Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past

"
In this splendid book, David Roediger shows the need for political activism aimed at transforming the social and political meaning of race. . .. No other writer on whiteness can match Roediger's historical breadth and depth: his grasp of the formative role played by race in the making of the nineteenth century working class, in defining the contours of twentieth-century U.S. citizenship and social membership, and in shaping the meaning of emerging social identities and cultural practices in the twenty-first century."—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive
Investment in Whiteness

"David Roediger has been showing us all for years how whiteness is a marked and not a neutral color in the history of the United States. Colored White, with its synthetic sweep and new historical investigations, marks yet another advance.
In the burgeoning literature on whiteness, this book stands out for its lucid, unjargonridden, lively prose, its groundedness, its analytic clarity, and its scope."—Michael Rogin, author of Blackface, White Noise

David R. Roediger is Babcock Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, & Working Class History (1994), The Wages of Whiteness: Race & the Making of the American Working Class (1991) and Our Own Time: A History of American Labor & the Working Day (1989) and editor of Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (1998).