David R. Roediger

Taking hold of freedom with both hands

Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All by David Roediger (Verso, $26.95).

David Roediger, a history professor at Kansas University, is an expert on American labor history and the persistence of racism. His latest, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All, is the second major historical work this year to address the agency exhibited by enslaved people as they struggled to free themselves.

“Self-emancipation”—also show more covered in David Williams’ I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era—goes a long way toward de-bunking the myth that African Americans waited patiently in chains for white people to decide they should be free.

This offers us a very different view of what it meant to be black in America in the post-Civil War years; Roediger goes farther, to examine how other groups—women seeking suffrage, laborers seeking better working conditions—also worked for their own benefit during this period.

It was an age of self-advocacy. Apparently, no one expected wealthy white men to hand them anything, which is a good thing. Of course, that doesn’t mean it was an easy road, and Roediger also analyzes the institutional barriers to attaining liberty in a capitalist society that takes advantage of racism and sexism to further the aims of the ultra-wealthy.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com show less

An excellent, thought-provoking collection. It is so rare that White people "look behind the mirror", so to speak, and see themselves through other's eyes. Roediger is obviously one of the most important scholars working on issues of Whiteness, and this book is important as well as fascinating.

The title essay is an essay I'd recommend in lieu of certain popular books about whiteness; though it references a specific historical moment I don't know much about (and I would love to know more!) it really cuts down to the heart of whiteness-as-violence and how we must be anti-white in our anti-racist movements. The other essays are maybe of less interest to folks who are not labor historians, and some of the reflective work on labor historiography was not super interesting to me, though show more it does mean I know I have a lot more reading to do. But there was also stuff in other essays I love--white communists trying and failing, mostly, and some fascinating looks at the construction of whiteness in the United States.

That opening essay though really turned kicked my butt and I want everyone to read it so pick this up even just for that! show less

A collection of short classics on the narrow but interesting topic of just what is it with these white people anyway. The book provides a nice introduction to the work of a great number of excellent African American writers, so it is a good starting place for anyone interested in beginning a journey into African American thought and literature.

Read this book, and if you find, for example, that you like Derrick Bell's essay on whiteness as property, well, then you can look a bit further and show more read his books on the history of the civil rights movements, gospel choirs, or Brown v. Board of Education. Or, if you've only read Toni Morrison's fiction, you may enjoy beginning to explore her other work with the excerpt from her book Playing in the Dark.

But even if Black on White weren't a good place to begin exploring literature, it would be worth your time, and here's why: the idea of race has largely been defined and explicated by the people who have the most opportunity for expression: white people. An analysis of what whiteness is, what it means, how it works, and what it's for -- but one conceived and written by Black people -- is bound to be fresh and interesting.

So, if you think racism and the idea of race definitions are wrong, or even if you aren't angry about it, but you do think it's a bit silly, then take a few hours to consider what Black people have to say about whiteness.

(Unfortunately, Black on White has no index or other supplemental endmatter.) show less