistake of excluding them from a key role in the national Democratic Party. He describes those main ingredients which have produced dominant white ethnic attitudes toward American society and politics. From their first arrival from Russia, Italy, or Poland, the ethnics experienced the scorn and exploitation ofthe already-established nativists. The pressure for Americanization, which grew strident during World War I, produced a feeling of displacement among first-and second-generation ethnics: a self-consciousness about their origins coupled with a guilty pride in a heritage they could not easily cast off. Krickus suggests that liberal scorn for ethnic loyalty to the political machines ignores the historical reality of an America in the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth century hostile to the newly-arrived immigrants, where usually the only source of reliable information and aid was the local party hack, whose friendliness and concern understandably commanded the newcomer's loyalty at election time. Where socialists and other radicals proved too dreamy or intellectual for the poor working immigrant, and where basic social services
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International Journal of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences Studies, 2022
Historically, the American dream began in 1492 with the discovery of American by Europeans. They called it the New World. The term New World therefore opened up new perspectives for life. It was in this context that he had significant human migrations from Europe to American where thousands of men and women hoped to find a better life. Other migrations came from Africa, of course, these were tragic, the Atlantic slave trade. Step by step, the American dream, as we understand it today, became an « American » singularity. This communication is devoted to this American dream; this American which the black force (economic, moral and intellectual) helped to build from the second half of the 17th century until the second half of the 20th century. The objective of the communication is to show that one should not set aside, for knowledge of the building of the American dream, the important aspects which constitute its foundation. How did black people contributed to build the American dream? Critical analysis of large historical facts is the methodology chosen in this study: the work of blacks in fields and mines; by way of their participation in the war of independence of the United States, and in that of the so-called Secession; to their remarkable contribution to the equality of civil rights which gave the American dream a human face.
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The Declaration of Independence asserts that “All men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Nevertheless, the United States, at its foundation has been faced with the contradiction of initially supporting chattel slavery --- a form of slavery that treated black slaves from Africa purely as a commercial commodity. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom had some discomfort with slavery, were slaveholders who both utilized slaves as a commodity. Article 1 of our Constitution initially treated black slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning representation in order to increase Southern representation in Congress. So initially the Constitution’s commitment to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” did not include the enslaved black population. This essay contends that the residue of this initial dilemma...