Let’s return to Du Bois’s formulation for a moment. Immediately after his brief lines on the “public and psychological wage,” Du Bois reached a conclusion different from that of Roediger and Frank, concluding that the “Negro” was “a caged human being, driven into a curious mental provincialism,” dominated by an ‘inferiority complex,” one who “did not believe himself a man like other men,” who “could not teach his children self-respect,” and who “sank into apathy and fatalism.” Few would embrace such claims today, for over the past generation or so, numerous historians have explored the deep currents of postbellum activism, working-class protest, and the multiple forms of resistance engaged in by black Americans. But rejecting Du Bois’s pessimistic conclusion above doesn’t justify transforming it into its opposite, a creative reinvention of nonwhite workers as the radical avant garde. Decades of scholarship have revealed a vast ideological, political, and programmatic diversity among African Americans. If some loudly supported militant nationalism, emigration, workers’ and women’s rights, or civil rights, others counseled accommodation with Jim Crow and white supremacy, supported private enterprise, advocated alliances with white capital, or otherwise avoided any overt challenge to the status quo. To describe working-class blacks as making greater “class-conscious choices” than whites or as playing the vanguard’s role is to read historical evidence selectively, politically, and ahistorically. In certain places, at certain times, and in certain circumstances, these characterizations of black political orientations apply, but in many others they simply do not. How useful is the “public and psychological wage” as an explanation for white workers’ refusal to make common cause with African Americans in the workplace? Only if one accepts, as do many of the historians of whiteness, the “theory of laboring class unity” or, in Bruce Nelson’s words, the “logic of solidarity,” does the failure of white workers to recognize their common interests with blacks, their creation of a labor movement that excludes people of color, and their own embrace of white racial privileges require explanation. For Nelson, race- and whiteness in particular- calls into question the fundamental “belief in the emergent reality of one working class, with a natural affinity toward solidarity and the capacity to develop a unified consciousness as a weapon of struggle.” For some, the psychological wage becomes a convenient answer to the question of solidarity’s limits: This wage “blurs common interracial working-class interests,” argues Venus Green. For Roediger, the “pleasures of whiteness” and the “status and privileges conferred by race” could “make up for alienating and exploitative class relations.” The whiteness project becomes a variant on the question that will not die, the old “why no socialism in America”- or at least the “why no working-class unity”- question.
Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination.” 2001.
From Arnesen’s critique of whiteness studies