Who was the first to come up with the “wages of whiteness” thesis, broadly construed as a theory of how racism works and functions in a hierarchical society? I’m not referring to Roediger’s book by that title, since the theory predates his book, as you can see below. I’m more interested in the general idea of it, which we can see across Europe and North America and across several centuries. For example, Ludwig Börne, a Jewish convert to Christianity, wrote this about German antisemitism in 1832: The poor Germans! Living on the bottom floor, oppressed by the seven floors of the upper classes above them, they resolve their feeling of anxiety by speaking about people who live even further below […]
It’s Old Home Week in the American media. First there was the welcome back of Abraham Lincoln (and the brouhaha over the Spielberg film). Now Thomas Jefferson is in the news. But where it was Lincoln the emancipator we were hailing earlier in the week, it’s Jefferson the slaveholder who’s now getting all the press. Yesterday in the New York Times, legal historian Paul Finkelman wrote a bruising attack on Jefferson titled “The Monster of Monticello.” This was a followup to some of the controversy surrounding the publication of Henry Wiencek’s new book on Jefferson, which makes Jefferson’s slaveholding central to his legacy. Finkelman’s essay has already prompted some pushback. David Post at The Volokh Conspiracy (h/t Samir Chopra) wrote: […]
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Categories
Political Theory, The Left, The Right
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Tags Alexander Stephens, David Post, David Roediger, Edmund Morgan, Hannah Arendt, Henry Wiencek, James Henry Hammond, John C. Calhoun, Josiah Nott, Louis Hartz, Lynn Hunt, Paul Finkelman, Robert Brassilach, Thomas Cobb, Thomas Dew, Thomas Jefferson, W.E.B. DuBois, William Harper